Is the Internet a Doomed Social Experiment?

I came across an interesting article by Annalee Newitz, author of a new book,  Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. She has an interesting premise about the future of the internet, based on research about the history of cities going back about 9,000 years.

In the Neolithic era, people had already started living in large cities. Then the cities disappeared and wouldn't return for several thousand years. The reason appears to be social factors, not environmental.

Let’s unpack what Kuijt is saying here. First, he notes that “more powerful lineages,” or elites, had emerged in these cities — these would have been community leaders who helped organize everything from feasts to harvests. At the same time, social cohesion was suffering due to the population explosion, which led to increased segmentation (literally, in the case of architecture) and the usual communication mishaps that occur in large groups. With all these difficulties came the loss of public events that could include everyone in the community. 

It’s the end of “communal rituals,” writes Kuijt, that sounded the death knell. As society fractured, people grew disenchanted with the “powerful lineages” who led the old rituals. Without faith in leadership and each other, urbanites saw no reason to say. Ultimately this was a failure of public institutions.

So what does this have to do with modern society and the internet?

Consider that this moment might be equivalent to the late Neolithic in terms of communications technologies. Humans spent millennia using paintings and writing to pass their thoughts along to people they would never meet. Now, in the past two centuries, we’re seeing the very beginning of where new tools like the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio will lead us. 

We’re building technologies that are supposed foster bigger, more complex communities, but instead they are leading us into mistrust, privacy invasion, fragmentation, and loss of shared public rituals. If the failed Neolithic experiment tells us anything, it’s that humanity has been here before. Sometimes we build amazing places, only to abandon them. That’s why I won’t be surprised if the internet is dead in less than a century. After all, one of the most popular topics of conversation online is how to stop being online.

I have been wondering the same thing. If we don't get a handle on how to behave in a socially responsible way online and clean up the disinformation that is flooding our screens, we may see a social collapse that's directly caused by our misuse of modern communication technologies. 

Newitz publishes a more-or-less weekly newsletter which you can subscribe to here. I highly recommend it.