Post-Internet

version

Well-known member
Patrick McCarthy describes HCE's wife ALP as "the river-woman whose presence is implied in the "riverrun" with which Finnegans Wake opens and whose monologue closes the book. For over six hundred pages, Joyce presents Anna Livia to us almost exclusively through other characters, much as in Ulysses we hear what Molly Bloom has to say about herself only in the last chapter." The most extensive discussion of ALP comes in chapter I.8, in which hundreds of names of rivers are woven into the tale of ALP's life, as told by two gossiping washerwomen. Similarly hundreds of city names are woven into "Haveth Childers Everywhere", the corresponding passage at the end of III.3 which focuses on HCE. As a result, it is generally contended that HCE personifies the Viking-founded city of Dublin, and his wife ALP personifies the river Liffey, on whose banks the city was built.
 

version

Well-known member
If the internet were to go down for an extended period and we had to do without it, what have we learned from it that we could use? I don't mean things we've learned via the internet, I mean what has the structure itself taught us? What can we take from it and apply to the offline world?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
If the internet were to go down for an extended period and we had to do without it, what have we learned from it that we could use? I don't mean things we've learned via the internet, I mean what has the structure itself taught us? What can we take from it and apply to the offline world?
Maybe something to do with decentralized organization. Perhaps you would still be on the tailend/offramp of the highway-of-systematized-narcissism, and still be in a sort of hypersocial state compared to the offline/pre-internet precedent.

Then again, maybe too many of will prove to suffer from a sort of atrophy of offline socializing muscles, although perhaps that primary pertains to more to people who had less offline time in their adolescence.

I'd imagine that among the social-media-savvy, perhaps some kind of offline-recoil-failsafe network could emerge whereby nuanced linguistic/gestural systems could become the primary means of communication. A bit sci-fi, but not outside the realm of possibilities, as far as I'm concerned. It would be a culture of memes and digital lingo transduced/translated into a more oral and bodily language/culture.

But if you're asking about what practical residual impacts would the internet prove to make on our social ontologies, perhaps the decentralized organization point would be the center point.

People raised in/on the internet seem to have more of a peer-to-peer sensibility, basing their judgements more and more on the feedback from average users/customers rather than on the feedback from specialized/expert sources. That would alter the manner in which information-flows are circulated, render it more horizontal, rather than vertical/heirarchical.

Or perhaps hierarchies may emerge in other dimensions/qualities - not sure.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Immediacy is the abyss in many ways.

Post internet will be Ancestry.com in the London Shard. Descendants are 'invited' in to view the browsing history of their ancestors. Then a premium deletion service is offered and Ancestry uses those funds to buy the copyright of every genome of every living and extinct species of life form that's ever existed.

Ancestry and China become locked in a bio-war. Mutations engineered through gene-editing are introduced to bypass genome copyrights, but the mutations prove ultra adaptable and take over. The end.
 

Leo

Well-known member
a post-internet world means no more dissensus or buying books on amazon, though. "internet" is more than yr smartphone.
 

version

Well-known member
a post-internet world means no more dissensus or buying books on amazon, though. "internet" is more than yr smartphone.
I don't think we're under any illusions about that. We'd also lose access to a lot of information and have to go back to relying on local newspapers, word of mouth, TV and radio. A lot of people would end up unemployed too.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
The influencer-instinct would take the histrionics to the roads, nomadic influencers manually crafting the grapevine that the revelational and oft-blasphemed TikTok so generously bestowed upon them, automatically, before we forsook it and the cloud diffused, taking our connections away with it.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Hour Zero has been protracted unto purgatorial oblivion, once the Clock of Progress stopped ticking, dropping us all into the "present" we so blindly lusted after, punishing us for our infidelity to the Future.
 

Leo

Well-known member
is this a thing yet?
can't wait tbh

why would this happen?

sorry to pee in the pool but hard to imagine it would be a positive, it's not like the world would then revert back to the imagined idyllic, more peaceful, simply days when (in theory) life was good and we all got along. people wouldn't suddenly forget what internet life was like, they'd rebel against losing all the advantages it brought.

it also smells slightly of MAGA.
 

sufi

lala
why would this happen?

sorry to pee in the pool but hard to imagine it would be a positive, it's not like the world would then revert back to the imagined idyllic, more peaceful, simply days when (in theory) life was good and we all got along. people wouldn't suddenly forget what internet life was like, they'd rebel against losing all the advantages it brought.

it also smells slightly of MAGA.
Yeah i was thinking about this too, We are totally reliant on this thing,
many countries just pull the plug when the going gets tough https://netblocks.org/tag/keepiton
 

Leo

Well-known member
I'd never be able to replicate the scope of conversations had here IRL, my pool of acquaintances is far too limited (especially with corona).
 
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