
The Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem - aooeeu
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-death-of-internet-pre-mortem.html
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Vivtek
Unbelievable. I am an American sitting in Budapest working on freelance
translation jobs I get in seconds from my agencies all over Europe, who Skypes
his wife doing research in Indiana on a daily basis and who organized his
30-year class reunion last year at the last possible moment (three days in
advance) by Facebook bullying. Record turnout, too.

When I program I have up-to-the-minute solutions for nearly every technical
problem I encounter (well, at least to get me started) - I HAVE CPAN. (So I'm
old.) I read American news (from Budapest) while it's happening. I see _video_
from news events that Joe Public has recorded an hour ago, and I don't need
Walter Cronkite to discover things for me.

I haven't done an inter-library loan in decades. And I don't miss waiting two
weeks to find out whether that book will really help.

And tonight, I read that the Internet hasn't brought anything new to the
world. And that got linked on Hacker News. Post-mortem my ass. Much the same
way monks were writing post-mortems of that new-fangled Gutenberg process, I
mean, sure, you don't have to have a scribe write out a book by hand any more,
but it's not like we never had _books_ before that guy came along.

Idiot.

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falcolas
I have to disagree with the premise that we did the same things before the
internet that we do today. Was it possible to order things remotely? Yes, but
it was hard enough that most poeple wouldn't do it - they would go to their
local store and just purchase an item there.

Did the average citizen communicate freely across the oceans? Not remotely.
Mail was expensive, phones even more so. Can this continue without the
internet? No.

Was information ever disseminated as freely as it is today? No. I have volumes
of programming books which were years out of date when I purchased them to
prove this.

That said, I agree that the internet is about to get a lot more expensive,
especially as the ad bubble which supported so much of its growth falls apart.
It will be interesting, and bittersweet, to watch how the internet evolves
post-ads.

~~~
nfoz
Frankly, the internet was pretty awesome pre-ads, so I'm not too concerned. :)

~~~
sb23
It was also a lot smaller!

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ArekDymalski
There are some _tiny_ points in this article which are worth considering (the
way internet companies are financed, the possible scenarios of internet
evolution towards mainstream entertainment), but as a whole, it's quite
incoherent FUD (and a machine to promote the overall authors' gloomy
predictions about the future).

It's especially pathetic that in spite of all the arguments, casting doom on
the internet, the author declares in the middle of the post that all these
factors "won’t kill the internet". This is just ridiculous.

Just like ridiculous are the author's opinions which clearly stand against the
facts, i.e. "(...) the internet can be expected to follow the usual trajectory
of a maturing industry, becoming more expensive, less convenient, and more
tightly focused on making a quick buck with each passing year". Can anyone
provide an example of the industry for which maturing led to higher prices and
less convenience?

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Mexxer
What a bunch of nonsense!

His main argument is that the internet is not economically sustainable, but
even IF the current infrastructure would stob being supported humanity would
find ways to keep it alive because it made our lives so much easier and we
can't live without it anymore. We might switch to a decentralized
infrastructure like Maidsafe is building for example and that would eliminate
the economic issue this guy is blabbering about.

But the END of the internet? That's ridiculous!

~~~
aooeeu
> it made our lives so much easier and we can't live without it anymore

You might think differently if for example you are an OAP struggling to pay
heating bills or you live in Sao Paulo and the taps don't always work.

Agreed, some form of internet will probably survive for quite a long time, but
that is addressed in the article.

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Zigurd
At first, Amazon's data center products were huge money sinks. Startup costs.
Missed cost estimates for opex. Extraordinary events. Lack of scale. It looked
BAD.

Now AWS is profitable, and Amazon's management knows enough about how to run
it to live with thin margins that will cause their competitors lots of pain.

Stuff is getting paid for, and stuff is getting cheaper and there is plenty of
room for stuff to get even cheaper.

~~~
evanlivingston
Stuff is becoming monetarily cheaper, but I think we've also started to see
other prices we pay: social price, ecological price, etc...

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essayist
I'd agree that a sales tax on Internet-based purchases will be imposed at some
point, and that seemingly going industries can be remarkably unprofitable in
the long term [1]. Don't know about the long term viability of Internet ads
and do wish they'd die, but it'd be nice to see data.

But the rest of the article seems to be unquantified assertions -- the SST
went broke, so of course the Internet will as well; data centers cost a lot of
money to maintain. One could counter with other assertions-- Apple profits and
Amazon revenues are huge, etc. Data would be nice.

[1]E.g. airlines have, over six decades of operation, not returned the cost of
capital. [http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-
explains/2014/02/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-
explains/2014/02/economist-explains-5)

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rafaelnonato
All of the people that disagree with this article forget to disagree with its
author's prediction that once fossil fuels and other still plentyful but
possibly not forever plentyful resources (water and fertile soil, for
instance) are over, the internet is going to become a burden too heavy to
continue to be lifted in face of more pressing issues, like eating. But I do
agree that before that happens, thought I think it'll happen in our lifespans,
the internet has no reason to go away, except for all of those free subsidized
services. (Paid) email will probably still be around for a while.

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MarkMc
Wow. To claim the internet is not economically viable requires an extremely
selective view of the evidence. I had to check the date at the top of the
article to be sure it wasn't written in 1998.

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Lancey
Why bother comparing the internet to supersonic jets? SST might have been a
popular idea, but it never reached the same level of global acceptance and
support as the internet.

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Spooky23
This is just the rantings of some wacky doom and gloom person. The Internet's
demise pales to the idea that the average American will lack running water in
2065.

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ArekDymalski
"John Michael Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in
America and the author of more than thirty books on a wide range of subjects,
including peak oil and the future of industrial society. "

I wish I read that _before_ reading the article.

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aooeeu
His articles are largely based on studying history, I'm not sure what your
point is.

If he claimed to be say an Economist, then I would be more sceptical.

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EliRivers
That sidebar of books being advertised suggests a mindset heavily invested in
inevitable decline.

