Headline Dec. 11/ ''' *GOODBYE* -EVIL-TECH- GOOSEBUMPS '''

''' *GOODBYE* -EVIL-TECH- 

GOOSEBUMPS '''

*THE INTERNET IS DYING*...........

Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up Facebook on your phone and you will see your second cousin's baby pictures;

But that really isn't the internet. It's not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s and early 2000s, the product of technologies created over decades through government funding and academic research-

The network that helped undo the Microsoft's stranglehold on the tech business and gave us upstarts like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix.

Nope, the freewheeling internet has been dying a slow death -and a vote  by the  Federal Communications Commission to undo net neutrality would be the final pillow in its face.

Net neutrality is intended to provide companies that internet service from offering preferential treatment to certain content over their lines. 

The rules prevent, for instance, AT&T from charging a fee to companies that want to stream high-definition videos to people.

Because net neutrality shelters start-ups -which can't easily pay for fast-line access -from internet giants that can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against the complete corporate takeover of much of online life.

When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and and feel like something else  altogether -a network in which business deals rather than innovation, determine-

What you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.   .

If this sounds alarmist, writes Farhad Manjo. consider that the state of digital competition is already pretty sorry. And the author adds, As I have argued regularly, much of the tech industry is at-  Risk of getting swallowed by giants. 

Today's internet is lousy with *Gatekeepers, Tollbooths and Monopolists*.

Together, these giants have carved the internet into a historically profitable system of fiefs.  They have turned a network whose very promise was endless innovation into one stuck in mud, where-

Every start-up is at the tender mercy of some of the largest corporations of the planet.  

Without 'neutrality -goodbye internet says, State Of The Art. But in the meantime, I also turn too, to see How evil is the tech?......

Obviously, the smart play would be for the tech industry to get out in front and clean up its own pollution.

There are activists like Tristan Harris of Time Well Spent, who is trying to move the tech world in the right directions.

There are even some good engineering responses. I use an app called Moment to track and control my phone usage.

The big breakthrough will come when tech executives clearly acknowledge the central truth : 

Their technologies are extremely useful for the tasks and pleasures that require shallower form of consciousness, but they often crowd out and destroy the deeper forms of consciousness people need to thrive.

Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy. Online is a place for information but not reflection. 

It gives you the first stereotypical thought about a person or a situation, but its hard to carve out time and space for the third, 15th and 43rd.

Online is a place for exploration but discourages cohesion. It grabs control of your attention and scatters across a vast range of diverting things.

But we are happiest when we have brought our lives to a point, when we have focused attention and will on one thing, wholeheartedly with all our might.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that we take a break from the distractions of the world not as a rest but to give us more strength to dive back in, but as the climax of living.

''The seventh day is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, joy and reticence.,'' he said. But cutting off work and technology we enter a different state of consciousness, a different dimension of time and a different atmosphere, a ''mine where the spirit's precious metal can be found.''

Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices.

Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best things in life.

Imagine if tech pitched itself that way. That would be an amazing show of realism and, especially, humility, which these days is the ultimate and most disruptive technology.

Jumping the gun or No,.....when, after all, people have been predicting the end of the internet for years.

But look, you might say : Despite the hand-wringing the internet has kept on trucking. Start-ups are still getting funded and going public. Crazy new things still sometimes get invented and defy all expectations.

Bitcoin, which is as Wild West as they come, just hit $10,000 on some exchanges.

Well, O.K. But a vibrant network doesn't die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it goes weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal.

It's not normal. It wasn't always this way. The  internet doesn't have to be a corporate playground. That's just the path we've taken.

With respectful dedication to the Society, Teach Giants,  Leaders, Parents, Scientists, Inventors, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all *register* on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Wild Students World '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless