Why is the internet eating every way we do things?

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Convenient as t'web is, I worry about two things-

Digital poverty - we have a growing situation where the poorest people have little or no internet access, when more and more things can only be done via the internet. They're trapped in a situation where they can't get a decent job and can't deal with all the extra bureaucracy that goes with being poor, because trying to fill in all these web forms on a cheap phone or in a half-hour library PC slot doesn't work too well.

A Carrington Event. That was a 19th century solar storm that burnt out telegraph wires across half the planet. What a storm that big could do to our totally networked, computer-dependant world....

With that first point, that is my similar concern, only not because of poverty so much than the social effect. Maybe this just sounds selfish, but why force the poorer people to have to get sucked into this system?

Reminds me of a Woody Allen observation: he heard two Jewish ladies complaining at a retreat in the Poconos. One says "the food here is so awful", and the second says "Yes! And they serve it in such small portions!".

The internet is dangerous, and not enough folks have access to it!

The internet is like cars, not everyone can afford one but they are dangerous and its up to the driver to be safe and follow the road rules.

Indeed. One problem over here is more and more Government services being put online "for efficiency", when the people who need to access them most are the poor. And I suspect there's an element of pre-screening in online-only job applications - "no chavs please."

I work as a cleaner, and we have real trouble recruiting. The people who want cleaning jobs typically don't get on well with lengthy web forms- they're not well-educated, have no internet access, don't speak English as a first language or have other problems (such as my actual phobia of forms!). HR regularly closes applications with no-one going through to interview. So we've taken to having quarterly recruitment days where our bosses can sit down and guide applicants step-by-step through the shiny online process that is supposed to find good cleaners.... The modern world is bafflingly stupid in so many ways.

The digital world order.

I find applying for jobs online hard. Filling in application forms on paper is easier for some reason. One time I applied for a job online and it asked me a question that I did not have an answer for, but it was a 'mandatory' question so I couldn't continue until I'd answered it. If I wrote 'non-applicable' it said that it was not a valid answer. So I was stuck and I gave up.

Also most jobs you apply for require you to register to the company website first, and I don't like registering for everything and throwing my email address around. Being on the dole for the first 5 years of my adult life probably explains why I get about 100 junk email crap a day. And if I block them they just get replaced by another spam address and so on.

The internet is a new and useful tool. Right now humanity is fixated on figuring out how to apply this tool and it's benefits to everything else. We'll get over it, but it might take a few more decades.

Think of it like when your grandma got her first microwave and tried to use it for all sorts of things that seem odd in hindsight.

Society made these same outraged claims when the computer was invented - also video games, TV, radio, rock music, automobiles, cameras, industrialized machinery, and the printing press. 1500 years ago they thought "reading and writing" would destroy the art of the spoken word.

And yet, here we are, living longer and healthier than ever. Still using spoken language and everything.

Computers are still a shiny new toy to society. Like everything else we invent, we will eventually get used to it. Yes, it does have it's flaws - as does every new thing until they get resolved.

Even though one can make the argument that "not everyone has a computer" when it comes to things like applying for jobs or government assistance - not everyone has the ability to go to those locations in person either - because you need transportation to GO THERE, so THAT requires something even more difficult to acquire than a computer - a CAR (and all that goes with that, including the ability to drive).

If it weren't for the internet and computers, WP wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't be able to have this conversation, between people all over the planet.

Things are not as cut and dry as they look.

The internet is good for some things, but making everybody dedicate their whole lives to the internet is another thing.

Back in the 90s the internet was a luxury. Now it's an essential. It's killing high street shops and lots of other businesses and jobs. I don't like it. I'm only 30 but I feel like a grandma to all this new technology.

I'm just hoping that people will still keep up the trend of going out to the shops instead of sitting in front of a screen getting everything delivered to their front door.
Remember when videos first came out and everyone thought it would be the end of the cinemas? Well there are still cinemas about today that are being used, even though people have access to DVDs and Netflix. Why? Because people like going out and doing things physically and socially. It is what makes life exciting and busy.

I only use the internet for social media, forums, emailing, finding entertainment on YouTube and finding answers and facts on Google, and now because of this pandemic I sometimes get my groceries from Tesco online. But that's about it. And I only do my groceries online if the COVID case rates are high in my area, otherwise I still go to the store to get my groceries. I have ADHD so I find it hard to sit still and focus on a screen for too long. I need to get out, but I'm not the sort of person to just take a walk to nowhere. I like to have a purpose, like taking a walk to the shops, etc.

While crowds do my head in, I'd still rather endure crowds than sit indoors forever doing everything on a screen. No way. I like living 90s and 2000s style.

I have a side project that I am working on that would prevent digital data damage from solar storms and EM bursts. I just hope I can get it to work before an event happens and wipes out most of my digital library.

No, generally I like the internet and technology and advancements of it.

It also is very possible we may need to use our technology to reduce global warming and even undo some of the damage we have done to the planet.

If having a menial job is the only way a person can fulfill themselves, we are already doomed lol. I am thinking if robots take over a ton of the jobs and UBI is developed that would be more time for things like hobbies and such. I don't think it will end up as everyone is glued to screens with nothing else to do at least not entirely and not quite like Wall-E though that was a good movie.

Metcalfe's Law: a network's value is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. The more things that are connected to the internet, the more value there is in connecting a new thing to it. Add this to economies of scale: the more connectivity hardware and services there are, the cheaper it becomes to connect something. This means that the value-per-dollar of hooking something to the internet is nearly proportional to the cube of how many things are already hooked up.

There are so many cheap and/or free resources accessible over the net, too, that it's far easier to just put a dumb interface or app as a front end and have all the cost of delivering a service - particularly if that service is just copying around or collating, manipulating, and curating information - practically vanish. Non-internet services which try to deliver the same result are simply going to be slower, more fossilized, and more expensive by orders of magnitude.

Nearly everything we do in society involves the exchange of information in some form, or has the exchange of information wrapped around the physical result like endless miles of ribbon. The internet has basically being making that information exchange faster, more capacious, and vastly cheaper, and there simply aren't any comparative alternatives unless you need a platform which, for whatever reason, needs something the internet can't deliver or emulate reliably (or needs physically airgapped levels of security).

It's also a factor that the networking software which blew up into the internet protocol suite was freely available and already in minor use by the time it started to become easier and cheaper to mass-manufacture consumer-level internet connection hardware, and the hardware production capability started being driven in a feedback loop by the Metcalfe demand. It was basically a perfect storm of "the more internet there is, the more voracious the demand for more internet became". Even now, with (to my knowledge) a majority of the human species having fairly easy access to the internet, hardware demand isn't dropping off due to the drive for faster speeds and, as you noted, the desire to connect as many increasingly-cheaper-and-simpler widgets and doodads to the internet as possible. Which in turn drives up the value of a connection even further, and makes internet-connected anything more profitable (for the most case).

And that's why the internet is eating everything.

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