Divergent Culture As A By-Product Of Insular Communities

I have been writing a great deal lately of a hypothetical alternative to the international network - a series of, effectively, federated webrings to be referred to hereafter as "The Intranet".

Connections would be by choice, with the will of the userbase dictating when to federate and when to defederate - with the intent of creating a completely divergent society online from the one we inhabit now.

I believe this will be a necessity - a digital matter of life and death - moving forward, lest every "last bastion" fall to the rots of the modern age - primarily websites being wielded by people with vested interests for the personal gain of corporations and politicians.

One biting question remains for many, I would assume - won't it get boring?

Compared to a 24/7 stream of algorithmically fed slop and softcore pornography - no shit.

Especially at the start, there wouldn't be too many people. A glorified chatroom with more steps - but the intent is not to host this Intranet for people who still use the internet - the intent is to create disconnected communities for the Intranet to connect.

Taking this a step further - I would have to concede my original idea of all connections being wired, in favor of some other system which would allow for wireless connections (but only within America) - it could allow for individual citizens who wish to disconnect entirely to do so.

Let's look at what the word "divergent" means. Imagine the long reaching implications of a set of parallel lines if you will. They run straight next to each other, forever.

Now take one line and tilt it away, just a smidgeon.

Now, you walk along that slightly tilted line for a week straight - and it's a little farther away from the line that never moved.

A month later even further.

A few years? You can't even see the other line.

What I'm trying to say here is that if everyone on the Intranet was dedicated to "the bit" - that is to say the shunning of all technology past 2007, the culture that arises would be one that is completely removed from this culture of bloat and excess that we live in today.

It would be a place where, slowly but surely, everyone could detox from the rots imposed upon us - dopamine levels would return to normal, brain chemistry would return to normal, addictions could be stomped, screentime would naturally fall - but the screentime that didn't would be better spent.

Think about it, really think about what the average computer was like when we were all kids - it sucked. Hardly any memory, slow when starting up - couldn't run Runescape and Windows Media Player at the same time without freezing, etc.

These hardware limitations would force people to finish one candy bar before they started the next for the most part - but along with that, I'm certain that they would be more inclined to be more social - as opposed to just sitting and watching youtube videos for hours and hours on end.

Making it more difficult to use the computer, imposing some kind of bandwith restriction or excessive hardware limitations - limitations that would effectively make it impossible to operate on 90% of the existing internet - this would destroy (within the insular community) most of the retention based attention span problems we see exhibited in society today.

I'm sort of all over the place here, I'm hungover as a surgeon right now - but I hope that my point is getting across well enough.

The Intranet of the future will look nothing like the internet of today, and hopefully it will feel a bit more like the internet of yesteryear.