Originally published at: An 83-Year-Old Short Story By Borges Portends A Bleak Future For The Internet - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation. How will the internet evolve in the coming decades? Fiction writers have explored some possibilities. In his 2019 novel “Fall,” science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a near future in which the internet still exists. But…
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Those of us who came of age as the internet was starting up remember it being clunky, but filled with interesting information and facts that you hadn’t known. Wikipedia grew out of that, it’s what all of us hoped the internet would become, a place where knowledge is collated and shared with the world to increase our understanding and allow even the poorest people access to information so they can advance.
It’s so disappointing how it has turned out, especially how it’s a sea of misinformation and lies, and a medium that encourages hate and suffering.
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The corruption of the internet by capitalists was somewhat predictable. Its further and much worse corruption by reactionaries bent on spreading hate and suspicioun and confusion has been a bit of a shock.
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I think anyone who participated in Usenet newsgroups saw this happen in the 90’s and early 2000’s. Usenet started off being useful and relevant. Then people started trolling, maybe at first just to demonstrate their “cleverness”. But the temptation to say something nasty from behind a wall of anonymity proved too great for some people. Inevitably, flame wars sprung up. By 2000 or so most groups were like armed camps. By 2004, relevant content dropped to a trickle, and outright Spam posting became prevalent. Usenet is now a wasteland of spam and off-topic nonsense.
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Having enough wealth to afford purchasing the truth could also be seen as simply having the free time to spend grazing the internet for information on a daily basis. IMHO I have curated a bunch of reliable blogs like TPM and have the time to peruse them while it feels like the majority of Americans do not. My daughter is a teacher in Washington state. She informed me yesterday that she heard from her peers that they just didn’t know enough about Kamala to vote for her. Don’t know if that means they didn’t vote or that they voted for the dotard but the fact is that the policies of the Harris/Walz campaign had been laid out in detail on their website as well as at their rallies but the educated people she was hearing that from didn’t have the time or take the time to inform themselves. They couldn’t afford to spend their free time becoming informed citizens in a democracy? It’s the duty of citizens to be informed isn’t it? Beuller?
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Exactly what is happening to Twitter.
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Oh my freaking god. Stephenson’s a very good writer, and I get that his stuff was coming out just when people were starting to pay attention to what would be the World Wide Web and the internet, but even the article you cite makes the point that no, Stephenson was just rebranding concepts from Bill Gibson’s work.
Learn your goddamned dystopian cyberpunk history before you try citing it, kids, please.
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What apparently aren’t present in the Borges story are intentionally harmful texts and algorithms that promote them for gain. We’re not just in an existential void—we’re in idiocracy and evilocracy, which I suppose = kakistocracy.
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With the rise of social media great swaths of the internet have been reduced to little more than automated rumor mills on steroids in which malign forces churn out waves, no tides, of mis- and disinformation.
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Which I suppose was the theme of his allegorical novel “Blindness”. The plague of blind ignorance that has settled on the nation.
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That certainly has been one more result of the increasing wealth gap. Many folks don’t have the luxury of so much free time.
Maybe I should have skipped this article today. Been trying to feel happy for Thanksgiving. A goal that is taking alot of careful curation!
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I don’t have any subscriptions beyond TPM. I text friends and family and use email only when necessary. So my “on line footprint” is very small.
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In his 2019 novel “Fall,” science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a near future in which the internet still exists. But it has become so polluted with misinformation, disinformation and advertising that it is largely unusable.
Thanks. You’ve convinced me to cancel my subscription to TPM.
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We’re already there. I first saw this particular “edit stream” featured on Trae Crowder’s Liberal Redneck Youtube program. I believe it sponsors The Bulwark’s Tim Miller as well:
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But what about my ability to read your comment on TPM? I’d like to suggest that there are many ways that the internet still provides important venues that are pretty decent.
I can’t tell you how many times I wish it was available to everyone back in the early eighties when I and two others tried to start a furniture design and manufacturing company. We were limited to a bit of press and a lot of word of mouth. Unfortunately we saturated the Toronto market for the type of designs we had. We had an outlet in Montreal but that didn’t generate enough sales. Well, it came to an end and we moved on to other things.
Here’s our Spandrel Lounge Chair from 1985. It’s been a few Canadian design shows since then.
Edit: we made a few of them for the early Tom Cruise movie “Cocktail”. Painted them like it was Miami. They shot the film in Toronto.
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Here’s sobering a gift article. Pass it on……
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When I saw Borges in the headline, I thought, "I’ll bet this refers to ‘The Library of Babel.’ " But that story, like so much of Borges, reminds me that we humans often think we’re smarter than we are. Like Orwell, Borges knew that history could be rewritten to favor those in power (and make those out of power disappear) and that people could be easily convinced to question truth.
People had great hopes for television, too. Hell, I’ll bet Gutenberg had great hopes for the printing press. They’re wonderful tools, and almost every tool is capable of good things; but sooner or later, humans being humans craving money or power or both, we screw it all up.
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Wasn’t Blindness by Saramago? I completely agree that one could read Borges’s story and Saramago’s novel together
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I actually thought it was Funes, the story of a man whose infinite memory made impossible for him to think, or to rest. For me, a very good metaphor of google
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> To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.
Neither the NYT nor WSJ are particularly trustworthy media messengers. In the age of Trump’s flooding the zone, neither can be counted on to clean up the endless fount of lies. Holding those sources up as paragons of awesomeness is a self own.
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