Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2021-03-03T15:50:15Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com March 3. http://ranprieur.com/#9bf4f7be1366369f6663c2e9cd4b38188322c5c5 2021-03-03T15:50:15Z March 3. One more comment on the doomed internet. I'm starting to think that the world of screens is a fad.

I didn't even see a screen until I was three years old. It was a ten inch black and white, and my parents had to limit my hours to keep me from watching all the time, even though there were only four channels. Fifty years later, we have a 40 inch HDTV with Netflix, Hulu, Sling and Prime, and watching it is almost a chore. I mean, I'm glad I saw Queen's Gambit, but I watched it because it was good for me, not because I was excited about it.

I remember when digital watches seemed magical, and when the Atari 2600 was an eternal cure for boredom. Now video games have a million times the pixels and I don't even play them. Billions of dollars are being poured into virtual reality, but the leap from Red Dead Redemption 2 to a full-on Star Trek holodeck, is less than the leap from Mattel electronic football to RDR2, and that's already not enough.

Now my favorite thing to do is walk around looking at tree branches. I found out that tree branches are beautiful from LSD, which is why I think the next frontier of human experience is not VR or space travel, but brain hacking that will make LSD look medieval. Instead of going to strange new worlds, or creating them digitally, we'll discover the strangeness of where we already are.

]]> March 1. http://ranprieur.com/#21505d6de9b87e2b3c743aef54e9c33b4889fa83 2021-03-01T13:30:03Z March 1. Continuing on the subject of technological exhaustion, a reader sends this link, Gopher, Gemini and The Smol Internet, about some really old internet platforms that still work. From the same blogger, The 100 Year Computer is about what it would take, in society and technology, to buy a computer that's still useful in 100 years. I love this paragraph:

There are two reasons to replace a computer. One is an artificially amplified desire for something exciting, new and shiny. The other is the failure of software to run in under 8Gb of RAM. We call this replacement an 'upgrade', when what's really happening is a celebration of sustainability failure.

Related, a Hacker News thread from 2017: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983.

I think it's obvious that information technology can't keep going on this path. Not only is the subjective experience of the internet getting worse, it keeps getting worse faster. But I can't see any smooth way to get off the treadmill. My best guess is, the failure of technology to serve human needs, will lead to breakdowns in mental health, which will cause societal breakdowns, which will cause more frequent failures in the infrastructure necessary for a high-tech society.

Or it could be much more sudden, if we get a Giant Solar Flare.

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