I'm not saying there wasn't useful information on the internet that you could learn from. There is now but the internet is making people dumber anyway. You could have learned lock picking, hacking and other things without the internet - there are books on these subjects. You may say you wouldn't have because you would never have become interested in those things in the first place. But then you would have pursued other things with your time, made better real life relationships and learned other things, perhaps things that would have been more useful in an internet-free world than the things you learnt are in the world of the internet. Of course you might also have wasted your time on TV and movies, but that's just showing those were a bad idea as well as the internet.
Ok I get what you are saying, that smartness exists (or doesn't) before logging on, and that is the determining factor of what one would do with their time, whether to learn or vegetate - and this applies to both online and offline.
I'm not saying there wasn't useful information on the internet that you could learn from. There is now but the internet is making people dumber anyway. You could have learned lock picking, hacking and other things without the internet - there are books on these subjects. You may say you wouldn't have because you would never have become interested in those things in the first place. But then you would have pursued other things with your time, made better real life relationships and learned other things, perhaps things that would have been more useful in an internet-free world than the things you learnt are in the world of the internet. Of course you might also have wasted your time on TV and movies, but that's just showing those were a bad idea as well as the internet.
Ok I get what you are saying, that smartness exists (or doesn't) before logging on, and that is the determining factor of what one would do with their time, whether to learn or vegetate - and this applies to both online and offline.