The internet was literally designed to solve the problem of automatically routing around problems to maintain connectivity in the event of a catastrophic outage like a nuclear strike, and now nations have decided that it's better to put all the necessary infrastructure in one building instead, probably so they can spy on the citizenry better. That makes me incredibly angry. Risking access to what is probably the single greatest human achievement (the web) for the sake of something as trivial as listening to people's Google searches is so damn stupid.
The web is our greatest achievement? Not language/writing, printing press, medicine, food production, sanitation, or harnessing electricity? I mean, the web is probably in the top 10, but I’d have to think pretty hard before concluding it was even top 5.
Fire, metal working, domestication of animals, sailing and navigation, democracy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the transistor, computing, radio, flight.
Probably not in the top 10 the more you think about it.
Internet, not the web, is for sure the greatest achievement of humankind so far if you consider the human effort and collaboration such a massive network requires and the multiplier effect it has on absolutely everything.
Being able to communicate in real time anywhere in the world would seem to me, to be a force multiplier far greater than any other previous invention.
Further, access to the internet surely has spread the world faster than any other tech. Which in my mind highlights just how important and powerful the tech has proven to be.
Sure, since the invention of the internet extreme poverty has gone from 30-40% of the world to probably around 5% and there's a very strong trend increase as internet became more available.
Freedom indexes showing things like research and expression exploded with the internet.
I'd suggest these things are _far_ more important for humanity than growing a countries GDP, which may or may not result in life improvements for the majority of its citizens.
I would also nit-pick and entirely reject that hygiene doubled our life expectancy. Worldwide LE went from 30 to 60 over the course of many decades and no single region saw a double in less than a few decades. So this can't be attributed to any single event, much less something as discrete as soap/hygiene.
> Sure, since the invention of the internet extreme poverty has gone from 30-40% of the world to probably around 5% and there's a very strong trend increase as internet became more available.
It's highly unlikely that extreme poverty reduction is caused by the spread of internet. Also, your numbers are way off [1], as the current percentage is around 10%, down from 36% in 1990.
> what do you suggest happened 30-40 years ago that triggered this massive spread of wealth, then?
It doesn't really matter what I suggest. Correlation does not imply causation.
But for instance, in China there were 700 million of people living in extreme poverty in 1990, and that number went down to 200 million in 2008, and 7 million in 2016 [1]. Regardless, internet penetration rate in China was 23% in 2008, and 53% in 2016 [2].
From the article in [1], it is easy to deduce that most advancements in extreme poverty eradication come from similar contexts, countries with larger populations that have experienced accelerated growth in the past decades, mostly because of manufacture and exports, e.g. India, Vietnam, or Brazil.
"what do you suggest happened 30-40 years ago that triggered this massive spread of wealth, then?"
Look at GDP or poverty rate of any country, there is no 'bump' or infection point the year or even the decade internet was invented. You know what did create a bump? Decolonisation.
Conclusion: nothing happened, extreme poverty was receding for decades prior, and it's just the same trend continuing.
In theory, with the internet, civilization could go back to full decentralization. You need writing, printing, sanitation and food production to aggregate humans in cities to create a human network.
With the internet, people can be hunter gatherers and spread all over the world and still pool their knowledge to maintain the infrastructure. You still need electricity and machines, but the internet links it all together.
*edit: changed web to internet, along dgellow's comment
Didn't hunter gatherers have a working week of 10 - 20 hours? If free time is the measurement of success, that would make agriculture a pretty horrible invention.
Hunter gatherers spent 10-20 hours per week getting food - which was their work. I'm not sure where you are located but I spend 1hr/wk getting groceries. There are certainly parts of the world where people still walk miles for clean water but that's not most of the industrialized nations.
I'm not arguing that people work less, I'm saying humanity now has more "free" time to produce technology/innovate. In regards to the west, the lower classes do not get the benefits of this - but the upper class or researchers absolutely do get the benefit of not having to hunt and gather for food.
Not language/writing, printing press, medicine, food production, sanitation, or harnessing electricity?
Those are innovations, not achievements. They happened largely by small groups in parallel around the world, with some small improvements shared between people when they met over hundreds or thousands of years. They're amazing things, but they're all examples of slow, incremental developments.
The internet is a truly global communications network that works ubiquitously everywhere that's been in development for less than 50 years. Humans have never achieved as much to do something so useful in such a short time ever before.
While I understand the heft of your argument, I don't think food production and electricity generation can be categorized as simple innovations. Everything starts off when a small number of people work on something, and later spreads around through consensus. But crops are a basic necessity for survival so I feel it is unfair to bring it into this debate.
If anything, I would classify antibiotics, standardization of drug manufacturing, and scaling of energy (oil, nuclear power) as humanity's greatest achievements because all other achievements are made possible by (1) people being alive and well and (2) having the energy budget to carry out research and development.
I actually suspect that the internet was designed to spy on the citizenry better, but was sold as a mega-connectivity technology.
Its an indispensable part of the tech required for technocracy, but now it has done its job and there is a tracking device is every hand, its time to rein it back a few notches. (Reining back has been underway for a while to be fair..)
We can say it wasn't sold as a spy system. But we also say that technocracy would require all devices to be connected. Languages such as java were designed with that in mind. So, perhaps playing up the social connectivity is the means to gain ubiquitous adoption.
If you think reality is just 'naturally unfolding' you will object to this. But if you think reality is somewhat directed, that our future is sketched out (even if we are unaware of the plans), I think what I say is plausible.
Obviously I don't think reality is simply unfolding. I note that many single social events that has occurred in recent years has resulted in incremental steps towards a technocratic surveillance system. Eg, constraints to travel with 911, perpeutual surveillance, advances towards a biomedical-banking-id. We move incrementally towards a dystopia none of us would ever agree to - but it happens so slowly, it seems to be beyond perception.
As someone else mentioned - the directions are blamed on the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse - terrorists, pedos, etc but if you look it is the individual's freedoms that are lost.
We can reasonably conclude the internet was not created to spy on citizens, it was created for military connectivity. One could suggest the World Wide Web was created for espionage, but that again requires several leaps with respect to its early creators, most of whom have shown a lifelong dedication to a vision of human freedom that far exceeds the population’s central tendency.
Was the rollout of the WWW and internet to the masses motivated, in part, by domestic surveillance desires? Sure. Almost no question about it. But was that a guiding aim? No, at least not in America, not until the project was well underway.
The US military involvement in the creation of the internet is a bit of a myth. It is true that the military had a big interest in a decentral "nuke resiliant" digital communication network and as such became an early adopter and big spending investor, but it was invented, build and distributed by universities to networking the local networks of universities together. Wiring two computers together to exchange data is quite obvious and doing so over long distance calls was the next logical step. There were many early adopters in the industry as well, telecommunication and electronics being the obvious ones. Military interest and financing influenced many small parts, and at the big picture it played a big role, i am not denying that, but the military did not invent or build it, and it wasn't created solely or even mostly for them either. It's a myth, a simple explanations for a complex process, a story that sounds nice, but is as wrong as it is right. The internet isn't even one thing, that is a rather grand abstraction, like "the forests" - which forests? All of them.
> US military involvement in the creation of the internet is a bit of a myth
It was relatively front and centre. SAGE was the Air Force’s networked radar system in the 1950s [1]. Its vulnerability directly lead to the work at RAND, in the U.S., on packet switching in the 1960s. Academia then took the mantle, but never far from the military’s aegis. (The UK took a parallel path through the NPL that wasn’t as martial, but still quite so.)
i am not denying that it was front and center, i am just saying this "the military created it" story that gets reurgitated endlessly is a very oversimplified explanation that downplays the involvement of many civilian and global actors in favor of a story of militaristic mysticism and american nationalism. The internet is not packet switching, even if it mostly uses packet switching and the internet is not a network of radars either and while RAND surely was military-industrial complex, it did not create the internet. Sure the DoD was always strongly involved, but claiming the ARPANET is the predecessor of the internet is like claiming i had one grandparent, while in truth i had four. The ARPANET sure was about networking, but not about global internetworking, even if it became one of the internetworked networks, and it sure did not care about global commerce and people sharing videos of their cats either. Last time i checked the military did not network yemen into the global communication network, they bombed them out of it (scnr). I am not saying that the US military did not invest heavily in computer networks and financed a lot of the science and technology, they surely did, but they did not create the internet. It is like saying Bill Gates became a billionaire by founding a company in his garage and working really hard, it is not entirely wrong, but it kind of misses a lot of rather important details to instead make an inspirational story filled with survivorship bias and american dreams.
The most ardent KBG agents are rolling in their graves - the 'free west' has a tracker on every citizen, and they even paid for the privilidge! Trully capitalism delivers results!
According to https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ they have 4 stations (3 in the west and 1 in the lower populated east) with access to a total of 5 cables, and 1 cable is wired into 2 stations.
> The undersea FALCON cable carries internet into Yemen through the Hodeida port along the Red Sea for TeleYemen. [...] Land cables to Saudi Arabia have been cut since the start of Yemen's civil war, while connections to two other undersea cables have yet to be made amid the conflict, TeleYemen previously said.
Internet was designed to survive in case of a few random nukes here and there, but I guess that nuking every single connection will do the trick.
I don’t know if the internet was designed to route around five years of civil war.
Even if you are fully federated, you run into the problem of being unable to protect and therefore repair certain parts of the network til the point where it degrades enough that one air strike takes out the whole thing.
The journalists who have disclose this fact were summoned by our intelligence services (DGSI). It was a scandale and freedom of speech was trampled with this case.
Well the Houthi movement's official slogan is "God is Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam". Can't be a coincident?
If they came through legally, they'll be just fine. Maybe not before a few years ago (valid criticism). If they snuck in then that may be a different story - then you can go into how the Kingdom treats and abuses illegal migrants and expatriates (more room for valid criticisms)
Drew Binsky is of Jewish background and he is welcomed, which is counter to your insinuation that.... he would be beheaded on the spot (???)
Even pre-reform not much would've happened to him on the ground by the people.
It is true however, that generally Jewish people were not allowed into the country. Of course there were exceptions back then also.
I think your sentiment is on the right side, you just need to make sure you keep up to date with what's happening so as to not invalidate your own position/talking point
I actively encourage you to participate in BDS of the states you have an issue with, as I do myself.
I think you should read more in the history of this relationship and compel your representatives to stop this policy of arming dictatorships just so your uncle in the mid-west can keep his job of machining parts for tanks and missiles.
There is chaos in the M.E and it is fueled by your weak politicians putting jobs (among other things) over peace.
Would you excuse Hitler with the same sentence?
You can switch islam with white supremacy, it's a similar supremacist ideology in search of a boogeyman. Protocol of Zion is still cited as a legitimate source in the middle east.
"Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken.[2] Funding [..] rose to $630 million per year in 1987,[1][4][5] described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency".
To be fair they're not US funded, they're US supplied. US and Uk weapons manufacturers are making lots of money because Saudi Arabia and the UAE are buying weapons from them. They're not using money from the USA to do this.
IIRC, Yemen was offline in 2019 right before the pandemic. I hadn't heard any news from Yemen since then, so I had thought the situation there was still abysmal, and that there was probably little, if any, internet.
This was likely a retaliatory attack for the rebel missile attack on Abu Dhabi a couple days ago.
You'll note the Saudi press release specifically calls out Iranian backed arms trafficking at the target (which is relevant since the missiles were likely Iranian supplies).
81 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadProbably not in the top 10 the more you think about it.
Isn’t this just a byproduct of the technology it is based on?
Commercial routes such as the Silk Road could be considered as the first massive, interconnected information networks.
Further, access to the internet surely has spread the world faster than any other tech. Which in my mind highlights just how important and powerful the tech has proven to be.
So invention of soap and hygene doubled life expectancy.
The industrial revolution / steam engine has taken us from 1% gdp frowth per ccenturyt o 3-5% GDP growth, so over 100x improvement.
Those are historic changes. What important metric has the internet increased at least by 50%?
Freedom indexes showing things like research and expression exploded with the internet.
I'd suggest these things are _far_ more important for humanity than growing a countries GDP, which may or may not result in life improvements for the majority of its citizens.
I would also nit-pick and entirely reject that hygiene doubled our life expectancy. Worldwide LE went from 30 to 60 over the course of many decades and no single region saw a double in less than a few decades. So this can't be attributed to any single event, much less something as discrete as soap/hygiene.
It's highly unlikely that extreme poverty reduction is caused by the spread of internet. Also, your numbers are way off [1], as the current percentage is around 10%, down from 36% in 1990.
[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/09/19/d...
> It's highly unlikely that extreme poverty reduction is caused by the spread of internet.
what do you suggest happened 30-40 years ago that triggered this massive spread of wealth, then?
It doesn't really matter what I suggest. Correlation does not imply causation.
But for instance, in China there were 700 million of people living in extreme poverty in 1990, and that number went down to 200 million in 2008, and 7 million in 2016 [1]. Regardless, internet penetration rate in China was 23% in 2008, and 53% in 2016 [2].
From the article in [1], it is easy to deduce that most advancements in extreme poverty eradication come from similar contexts, countries with larger populations that have experienced accelerated growth in the past decades, mostly because of manufacture and exports, e.g. India, Vietnam, or Brazil.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/56213271
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236963/penetration-rate-...
Look at GDP or poverty rate of any country, there is no 'bump' or infection point the year or even the decade internet was invented. You know what did create a bump? Decolonisation.
Conclusion: nothing happened, extreme poverty was receding for decades prior, and it's just the same trend continuing.
If I kept going I suspect by the end of the day internet might not even make the top 100.
With the internet, people can be hunter gatherers and spread all over the world and still pool their knowledge to maintain the infrastructure. You still need electricity and machines, but the internet links it all together.
*edit: changed web to internet, along dgellow's comment
I'm not arguing that people work less, I'm saying humanity now has more "free" time to produce technology/innovate. In regards to the west, the lower classes do not get the benefits of this - but the upper class or researchers absolutely do get the benefit of not having to hunt and gather for food.
Plenty of ways to interpret that sentence more charitably. How about "we" meaning "we the people of our time."
Those are innovations, not achievements. They happened largely by small groups in parallel around the world, with some small improvements shared between people when they met over hundreds or thousands of years. They're amazing things, but they're all examples of slow, incremental developments.
The internet is a truly global communications network that works ubiquitously everywhere that's been in development for less than 50 years. Humans have never achieved as much to do something so useful in such a short time ever before.
If anything, I would classify antibiotics, standardization of drug manufacturing, and scaling of energy (oil, nuclear power) as humanity's greatest achievements because all other achievements are made possible by (1) people being alive and well and (2) having the energy budget to carry out research and development.
It's never about Google searches, it's about The Four Horsemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Its an indispensable part of the tech required for technocracy, but now it has done its job and there is a tracking device is every hand, its time to rein it back a few notches. (Reining back has been underway for a while to be fair..)
We can say it wasn't sold as a spy system. But we also say that technocracy would require all devices to be connected. Languages such as java were designed with that in mind. So, perhaps playing up the social connectivity is the means to gain ubiquitous adoption.
If you think reality is just 'naturally unfolding' you will object to this. But if you think reality is somewhat directed, that our future is sketched out (even if we are unaware of the plans), I think what I say is plausible.
Obviously I don't think reality is simply unfolding. I note that many single social events that has occurred in recent years has resulted in incremental steps towards a technocratic surveillance system. Eg, constraints to travel with 911, perpeutual surveillance, advances towards a biomedical-banking-id. We move incrementally towards a dystopia none of us would ever agree to - but it happens so slowly, it seems to be beyond perception.
As someone else mentioned - the directions are blamed on the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse - terrorists, pedos, etc but if you look it is the individual's freedoms that are lost.
We can reasonably conclude the internet was not created to spy on citizens, it was created for military connectivity. One could suggest the World Wide Web was created for espionage, but that again requires several leaps with respect to its early creators, most of whom have shown a lifelong dedication to a vision of human freedom that far exceeds the population’s central tendency.
Was the rollout of the WWW and internet to the masses motivated, in part, by domestic surveillance desires? Sure. Almost no question about it. But was that a guiding aim? No, at least not in America, not until the project was well underway.
It was relatively front and centre. SAGE was the Air Force’s networked radar system in the 1950s [1]. Its vulnerability directly lead to the work at RAND, in the U.S., on packet switching in the 1960s. Academia then took the mantle, but never far from the military’s aegis. (The UK took a parallel path through the NPL that wasn’t as martial, but still quite so.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Enviro...
Opponents are sending spies, we are gathering intelligence.
They are terrorists, but we are freedom fighters.
Mafia doesn't do racketeering, they offer protection, etc.
> The undersea FALCON cable carries internet into Yemen through the Hodeida port along the Red Sea for TeleYemen. [...] Land cables to Saudi Arabia have been cut since the start of Yemen's civil war, while connections to two other undersea cables have yet to be made amid the conflict, TeleYemen previously said.
Internet was designed to survive in case of a few random nukes here and there, but I guess that nuking every single connection will do the trick.
If we had kept it at no faster than 56Kbauds, I’d be more inclined to agree.
EDIT: incorrect pronoun
Even if you are fully federated, you run into the problem of being unable to protect and therefore repair certain parts of the network til the point where it degrades enough that one air strike takes out the whole thing.
"Yemen has lost internet after U.S. Funded, Saudi-led, airstrikes"
https://www.ecchr.eu/en/case/made-in-europe-bombed-in-yemen/
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/european-arm...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P24WZp0gVRg
If you want to have your (valid) criticisms taken seriously, it's best to keep up to date with what's going on on the ground.
If they came through legally, they'll be just fine. Maybe not before a few years ago (valid criticism). If they snuck in then that may be a different story - then you can go into how the Kingdom treats and abuses illegal migrants and expatriates (more room for valid criticisms)
Drew Binsky is of Jewish background and he is welcomed, which is counter to your insinuation that.... he would be beheaded on the spot (???)
Even pre-reform not much would've happened to him on the ground by the people.
It is true however, that generally Jewish people were not allowed into the country. Of course there were exceptions back then also.
I think your sentiment is on the right side, you just need to make sure you keep up to date with what's happening so as to not invalidate your own position/talking point
SA is a country ruled by an evil group of people who have so good political connection that the US invaded Afghanistan instead as a revenge for 9/11.
I actively encourage you to participate in BDS of the states you have an issue with, as I do myself.
I think you should read more in the history of this relationship and compel your representatives to stop this policy of arming dictatorships just so your uncle in the mid-west can keep his job of machining parts for tanks and missiles.
There is chaos in the M.E and it is fueled by your weak politicians putting jobs (among other things) over peace.
"Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken.[2] Funding [..] rose to $630 million per year in 1987,[1][4][5] described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency".
What happened next was a logical consequence.
Queue in cryptobros saying how cryptocurrencies are a solution to unstable governments etc.
You'll note the Saudi press release specifically calls out Iranian backed arms trafficking at the target (which is relevant since the missiles were likely Iranian supplies).
More info about the recent conflict here:
https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2022/01/houthis-laun...