https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-dead-long-live-the
The Internet Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.
Have you heard the latest?
Canadians are losing their access to online news thanks to a new bill that would make tech companies liable for so much as linking to news stories.
French President Macron is mulling a social media shutdown in the name of quelling France's social unrest.
Meta's new "Twitter killer" Threads app is (surprise, surprise!) censoring from day one.
And the UK government is mulling a proposal to give their NSA equivalent, the GCHQ, unprecedented, sweeping new powers to monitor internet logs in real-time.
Are you noticing a pattern?
Yes, the Internet—the "Information Superhighway" version of the "Internet" that was sold as a digital panacea to a credulous public in the 1990s, that is—is now officially dead.
So what does this mean? And where do we go from here? Today, I'll get to the bottom of the dead internet theory and what conspiracy realists should make of this news.
The Internet Theory
If you lived through the '90s, congratulations! You had a front row seat to a fundamental transformation of society the likes of which hasn't been seen by any generation since the days of Gutenberg.
Unless you were working at a university or a US government lab, you started the decade utterly ignorant of email and message boards and even the basic rudiments of computer networking. But by the time you were ringing in the millennium, you were (more likely than not) online, sending emails and surfing the web and getting into your first online flame wars.
You lived through the endless talk about the Information Superhighway. You survived the interminable propaganda designed to convince you that the Internet (capital "I" and all, as if cyberspace was some newly discovered foreign country that we were about to colonize) was going to democratize information, give everyone a voice in the conversation in the digital town square and unite us all in peace, harmony and understanding. And you endured ceaseless segments of befuddled TV hosts informing their audiences about URLs and email addresses as if they were reading an encyclopedia entry in a foreign language, carefully intoning every letter, colon and backslash and tittering over how to pronounce the "@" symbol.
It was all a lie, of course. Unbeknownst to the general public at the time, the internet did not spring fully formed from the heads of the Silicon Valley nerds in the 1990s. In fact, its origins go back much further. As we eventually came to learn, the internet actually began life as the ARPANET, a US Department of Defense project whose goal, according to the former director of DARPA, "was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making."
As it turns out, even this "nuclear resistant network" story is a limited hangout. As students of my Mass Media: A History online course will know by now, the ARPANET wasn't just about securing America's nuclear war-fighting capabilities but also about improving Uncle Sam's tools of surveillance and control for counterinsurgency operations. This thread of the story—involving characters like psychologist-turned-computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider and his quest to build a tool capable of collecting, storing and analyzing mind-boggling amounts of information on every entity and individual deemed an enemy of the US government—has been largely lost to time.
As Yasha Levine documents in his book on Surveillance Valley, however, anti-Vietnam War protesters on US campuses in the 1960s recognized the ARPANET and The Cambridge Project and associated computer networking research projects for what they were: attempts to find a way to quash dissent against the powers-that-shouldn't-be wherever and whenever that dissent arose.
One 1969 pamphlet on the growing peril of military-funded computer databases noted:
Clearly the ARPA network has practical military implications. While not a weapon of destruction per se, it will contribute a necessary link to a powerful automated military control system.
And another 1960s pamphlet on the looming threat of silicon surveillance observed:
The whole computer set-up and the ARPA computer network will enable the government, for the first time, to consult relevant survey data rapidly enough to be used in policy decisions. The net result of this will be to make Washington's international policeman more effective in suppressing popular movements around the world.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, public awareness of the perils of digital dictatorship and the mechanized menace of the "Octoputer" (with its technological tracking tendrils snaking their way into every nook and cranny of your life) got lost along the way. By the '90s, people were ready to believe that the digitization of social relations was a boon to humanity and that the world would be better off for it.
Meanwhile, here in the 2020s, the gloss of the (capital "I") Internet fairy tale has long since worn off. And, now that we have long since past the point of no return on this roller coaster ride into the digital abyss, we are finding that the dream sold to the public three decades ago—the hopium-induced phantasm of Information Superhighways and technological liberation—is now officially dead.
The Dead Internet Theory
Have you heard of the "dead internet theory"?
In a nutshell, it posits that the Internet of old—the wild and wacky, old-school, capital "I" Internet of human-generated fun and weirdness—died in 2016. Since then, according to adherents of this premise, the majority of everything we encounter online has been bot-generated.
If this theory is correct, then the computer-created content of the dead internet includes not just the obviously inhuman content on the web—the spam that overruns every unmoderated comment section, for instance, or the botnets that flood social media with identically worded propaganda posts—but everything: the content itself, the commentary on that content, the "people" we interact with online, even audio podcasts and video vlogs and other seemingly human-generated media.
Whatever one makes of this dead internet theory, it is certainly neither the first nor the last time that the internet has been declared dead.
In 1998, Paul Krugman infamously declared the internet to be a hype-driven fad, boldly predicting it would have no more impact on the economy than the fax machine.
In 2000, Bob O'Keefe, a professor of information management at Brunel University, opined that the "internet is dead" because "young people want mobility and social interaction, not computers."
In 2002, CNET announced the death of the free web (free as in free beer, that is, not free as in free speech).
In 2007, Mark Cuban told us that "the internet’s dead" and that "it's over" before contradictorily asserting that "the internet’s for old people" because it had become stagnant.
In 2010, Wired confirmed that the web was indeed dead (having been replaced by apps).
In 2015, Vox also pronounced the internet officially dead, a point contested by their MSM brethren over at The New York Times, who asserted in 2017 that the internet was merely in the process of dying.
Even the CBC has gotten in on the act (years after everyone else, of course), daring to ask in 2020 if "the dream of an 'open' internet" is in fact dead.
Some astute observer may have even written "April 10, 2021" on the internet's death certificate in commemoration of the main Corbett Report channel being scrubbed from ThemTube that day. (I mean, I haven't seen anyone actually do that, but I'm sure someone could!)
Whichever death certificate you choose to believe, though, it's hardly worth quibbling over the exact date and time of the internet's death at this point.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the rise of the censorship-industrial complex over the past decade, anyone who has seen country after country after country after country after country implementing internet shutdowns and great firewalls and internet kill switches to keep their tax cattle from accessing online information detrimental to the powers-that-shouldn't-be, anyone who has seen the push for age verification and digital identification and "driver's licenses" for the internet knows the truth by now: to whatever extent the "Internet" of yore ever existed, it is now well and truly gone.
Heck, I just spent ten minutes searching various search engines with multiple queries to find an article whose exact headline I already knew. (And, irony of ironies, that article is about Canada's new online censorship bill).
My friends, it is now beyond doubt that we are no longer living in the utopian era of the Information Superhighway but in the dystopian nightmare of the digital gulag.
The Internet is dead.
Long Live the Internet?
But what does it mean that the free and open Internet is dead? After all, the ARPANET was designed to be able to survive and to continue functioning even in the wake of nuclear Armageddon, wasn't it? So how can some meddling governments take the whole thing down?
The most obvious answer is that the clueless masses who began logging on to the internet over the past two decades had no clue about the benefits of decentralization and merely gravitated to the most convenient and popular online spaces. By eschewing the labour of creating their own websites (or even designing their own geocities blog or Myspace page), by forsaking the quest to find new, unexplored corners of the net, they unwittingly recreated the dinosaur media paradigm in the new digital domain.
The parallels are striking: just as there were a handful of TV networks and newspapers and media companies that were able to dictate what almost everyone saw, heard, talked about and thought about on a daily basis in the old dinosaur media paradigm, there are now a handful of social media platforms where people are allowed to create a standardized, cookie-cutter profile and talk about the (fact-checker approved) news of the day.
And, just like that, the wacky, weird, intensely personal web of blogs and fora and message boards became the handful of standardized, soulless, corporate social media sites that dominate the web today.
There's even more to the story, though. The truth is that the Internet of yesteryear became the internet of today through a series of actions designed to make a decentralized, distributed network of information exchange into a centralized network of information control.
In fact, from its earliest beginnings, the ARPANET relied on a single "HOSTS.TXT" file maintained by the Stanford Research Institute to map hostnames to IP addresses. That system eventually developed into the Domain Name System that exists today, turning the inscrutable 77.235.50.111 IP address into the human-readable corbettreport.com.
Of course, most people don't give a moment's thought to the domain name system—how it is managed, who controls it, or why such a centralized directory is needed at all to run a supposedly decentralized network—until their domain is seized by the feds, that is.
Nor do they consider the dangers of relying on one of the few big-name web hosts or content delivery networks to host their web site . . . until their hosting is pulled and no one can access their site anymore.
Nor do they ponder the implications for the free, open, decentralized web if everyone relies on a handful of social media platforms run by a handful of Big Tech companies to provide access to their online "friends" . . . until their profile is suspended or their account removed for wrongthink.
Of course, as viewers of #SolutionsWatch know, the concept of truly decentralized communication is still alive and well. From Bastyon to Qortal to nostr to Blockchain DNS and many other projects besides, there is no shortage of developers who are working on ways for people to use the internet as it was intended: as a decentralized, distributed network with no middleman capable of stepping into your peer-to-peer information exchange.
Of course, the majority of people don't care about decentralized communication. They're happy to watch videos on YouTube and to share news on Twitter and to post vacation photos to Instagram and to pretend to be Facebook friends with people they haven't seen since grade school and to call all of this "the internet." They don't care about censorship or government surveillance. After all, if something is banned from this or that social media platform, then it's probably Thoughtcrime and deserves to be censored anyway, right?
But beyond the censorship, there's an even sadder story underlying the tale of the death of the internet. It involves the death of the human element of the early world wide web, a tragedy that the Dead Internet Theory is gesturing toward in a ham-handedly literal fashion.
Although it's incomprehensible for people growing up in today's depressing, enraging, clickbaity internet environment, the truth is that 30 years ago the world wide web was a fun, zany, lively space for encountering truly unique and idiosyncratic sites of all sorts.
The excitement of finding that group of people who cared as much as you did about stamp collecting or Scandinavian doom metal or 19th century crockery or whatever ridiculously niche topic you happened to be interested in is perhaps indescribable to those habituated to mindlessly scrolling through algorithmically provided feeds of increasingly bot-generated content on the handful of boring corporate social media platforms we're confined to today.
Oh, and those twirling "under construction" graphics and flashing, seizure-inducing backgrounds of poorly designed 1990s websites? Humorous as they appear to us in retrospect, they spoke to the human nature of the world wide web back then.
Contrast the off-the-wall individuality of an early 1990s website with the impersonal, inhuman, barren landscape of Facebook or reddit, and you can't help but be left with the feeling that we are slowly being turned into machines ourselves, devoid of personality or individual creativity.
Perhaps, then, it isn't a bad thing that the decentralized networks and platforms that are coming online right now are not popular. They are not being brought down to the lowest common denominator by the Joe Sixpacks and Jane Soccermoms of the world. Perhaps it's through these new, exciting, experimental technologies that we can finally shed the carapace of the dead internet and rediscover that place of human connection that seemed to be at our fingertips lo those many decades ago.
The early internet was pioneered by the misfits, the geeks, the pioneers, the weirdos of all stripes who were willing to go out of their way to create something novel and different. The new internet will be pioneered by them, too. Hope to see you there.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/dont-look-now-but-utter-chaos-being-unleashed-all-over-world/5825070
Don’t Look Now, But Utter Chaos Is Being Unleashed All Over the World
The relative peace and tranquility that we had been enjoying for several months has been shattered. All of a sudden, chaos is erupting all over the globe.
Rioters are setting fires in cities all over France,
The IDF just conducted the largest military operation in the West Bank since 2002,
and the Russians and the Ukrainians are both accusing one another of wanting to attack the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
If that facility is bombed, it could potentially cause a nuclear disaster far worse than the one that we witnessed at Chernobyl in 1986.
Unfortunately, I believe that global instability will be the norm throughout the remainder of 2023 and beyond. Much more civil unrest and war are ahead, and that has very serious implications for every man, woman and child on the entire planet.
Cars burn in the aftermath of clashes between protesters and police following the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a French police in Nanterre during a traffic stop, in Toulouse, France, June 28, 2023. (TIMOTHEE FORGET/VIA REUTERS)
Personally, I have been absolutely stunned by the tremendous violence that has been taking place in France. It is being reported that 5,662 vehicles have been set on fire during the rioting so far…
Ministry of the Interior figures taking account of damage to people and property during the now six nights of riots triggered by the shooting death by a police officer of an Algerian heritage teenager in a Paris suburb at a traffic stop reveals there have been 5,662 vehicle fires so far, reports Le Parisien.
The widespread destruction of vehicles, which as images recorded in the areas of unrest in France attest, include not just private cars but also trucks and buses. Trams have also been targeted by vandals. In one widely-reported case, a large truck was stolen by looters to ram down the doors of a mall to gain access to the merchandise inside. There were 1,919 vehicle fires on Thursday night alone.
France has seen a lot of riots in recent years, but nothing quite like this.
At least 1,000 buildings have been torched during these riots, and that includes 254 police stations…
Damage has not by any means been limited to burnt-out cars and buses, however. As the government figures attest, at least 1,000 buildings have been damaged in the riots. This includes attacks on 254 police stations, as well as dozens of town halls, schools, post offices, and private commercial properties targeted for burning or looting.
The rioters have already caused a billion dollars in damage, and this crisis still isn’t over.
But this isn’t the biggest global story right now.
An Israeli military bulldozer seen leveling roads and destroying the center of the Jenin refugee camp during a raid on the camp near the West Bank City of Jenin, july 3, 2023. (Photo: Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA images via ZUMA Press Wire/APA Images)
Over the past few days, the Israeli military has been conducting the most extensive military operation that we have witnessed in the West Bank since 2002…
Over 1,000 IDF troops were involved in the campaign, which appeared to be the largest in the West Bank in some 20 years.
Speaking alongside Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Jenin “in the past two years had become a factory for terror. In the past two days, this ended.”
“We cut off the weapons manufacturing process, captured thousands of bombs, destroyed dozens of production sites, workshops and explosives labs,” he said.
The IDF is beginning to wrap up this campaign, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is warning that this was “not a one-time thing”…
“At this moment we are completing the mission, and I can say our widescale action in Jenin is not a one-time thing,” Netanyahu said during a visit to the Salem checkpoint, some 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from Jenin.
“We will continue [to operate] as necessary to root out terrorism. We will not allow Jenin to go back to being a hotbed of terror,” he added.
Tensions in the region have reached a boiling point, and it is just a matter of time before a major war erupts in the Middle East.
But this conflict in the West Bank is not the biggest global story right now either.
To me, the most important global story at the moment is what is going on in Ukraine.
The Russians and the Ukrainians are both warning that an attack on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is imminent…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has claimed that Russia is plotting a potentially dangerous attack on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which Russian forces have occupied for more than a year. Russia has accused Ukraine, meanwhile, of plotting to attack the same sprawling Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, southern Ukraine, in the next two days.
It was a nerve-racking night for people across Ukraine amid the crossfire of accusations, but especially in the towns and cities near the Zaporizhzhia plant, including the city of Zaporizhzhia just a few miles away, which Russia never managed to capture.
I hope that there is no truth to any of this.
But where there is smoke, there is often fire.
I think that someone has been plotting something, and if an attack is carried out it could potentially create a disaster that is “not even comparable to Hiroshima or Nagasaki”…
An explosion at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant ‘is not even comparable to Hiroshima or Nagasaki’, a Ukrainian opposition leader has told MailOnline.
Such a blast would be ‘a much more terrifying and massive nuclear accident that, in the conditions of such a war, can lead to unpredictable consequences,’ he said.
The good news is that the entire world is now watching the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant very closely due to all of the accusations that are going back and forth.
So it will be much harder for either side to pull something off.
Let us hope that an attack does not happen, because that could set off a chain of events that nobody would be able to control.
For example, if the Russians believed that the Ukrainians attacked the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, they may respond by using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainian military targets.
If that happens, the U.S. would likely respond by using tactical nuclear weapons against Russians military targets.
And then it would be just a matter of time before we get to a full-blown nuclear war.
Already, one prominent Russian leader is warning that the U.S. and the EU “will be responsible for the consequences” if the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is destroyed…
“The goal is monstrous: to use a nuclear terrorist attack to accuse Russia and force the collective West to get directly involved in the Ukrainian conflict,” Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Russian State Duma’s International Affairs Committee, wrote on his Telegram channel.
Slutsky said tensions are growing around the Zaporizhzhia plant, as they are also “in European capitals.” And in a thinly veiled warning, added, “Brussels and Washington have every chance of being among the sponsors of nuclear terrorists and will be responsible for the consequences of blowing up” the plant.
This is incredibly serious.
But most Americans have absolutely no idea that any of this is going on.
Speaking of the United States, there have been 10 mass shootings in our nation over the past two days…
So far, there have been at least 10 mass shootings on July 4 and 5, according to GVA. Much of the information about each shooting is preliminary, and the details – about the number or nature of the injuries, for example – could change as police investigate.
Mass shootings have become so common that each one barely makes a blip in the news before the next one happens.
And it is just a matter of time before the rioting that we are witnessing in France erupts here too.
We are a nation that is in a very advanced state of decline, and most Americans are completely and utterly unprepared for what is coming.
The chaos that is currently being unleashed all over the world is just a small preview of the great storm that is ahead.
So I would encourage you to get things in order while you still can, because the pace of global change has accelerated to a speed that is absolutely breathtaking.
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