State Of The Dead Internet | Jules

[numb3r_5ev3n]

The link to the video, since embedded videos crash screen readers. This goes way deeper than the "dead internet" meme, into a discussion of Active Measures. This is one of the best videos I have seen on this issue yet this year.

Comments

[flamingsword]

Thanks! I’ll throw it on the pile of videos to watch.

It's been Dead

[nyyki]

Sorry, I'm going to get a bit semantic here. So often people think of the world wide web as the internet and speak of it as if it's the totality of what that communication medium is. That's false.

Think about this -- when was the last time, if ever, you downloaded something from a FTP site? Did you ever read, much less post, on newsgroups under Usenet? Have you ever done an Archie or Gofer search? For most people, the part of the internet they use is TCP/IP (though we're at IP6 now, so that's mutated a lot) and email, though once again a lot of people use IMAP if they're using a mail program or app. The internet is, for all intents and purposes, like the Atlantic Coast Highway or Route 66 -- something that exists in rare pieces and locations, and also in history, but not in anywhere near the form it was.

I find it interesting that the 24 hour/7 day news services got a mention -- I've bee skeptical about news rooms for television services for about 35 years, and I got far more skeptical after I saw the divergence between occupiers posting to social media that showed such a different view than what the news services demonstrate.

I found the mention of demoralization as a control dynamic to be interesting.

There's a core question, and this goes back to Descartes -- what is real, and how can we know it is? Still, I got to experience digital communication when it seemed far morereal than it is now.