Death of the Internet Revisited

This builds on a previous blog post, Death of the Internet?

The surge in smartphone and tablet computing is not entirely consumer directed. It is in part the result of long hopes and dreams held by plutocrats everywhere. The Internet, as it now exists, remains the single biggest threat to plutocrat control. It is currently the only means of communication they do not yet control fully. If they can succeed in channeling the urge to write and speak into false concerns and silly nonsense, they have won. But some of us aren’t easily seduced into that, and stopping us requires a different approach.

Part of that approach is simply making the hardware unavailable, in the sense of raising the threshold for getting and keeping it. Read any number of magazine type sites and you see the trends pushing, pushing, pushing everyone over to a consumption based Internet and hindering, if not disabling, independent production of content. An article from RT notes that Big Telecom wants to help with this process. They want the Internet to be another form of cable TV, where the entire delivery process is controlled from the top. The court case regarding the FCC rules almost misses the point, yet is making so very much news, splashed all over the faux opposition sites. This is not a trend easily resisted.

Even the bulk of Open Source has been seduced by this nonsense. Get the picture here: The early efforts at constructing a full desktop GUI were aimed at integrating hardware functions into simple and convenient access. You shouldn’t have to manually mount a CD-ROM and then get access to the contents. You shouldn’t have to manually pick through the file system and organize a batch for burning to a DVD, carefully noting a dozen parameters you don’t even understand. So when Open Source folks realized they actually could and should do this, several projects formed to create competing desktop environments. At about the time GNOME and KDE were just pulling even with Windows for user convenience, the whole thing was hijacked into tablet and cellphone interface development.

The current fallback position is XFCE, which has yet to become as fully integrated as the others were some years ago. The folks at XFCE are trying, but their resources are limited. This whole business of touch is not about convenience for the user, but about suckering consumers into surrendering control, and more to the point, surrendering their voices. You cannot write much using your thumbs only. You’ll never be able to do any real work that way; that’s the nature of human output. Human development, moral development in particular, is very language intensive. More than one Social Science professor has loudly noted as much in regards to their academic disciplines. The only way you can understand where we are today is by seeing how we got here. The only way you can understand that is by reading tons of materials written by folks who did the research. If you don’t know where you are, you can’t move to a better place.

If you are happy with where you are, then your moral development is already dead. Without that sense of yearning for a better understanding, we are damned. Without the facility for written language, the task of learning is beyond the reach of human life span. God said bluntly that He uses the lives and words of His people to awaken that call in human hearts. I’ve already written broadly about how videos are inherently deceptive because they are based on squelching the human rational evaluative process. If you can’t read, you can’t think. If you can’t express yourself freely, you cannot give full shape to your thoughts. You cannot possibly live independently without a facility in written language. If all your expressions are soundbites from your thumbs, you have said nothing; you only make senseless noise.

It falls to a very narrow slice of us to keep doing what’s right in this regard. We can’t estimate the tipping point, but it only takes a few of us to keep good things alive. God has promised to use however many are willing to keep the door to truth open. We need to keep the door open for however many are moved by our efforts. “But the gate is narrow and the way is difficult that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:14, NET). This verse most certainly applies here.