Well... needing it to progress and the thing being mostly misused are two different things.

It's like saying "can you imagine humanity progressing without fire"... when actually most people are runnign around burning everything down.

i see why politics has been banned here.

The fact remains that humanity can't progress without fire.

In this case they can only burn their own stuff down and not mine. Mine is firewalled.
Regardless of how they misuse fire, I'll keep my fire and continue putting it to what I believe is good use.

I want fire to be there, but that doesn't matter, because it's not going away. The best I can do is use it productively and teach my skills to those who want to learn them.

And ignore those who don't. I'm not one to stop people acting in ways I'm tempted to judge as stupid.


I have a love-hate relationship with smartphones.

Typongnod mot exsctly easu on those.
Translation from mobile English to desktop English: Typing is not exactly easy on those.

I used to despise using my phone, because it was slow, unresponsive, out of storage space, needed charging all the time and many apps didn't work on it anymore - not due to the phone itself, but the app developers' policy to constantly release updates and the newer versions not supporting the older Android versions. I had the impression it was getting slower and slower, as if being intentionally throttled to encourage me to buy a new model.
Then I replaced it with a more recent model and my experience improved greatly.

I have a smartphone for practical reasons - it makes life easier and more efficient - but also because the way modern society is organized forces me to. I need a smartphone for banking, access to medical care, ticket purchases etc. - applications that are not inherently mobile. And I'm not happy about that. I miss the good old times when you could do everything on your desktop PC.

Now many services are discontinuing support for desktop or web and switching to mobile only.
You want to open a bank account? You need to get a relatively new smartphone model, install their bloated app (and update it almost every day or it will stop working) and fill out the application form on that fiddly little thing, painstakingly typing in your personal details 10 times before you get them right (because you can't copy and paste or let them autofill) and you can't search on the page for the button or menu option you want, because there is no page. If you accidentally delete a piece of text, you can't undo it, because there is no undo and redo. Then you have to take an inevitably wonky and blurry photo of your ID with your smartphone camera for KYC (you can't use a high-quality scan from your HDD or cloud storage that you took a couple of years ago and thought would serve you for a decade) and a selfie.

Why do they think giving people the ability to open a bank account while riding a train or climbing a mountain is more important than giving them the ability to open a bank account comfortably from their home? (not that I support banking, but it's still part of our lives; you can replace it with other services - insurance, food ordering etc. - if banking is history to you).

It seems there is an app for everything these days. You almost can't fart without installing a farting app, which obligatorily takes at least 200 MB of storage and is updated daily. Then a few months later you have to buy a new phone before you can fart again, will all the new sensors that the developers believe are now required for a good, modern farting experience.

That said, I'm glad I don't have to carry a ton of physical maps with me everywhere I go, I don't have to wait in line to buy a bus ticket, I can tell a friend I'm going to be late without them having to wonder what's going on etc. I don't need to carry a guitar tuner around, because my phone has one. My phone can help me translate to/from the local language while abroad. I can easily ID the plant I come across in the wild, I can read up on the plant that attracts my attention at the garden center before I decide to buy it etc.

These are mobile uses and that's what smartphones excel at. For non-mobile uses, I'll take the PC any day if that's an option, which it increasingly more rarely is.

But as a freedom advocate I'll let the market decide, while choosing and promoting decentralized solutions that give people more choice and not less.

About smartphones, my neural makeup is just not able to handle such a continuous stream of monstrous magnitude. I am some kind of type 1 autist, but a bit unique. It's partly why I have leaned to a relatively primitivist way of life. It's really difficult because I really feel whole when I live without screens, but I cannot leave them behind (In fact after becoming a father my life has been pushed more and more into mainstream ways). My ordeal, my journey.

Leaving me aside, we all are genetically geared towards certain ways of being and the crazy linear pace of contemporary technology does not suit any Homo sapiens sapiens (or any organic, grounded earth being for that matter). Besides, nothing ascends forever, there is a peak and a fall approaching. Watching this movie is intriguing.

I think the internet cannot be evaluated independent from the entire sphere of contemporary humanity. We are all going through this experience and we just try to make the best of it. I appreciate the internet, I use it a lot for gaining knowledge. But as I read recently in am article, the internet is good for horizontal knowledge, but oftentimes insufficient to deepen in or master a subject. I personally experience this. It just needs to be balanced and supplemented with other channels for knowledge. Unfortunately humanity is fixated on expanding the virtual world and demolishing our ancient legacies.