Throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, I sincerely believed internet tech would make people smarter. Moreover, I sincerely believed people would want to get smarter so as to do more, not only with technology but in general. Unfortunately, the trend I see now is companies seeking to make tasks simpler so a lack of intelligence doesn’t prevent commerce.🙄
Increasingly, I see the seemingly desired outcome to be akin to the people in Wall-E or The Matrix — a civilization where people only ever pursue easily accessed pleasure, resulting in people either endlessly consuming, to the point that they cannot stand and never even experience physical reality at all, instead being completely engrossed in an illusion rather than experiencing physics. I share the desire to be disconnected from the drawbacks of physics and entropy and the wear and tear of existence, but I think that life on Earth is defined by the ability to face and overcome obstacles. The notion that simply existing in a simulation is extremely misguided. As such, simply living in a virtual world is, to me, fucking stupid.
Moreover, that a few rich dorks seem to want to propagate the idea that life should go virtual simply reinforces the notion that they don’t have much to offer, and the vision they see is one they derived from imho taking video games wayyyyyy too seriously. Rather than shrinking a world of possibilities enough to fit it into a screen, how about we experience more of the world around us?