Mike Christ
aka snapsunny
Legendary
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Activity: 1078
Merit: 1003
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March 26, 2016, 10:49:25 PM |
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Our means of communication would be way more stunted; we'd have to rely on central distributors like newspapers and the radio to get a lot of our knowledge, decentralized information distribution would occur mostly via word-of-mouth which would travel much slower. This would've made it much easier for central institutions to dupe society at large with propaganda. The Internet facilitates this as well, but makes it very easy for people to not buy into that, and makes alternative sources widely available, which makes it very difficult to control the narrative. The narrative is extraordinarily important in manipulating how people understand reality, which allows for greater control over what those people do, so it's a very common thing for powerful institutions to wrestle this. The Internet helps to democratize the narrative, and many of us can see now how the narratives from before the Internet's popularity are beginning to crumble, what many would call getting "red pilled." Void of this, perhaps we can look at North Korea as to what happens when the narrative is under full control by a central authority.
Then there's the total oversaturation of knowledge which allows people to learn just about anything they want with no barriers but presence of an Internet connection and a device that can browse it, and the latter gets cheaper all the time. It has completely supplanted libraries, as it's cheaper, more convenient, and more widely available; you can even get the same books from the library in pdf form from the Internet, even college textbooks. You can literally get a college education in your own home, so long as you are disciplined. This allows for people to self-improve at an incredible rate; just about anything you want to learn about, and much of what you want to learn to do, can be studied on the Internet, often times at no cost. This raises the value of every human being with Internet access--to varying degrees, anyhow, as some people choose to get more benefit from it than others--which likewise raises our quality of life. Without the Internet, it'd be a bit more difficult to get this knowledge; libraries would still be around but there's no guarantee that the book you need will be available to you, just due to how libraries work, typically stocking just one, maybe two copies of a single book. If some book happens to be popular--say, a book on a certain language--you'll find it difficult to get a relevant text, and if you do, someone else will be deprived of it. Or perhaps the best book on the topic is never around and you're left with an inferior product which may not fulfill your needs adequately. Not so with the Internet: there's always enough copies for everyone and then some, since a single file is infinitely duplicable. So no matter what the fad is, you can always learn to your heart's content from the best content available at the time (plus, interactive learning resources often do a better job than just books, e.g. programming courses.)
However, this does not necessarily deprive computers of software; let's say, without the Internet, to get your software fix you'd have to visit the store, or perhaps order a copy of a piece of software to your home. Here comes the next problem: the high price of knowledge, esp. when paired with licensing and other such limitations. Rather than a course for learning a given language being free (such as Duolingo, or perhaps just a website), you instead must pay a hefty fee to purchase a piece of software which does the same (let's say, Rosetta Stone), or perhaps void of that you'd pay for a book on the language. The case without the Internet is always more expensive to the consumer than the case with the Internet, factoring in piracy as well. Due to the heightened cost of learning, fewer people learn, and learn less often, as it requires more labor on behalf of the consumer to pay for this cost; say, after you shell out 1000$ for the language software, you then want to get a book on programming concepts, and the best book you can find costs 120$, with worse books getting as low as 30$. Then let's say you want to get another book, say, for anthropology; ultimately you must limit yourself as to what you can or can't learn, and limit yourself as to the quality of your learning material, because every time you pick something up, you'll have to pay a great deal for it, or take a gamble with the library having it in stock. Ultimately it's inferior to the benefit of the Internet, for without it, while our quality of life may improve, it will at beast improve at a slower rate.
Consider this: without the Internet, software like Photoshop would still exist as something you could buy in the store. You could still possibly find someone locally who will sell it bootleg, but without that, you'd have to get it legit. This software is very expensive, however, and the end result would be, Adobe would get just about as much cash as they were getting before, except now that people who can't afford it won't be able to easily pirate it. So all you wind up with is far fewer people who can use this software competently (since learning resources would also be scarcer), which means bloated prices for these professionals, which means limited availability of such professionals, which means overall less efficient image creation and manipulation with a higher cost for businesses; say, if you wanted to get a business logo, you'd need to shell out a lot more cash for the same level of quality you could get now from any of this site's freelancers. These costs are always passed on to the consumers, who foot these bills from higher priced goods. Perhaps we'd still see a lot more traditional artists, but traditional artistry is always more expensive to pull off than digital due to tool costs and increased time to resolve certain problems like changing a color, so the cost would still be higher than it is now. With the Internet, both the software is freely available (albeit illegally) and the resources to not only learning it, but to master it, are widely available free of charge, thus graphic design is much cheaper with more professionals around. So more businesses can get graphic services for less, even smaller businesses and startups which otherwise would find it hard to pay for such. Hooray for piracy!
There are some negatives to having the Internet around, like making it easy to spy on the population, making it easy for unsavory people to connect with others, e.g. pedophiles, but overall I think we're far better off with it than without. I don't think Bitcoin would be possible without it, nor all the technologies being built due to its existence, like OpenBazaar. These two things alone would be reason enough to lament the non-existence of the Internet, the freedom these two technologies will allot us is priceless.
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