I know the internet feels indispensable at this point, but I've been having this ongoing thought experiment where someone showed me all of 2020 (so far) back in... let's say 1996, and granted me the power to either allow or prevent the internet from existence, permanently

At first it was an easy decision to let the internet happen, but the more you think about it the more you kind of feel like you could get by without it, given its massive and unprecedented accelerative power in a fundamentally white supremacist world

Last night I turned off permissions for my TV to access "body sensors," whatever the fuck that is, and I log on here and ostensibly left people are making passionate arguments for the continuation of a carceral, predatory, life-destroying state of affairs

We're conducting all kinds of personal business online because of this pandemic, which is still an issue in this country largely because of the efficacy of right-wing trolling and grievance culture, and because of regulatory leniency these video chats aren't even secure

I probably have more technology in my apartment than most households, on a per-person basis, and it would take me a long time to figure out how to live without it, but that's only because I was given the chance to live with it

I was out of college by the time the internet became a household thing and not just a nerd thing, and somehow I survived. But the sheer existence of the internet creates massive memory holes so I don't remember how I survived

(The memory holes thing is about the omnipresent assumption of the availability of all knowable information, and how that fundamentally changes how humans interact with literally everything)

This isn't a missive or a manifesto, this is an acknowledgement that, as a species, we were uniquely unprepared for the things we ended up having the ability to create, because hubris and capitalism and racism and misogyny and on and on

(Don't quote Ian Malcolm to me in the replies, that guy was a hack who may have been right about technology in a limited and fictional scenario)

I know people are going to have concerns about this, but you do need to understand the intersection of technological and cultural momentum: capitalist and bigoted systems move at the speed they're allowed to, as close to maximum speed as possible

These systems don't hold themselves back; they're like the asshole roommate watching 4k Netflix while other folks are trying to do video chats for work. The one commandment is to expand to the size of the pipe, always

So we had this invention that essentially made the size of the pipe infinite, and with a speed that society wasn't prepared for. We gained 24 hour news channels but Congress and SCOTUS still take months off. It's two different worlds co-existing

Even during the industrial revolution there was time to consider the robber barons, the monopolists, and decide that it was worthwhile to stop them, because public sentiment turns like a battleship: it takes forever to reach critical mass

Because of the speed we weren't ready for, we've already become inured to suffering as entertainment, which is part of why body cam video of people literally dying is shared like it's no big deal

Some number of generations from now the only living people left will be those who were born after the internet became the internet. And the systems that govern their lives will still be much, much slower than the thing that influences those systems more than anything else

The sudden acceptance of "online" slogans like "Black lives matter," therefore, present no real equivalence with the kind of permanence people (falsely) assign the results of the Civil Rights era, because speed often prevents real reckoning

Critical masses are entirely different animals in a landscape where they can be undone quickly because counterintelligence-gathering that would take years or be impossible can be done in days, hours now

The widespread adoption of the internet might be the most significant story in our species' history, and people are still clinging to outdated traditionality like unlimited free speech being an actual thing

People still defend "soft" bigotry as "satire," citing a work from the late 1700s as if the time it took for Swift's work to get around in a bygone era of communication and speed had nothing to do with its impact

We had a shitty, fraudulent system bolstered by capitalists and liars before the internet, and while the internet has exposed a lot of that, it's also made exploitation a work-from-home experience, even before the pandemic

What do you do with all of this information? It's not like I expect the internet to shut itself down for the safety of all of the potential victims of the conspiracy theorists and racist YouTube shitheads

What not unreasonable, though, is to ask that people in my replies licking boots come at me with better arguments than "here's how it worked in 1962," or whatever, because you do have to eventually acknowledge something like the existence of the fucking internet in your analyses