Thoughts on Internet Communication

This post is part of Agora Road's May 2024 Travelogue.

There was some recently some discussion about thread derailment on Agora Road. Amidst the discussion, many users were clamoring for people to make more high quality posts. As such, I started to brainstorm ideas to make a so-called "quality post".

I had the idea to make a post about the "Problem of entertainment". I was planning to argue that seeking entertainment is something analogous to greed and that humans should only consume a finite set of "content" as the creation involves the wasting precious material resources.

As I was drafting the thread however, a thought came into my mind. Why do I want to convince a bunch of random people on the internet anyway?

Seeking aside the immense backlash my idea of restricting art for the greater good would have, why did I want to convince people I was right? Even if I would somehow convince the entirety of the forum to follow my ideas, it's not like it would result in real-world change.

Many users observed that the recent "toxic users" that flooded Agora Road were preaching about ideas totally outside of their control. While those users seem absurd in isolation, all the other users fall into a similar mindset - though they tend to hold more civilized discussion.

An example of this that come to my mind is the thread about how Gen Z do not know how use computers. At the time of writing, the thread has 125 messages that can be mostly summed up as "damn, the education system is lagging behind" and/or "this will have negative consequences in the future".

Aside from the possibility incentivizing their future children or a relative to learn computers, I am pretty sure the information is not of much use for any of us. It is not like any of us can change the education system and society to fix this problem.

On Agora Road, there is a widespread belief that using forum is more beneficial than using social media. While this is true in some aspect (i.e forums not having endless scrolling), I fail to see any difference at fundamental level.

As you probably have guessed by now, I am on the belief that hearing about things you have no control over worsen your mind. Therefore, I consider using Agora Road to be problematic. Actually, most internet communications probably are.

Before writing this article, I was under the impression that a more "pure" way to have internet communication would be using read only sites such as Neocities blog - stumbling upon someone's opinion would be less problematic than seeing an argument in a forum post. I came to the conclusion that in the end, you would end up receiving "toxic knowledge" in your brain anyway.

Now, I don't think this is solely an internet problem. Afterall, people often talk about politics in real life - something mostly outside of their control.

I can see two approaches to fixing this: removal of toxic knowledge (aka isolation) or modifying the brain somehow.

In the past I thought I had overcome this problem by having a new "I don't care" mindset. This attitude slowly faded over time without me noticing it. I assume this is because this is not how my brain operates by default. As such, I have prototyped a solution. My computer now commands me to write a short weekly report that demand proof that the mindset is still in place. I'll see how it goes.

Even if this specific method fails, I am confident that I have the right approach. I recently learned about Titus Morris - a man living off the grid. Despite being almost completely detached from reality, he heard about the War in Ukraine. I assume this is due to his Amish friends or his parents - meaning that I supposse he could have been completely isolated from this "toxic knowledge" with the right conditions (that is absolute isolation).

As I have no desire to go live off the grid, total isolation is clearly not a solution. I presume that in the end it's all about the quantity of "toxic knowledge" one consumes. I doubt Titus Morris is suddenly going to be depressed just by hearing about the war. For someone living in modern society however, hearing about this might be what usher absolute despair upon them.

Truth to be told, I was considering quitting Agora Road after realizing the futility of the talking about things outside of my control. I however decided that it would be much more interesting to stay to see how effective my new method is.

Written by manpaint on 11 May 2024.