It can be a bit of both. Can’t speak to the UK but in Japan you’re constantly asked to become a prepper because we don’t need no stinking strait of Hormuz to threaten us, the earth we live on is doing that all by itself.
Japan is in a bit of a pickle because it relies on the US for defense to quite a high degree. Nobody here thinks the orange’s adventure in Persia is a good idea. But since he reacts like a toddler nobody really dares speak out in public. So the only thing the government can do is ask companies to find ways around the closed off strait. And then the PHP thing happened. And a big data breach. Our ongoing cost of living crisis is amplified by a weak currency. The crises are piling up over here as well. Naturally, the government issues guidance. They can’t do much else.
There have been weird developments in IT thanks to so-called AI. Along with a limited number of advantages at current, it presents a major threat. It provides a Google translate tool for normal speak to code with a reliability of Google translate from 15 years ago. The North Koreans who hacked Sony had to know what they’re doing. We’re now in a place where you can just ask your tailored LLM agent to hack a company and you don’t have to know how to do that. The agent will come up with ways nobody thought of. Offence in IT tends to be faster than defence. So the heightened threat level is not a farce. The impotent government response can be though.
These are some more general thoughts on the subject:
I’m going to take issue with any statement that puts Facebook. And “just fine” in the same sentence. A terrible company run by largely terrible people.
The good old days of fan forums and communities that grew around shared interests in the dial-up age had a vital advantage: small user numbers and low cost. Mostly text based packets were cheap to send and receive. At very low speeds. It was inevitable that standards would rise, and with it, costs. And if money becomes a factor, whoever has or makes it rules. An inevitable and irreversible development if you ask me.
And if it’s the niche community nostalgia that hits you, you can still have that. It’s probably on a small fediverse server you’ll also need to support financially or on a Discord server. The internet people loved largely survived if you knew where to look and all the other stuff just grew around it. And only occasionally over it. No service is eternal. There will be a time when Insta will be a faint memory. Or reddit. Or Wikipedia.
The early internet also had a terrible impact on what it became much later. People put their content out for free/as supported, especially media offerings and the news, and instilled in consumers the expectation that one shouldn’t have to pay for shit online. This was the first domino falling in local newspaper death and an increased disillusionment with politics.
Another problem of the early internet is that it was built by mostly idealists who created the perception that connecting the world would democratise knowledge and participation and it would be a force for good. This hype carried us through its expansion and people saw the negative sides far too late if you ask me. The threat of surveillance was waved mostly away. That hype is not so dissimilar to what we are seeing with so-called AI these days.
Organised social media created a bias that the loudest voices there were a majority. The flood of bots may actually finally cure us of that perception. I call it organised because the early chat rooms around Star Wars or X-Files or something like that were a form of social media before we had a name for it.
You haven’t missed anything from the early internet. Unless you want people fighting over landline phone connections and waiting hours for a solitary picture of some boobs to download. The internet isn’t good or bad, it’s a tool and people use it for good or evil. Always have (remember the anarchist cookbook?), always will do.