It's amazing how much I enjoy the set up but immediately disdain most of the argumentation. If the internet is made of daemons, it's absolutely not the other people, not the memes, not the tiktok, not the reward systems/stats. These things are hardly relevant, are minor factors, small hazards like someone enjoying bars or drinking; there's potential for danger, some people ensnare themselves, but the things themselves are so far from bad.

The internet is made of demons because technology is out of our control, because we can't see it work, can't make our own decisions. We're beholden to vast online sites and have few genuine & honest options available to us, few authentic means to own our own communication channels. Modern tech happens deep inside fire walls, in phones that lock us out of features if they detect we've crossed the SafetyTripwire the OS taddles on us to the apps about. We're little blips of small data in a sea of big data, & there are far off masters inside corporate towers with access to that data, and advertisers & marketters buying sniffs of that data, but we ourselves are still beholden to the powers that be to browse, to surf, to get what comes to us.

What we have is deeply inauthentic, mediated deeply by archaic esoteric & far away systems. The danger of taking it seriously is, in my view, largley made up, overblown. That we have callous shallow interactions with one another is actually not a big problem, that we rebuff & spin off one another. This intellectual sphere is a fine realm for this, is low hazard. The middle-ground between writing & speech is reasonably effective, a direct discourse, not always proper & well cut but earnest & usually imminently correctable, if not person to person in aggregate. The stakes are low & we will have countless other varying encounters to ongoingly shape ourselves & each other across. I see the challenge as building better frameworks to aggregate opinion, annotations to help us support & detract, to underline or cross-out. Truth is ongoing, realtime, and that's fine, we're hashing it out, exploring in many directions at once. The messiness of it is ok.

This is all such fun framing. I think the outline of problems, the thesis of demons is an interesting framing we could use. I very much love critiques of what's happening online, but again I don't feel sated, don't feel aligned to this set of complaints, much more than I feel aligned to most set of complaints. What we have is, to me, not that important, because there's higher potentials that happen, better democratic exchanges waiting just around the corner, that the current tech is actually good enough for, but which we all just need more time to explore & play around with & let emerge: the web has huge potential still within it, ways to let us start alloying the produced consumer sites with additional more personal & distinctly us channels. Tech that genuinely favors us, that is here to be good technology for us, not merely advanced product, slowly emerges, trickles out, and we learn: this scale, of what kind of tooluser humankind is, shapes what the internet is, and it's slow growth but it is happening, and I love it & cherish it, and it's so much more important & such vastly bigger potential than the happenstance of now, than the particulars of what mass culture has gotten itself up to & what it's made of the net at this moment.

In general, the perspective of fear that courses through this article is highly offputing to me. There are problems, but these seem like superficialities, of what culture is, not of the technics & depth of the system. I think there are far worse demons that genuinely hold us back than the petty social fears this tries to drum up. These critiques feel so modern, so trendy, vast orders of social media refusenik'ing lining up, but they lack any real appreciation or perspective on what the internet is: they are atechnical to a fault, unable to see & grasp at what really happens, unable to understand the frontiers & settlements are being put down outside the mass corporate-run social playgrounds, which are, imo, mostly harmless, rancorous & brimming with not-good, but an effective offgas for society, an earnest reflection more of us than the sites, and something we'd seek to change mostly because we are afraid of seeing ourselves, more than the sites/internet. There are far better programmes of de-infernalization we can get up to.