Centralized internet is one giant psy op for behavioral and mind control, globalization and mass surveillance. Every person using it is compromised to some extent.
I think it's good to remind ourselves of what we're dealing with and anticipate where things are going. I regret caving in and going on social media a few years ago.
I agree the internet (as with most technologies since 1900) was a mistake. Real life relationships and community have been shattered by it and people have become dumber. Social media only made it worse. I'm not convinced a decentralized internet would be much better.
Best thing to do is stay offline unless it's for something important, not leisure. Very hard to do in today's world however.
Yes, but like other great technologies, it's a double edged sword. It made the masses dumber and more degenerate for sure but it also gave smart people access to knowledge that was reserved for the elite class in the past.
Having red a lot of the elite's writings, it's possible that they do this for eugenic and dysgenic purposes. Jonas Salk called this the survival of the wisest. Both H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell talked about how in the future people will literally be biologically engineered through diet and injections into two separate species. Huxley wrote about a future caste system in his Brave New World. Planned Parenthood director Dr. Day (in the Day tapes) gave a lecture in 1969 where he outlined the same agenda and reasoned in a similar manner.
It gives access to more knowledge, but does it actually lead to people having more knowledge? If it reduces your attention span, memory and addicts you to wasting your time then almost certainly not. You may get access to information that would have been difficult to find prior to the internet, but this is likely at the cost of remembering less, reading fewer books (or high quality information) and if you are young, getting a lower quality education. You likely also get information overload where you don't have sufficient time to process individual pieces of information, leading to less cognitive development, less recall and more stress. There's surely lots of other consequences that I've overlooked including ones yet to be discovered.
We're all products of the system to some extent and we live in it, but if one is aware of its mechanism and its purpose he can counter it and avoid the psychological traps. This requires discipline and good habits. If you decide to spend more time doom-scrolling instead of reading a book and researching it's on you. Being focused and productive takes effort and exertion - this is why the masses reject it because they are raised to be passive consumers. You have to limit your information and use fewer channels. Get rid of your smartphone and gadgets that require your constant attention. Don't watch or read mainstream outlets and stress out about stuff you have no power over. Don't get baited and sucked into every single issue that's propped up on the stage. Eat and sleep well, exercise and stay in the sun because all of this is crucial for your cognitive abilities. I think all of this falls under the "being smart" category. The system is the experiment and you have to learn the purpose behind everything you're given and understand how the engineers running it think.
Normies fail at those and they enter a feedback loop that makes them dumber and vice versa - good habits make you exponentially smarter and more capable with time. How you live determines who you are.
I totally agree. But the percentage of people with such wisdom and discipline is in the single digits at most. Even those people can't be disciplined all the time. These systems are designed to exploit human psychology. Humans on the whole aren't capable of functioning properly with these systems. It's like expecting a whale to live on land. So while we as individuals can do our best to avoid the negative consequences for ourselves and use the internet wisely, we still have to oppose its existence out of concern for our brothers and sisters.