Observations about the world, part three

Photograph of the Atlas globe

Is the internet good or bad?
Wednesday – October 1, 2025

While the internet has surely enabled cross border communications on a vast scale and connected people across the globe in a way never seen before, I do hold that there are some clear downsides to the advent of the internet. My view in short is that the internet can be a good thing and also that the internet can be a bad thing. I don't however believe that the internet is good in and of itself; I don't believe this about anything. Once upon a time not that distant, people used to complain about books, in particular young women being exposed to the ideas that many books carried, but also in how books once more and more people became literate slowly but steadfastly changed the world and how people interacted with the world and in a sense the internet is a part of a process of information becoming available to more and more people. In the distant past, only few learned men often monks could read, write, and really participate in the flow of information, but slowly over the past couple of centuries or really millennia this has changed and today more people than ever before in human history may partake in the flow of information, and currently we are clearly standing at a juncture in time where the mode of being or how people interact with the world is changing: we're really transitioning from a paper based organisational structure of society to a computerized organization of society, but like most paradigm shifts in history this hasn't happened over night, and as I am writing this, very much relying on the internet, we're just in the midst of this transition, and I would expect that the full transformation into the computer age will take another couple of decades. But do notice that these large societal transformations, paradigm shifts, have occurred in a faster and faster order from about 2000 years ago up till today, where the entire world can seemingly change within less than a lifetime. Indeed, such large scale societal shifts only occurred over large amounts of time in the past, but today cultural and societal shifts have been compressed in a way, and this compression of change seems to be accelerating, the compressing just keeps going faster and faster with no end in sight. In my view this is really a function of our times, the Kali Yuga, and therefore I am not surprised to see these large scale societal shifts, and I expect them to just become more and more compressed.

    It seems that it was common place to divide most of the 20th century in to decades and as history clearly shows, there was usually large cultural and social shifts from decade to decade within the 20th century, and this just can't be said about previous centuries, where the societal shifts still occurred but just moved by much more slowly. Today though, it seems that almost every other year has been a large cultural and societal shift, and indeed this even began early in this century, even though we're still early in the 21st century. No longer can it seemingly be said that a large-scale cultural shift has happened between two decades, for change is so much more rapid these days, and the carrier of most cultural and societal shifts in the modern world seems to be the internet. Indeed, because of the internet it seems that the paradigm shift has almost been made instantaneous: change happens so rapidly that there is no sense of now or the contemporary culture or society, for it has already changed and morphed into something else. The unit of societal change has become compressed to such a degree that it's almost instantaneous today or it's approaching 0 if you will, and that in and of itself has become the new norm: everything is changing because that has always seemingly been the case with the universe but this change now happens so rapidly that the boundaries between the past and the future are about to get erased, for we're all living in the moment while also loving in the future in a sense. I imagine that this has and will disrupt many things in society, from education and workplace culture, to how people interact with other people across international borders: the world has become so much smaller and so much more compressed. In my series on collectivism and individualism I have often mentioned the individual as the fundamental unit of society and that all social and cultural life that is acceptable and adherent to the principles of the humanist axiom have been also compressed into that single point, the individual and in a sense this seems to be a function of the overall culture, a culture that revolves around the individual in the moment.

    It seems clear then that mental illness and other ill-effects of these large and ever evolving societal shifts should be expected and indeed it does seem that the internet and really the overall societal structure that has been enabled by the internet has created more mental illness among the population, as these fast changes keeps erasing boundaries that people rely on to relate to world and other people, to navigate in the world really. When people are unable to navigate or indeed when they are unable to know how to navigate in the world, they become lost on the high seas and consequently they become enveloped by madness, for they are no longer aware of the proper boundaries of the world: they exist in a state of seeming chaos, and this has been the biggest downside to the internet, people's seeming inability to interact with the internet in a manner that can be described as healthy. Often the internet has replaced large portions of what would otherwise seem to be important parts of the social fabric of any functioning society, and this again leads to mental illness and general social fatigue because people are no longer socially aware.

    I also believe that these fast and often sudden changes to the societal structure causes a lot of stress, or it has enabled the reign if stress in the modern world, because there are no longer any proper boundaries between work, the vocation, and rest; life has been reduced to nothing but constant performance and this has been reinforced by an ever growing apatite on the part of the state and other actors to monitor the population, it has enabled a constant pressure to measure and quantify every single aspect of life, and once the individual inevitably falls short he becomes anxious, stressed, and depressed. In a sense, the world is really approaching a prison, where people effectively won't have any other ways out or options in life other than constantly performing in order to uphold an evermore unsustainable material order, and this is also why I believe that it's almost inevitable that robots and the post-human form should replace men: the world is simply going to out phase most men, it will just be to complicated and to shifting, and the only solution to this must be some form of extra intelligence, that's the point of singularity that we're approaching as the world becomes more and more compressed into one single point.

    So is the internet good or bad? As I stated in the first paragraph/section: I believe that the internet can do many good things, but overall I view the advent of the internet as another move towards the inevitable conclusion of this era, the Kali Yuga. I myself rely on the internet and indeed this entire page is powered by and for the internet, and that's because I believe that I can do good and other men can also do good with the internet. There are however many downsides to how the internet is used and it does seem that the internet has and will enable the abolition of objective truth: I believe that the internet will be used and indeed has been used to warp people's perceptions about material and objective truths, and indeed it seems that the internet has enabled and will enable a kind of divorce from reality, and while you may argue that some men have always been divorced from reality this has become a salient and unchangeable part of the internet, and this will most likely enable and accelerate the dissolution of most nation-states, as the internet will disrupt the societal fabric on such a large scale that it quite simply becomes impossible to organize and mobilize large scale politics, and without politics there really can be no coherent and functioning nation-state.

Reginald Drax – October 1, 2025.