An Internet We’re Afraid to Explore

I've finally started watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. What a great show! It talked about the "Old Net". The show takes place in 2077 and they say that "50 years earlier", the internet collapsed. 1 A hacker released a virus that corrupted much of the network. Leaving people scattered, isolated in a bunch of smaller local networks. The old net still contains valuable information and lost knowledge, but rogue AIs inhabit it and attack whoever tries to access it. That felt so real, so close. It felt like it could really happen now. It probably wouldn't be as dramatic or cinematic as the show makes it look. But the idea itself doesn't feel far-fetched to me. The internet already feels like a hostile environment where I don't want to spend much more time except in a few curated places. Social media is filled with fake news, distorted news, hatred. It is just chaos. Echo chambers occasionally launching raids on each other. And the algorithms keep pulling me back into that chaos. The second I…

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