I think it will become easier and easier to generate content tailored to individuals and all that noise will make it harder for human created content to pierce through, until it becomes too impractical to create and distribute content. Then it will take some kind of quiet revolution where everyone starts rejecting all forms of technology as overstimulating, and move towards simple communication devices to try and connect with each other.
It will get increasingly locked down due to authoritarianism and corporate capture. Small pockets like the Fediverse persist, but it becomes harder and harder to use as regulators impose laws on more technology.
The internet is still relatively new. The generations that don’t understand it still govern.
I think the millennials will be its last hope, because they remember the world without it, were young enough to understand it when it became popular and aren’t yet old enough to have forgotten how much more fun it used to be.
If that nostalgia finds its way into meaningful regulations, it’d be nice.
If you think the human race as a collective organism, the internet is the nervous system. Suddenly we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we feel pain through it, we form collective thoughts and organize actions.
We have collective intrusive thoughts and impulses, we store our memories there and we train it to anticipate and predict using prior knowledge and reasoning, as we do.
We need to take care of it and feed it correct information or it’ll become erratic and stagnant.
I predict it’ll be splintered into pieces and from them something new will emerge.
Tech in general is peaking in performance and and so it must differentiate in features to be competitive
Manipulation
For general consumers? Probably complete industry collapse and regression. Specialized industries and national security use will continue to develop, but broad market access is going to likely stagnate for a decade at least if not more.
It will be boring eventually like a toy that you’ve played with too much for most people.
Either we quickly find a way to undo the damage government regulation has done to it in the last ~10 years, or we lose all the good it could do for society forever because the coming generations won’t know what they’re missing. :(
The next tech industry crash will probably take out all the big platforms because they never really figured out how to make money, and self-hosting will take over as Basic Hardware capabilities have been improving all the while, the software to host servers and get through NAT jail have improved, and Regulatory crap like porn bands and age verification have given a decisive Edge to platforms too small to be effectively censored passed a whack-a-mole level short of extreme censorship which even then can be bypassed with wireless or wired Mesh networking.
Think about it, feature wise what does reddit do that Lemmy or piefed can’t? Plex is the best way to stream already. Hosting a website is also trivial now when it used to be a big deal that Apache web server existed in the first place.
It has become too accessible and thus will be censored and restricted to the point of ceasing to be useful in the next 5-10 years.
seems like the current trend is consolidation - it will be more expensive and less accessible to own your own computer or run your own servers, programs will continue to bloat and require more expensive hardware (see LLMs for example), and this will all lead to greater consolidation under fewer and fewer entities
It will reach a point where storage capability is so massive and yet physically very small we will all be carrying a copy of the ‘internet’ around with us and it will constantly be synching across all devices.
the ruling meta-regime is in the process of enforcing the non-ruling-classes into an inescapable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon & enforcing learned-helplessness on all they can.
Feudalism, unbreakable.
ONLY right-technology, right-law, right-regulation, etc, CAN make human-lives be worth-living in a world where technology distorts so potently as ours now does.
Unless you/someone finds the one who can coerce a meaningful portion of our world to do the right-action/right-speech/right-law/right-technology thing, all the way through,* then … feudalism’s our epitaph.
Social-pressure’s incapable of coercing such regimes, so is “political-will”/whim.
East-Germany, but “perfect”, is our fate, unless someone breaks the undertow/trend, soon.
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When brain-computer interfaces are perfected our minds will be networked with computers and each other. The concept of privacy will seem very quaint to or children’s children.
Resistance is futile.
