the internet, a dirty word

I’ve always tried to be an optimist.

This philosophy has got me into trouble more times than I can count, nevertheless I maintain it is important for your mental health to remain hopeful about the future. A practical delusion if you will.

My hope is that the real world and the digital world will form a relationship of mutual reliance as they mature together, both yielding the opportunity to exploit the other party due to the potential for mutually assured destruction. Ha! How delusional I must sound already to have dreamed up this utopia. History was never my strong suit I suppose.

There was a stunning graph published in the 2024 FBI Internet Crime report which I have posted below. It shows the number of cyber crime incidents reported to the FBI in 2024, broken down by age group. The data looks exactly how you would expect. Individuals aged 50 and older suffered more losses than the younger four age brackets combined, and I think this serves as a valuable benchmark for how “internet mature” our civilization currently is. Pick a random person over 50 and I would be surprised if they could name a single key board short cut or file format. However, in 30 years the entire working population will be digital natives; people that have never known a world without the internet.

Mark my words. We are approaching the event horizon. As a society we have about 30 years to decide what our relationship to the digital world should be, or it will decide for us. I’d like to see more people engage in positive and productive conversations about this topic, but all you seem to hear these days is sensationalism (I admit, I am guilty of this as well).

I’m no thought leader but that won’t stop me from sharing a few thoughts. You’re not going anywhere, right? My dear reader, these are the conditions I would like our society to avoid:

• An overreliance on digital technology to communicate, including the automation and substitution of basic functions such as reading, writing, and speaking – and of course, an overreliance on technology for problem solving and critical thinking
• A world where its impossible to verify the credibility/integrity of data, media and all other forms of content published online – leading to distorted world views for those that aren’t able to “filter out the garbage” they see online
• A world where every industry vertical is forced to connect to the internet, compounding supply chain risk and putting human lives at risk in the event of a cyber attack targetting verticals that deal with physical systems such as utilities and healthcare – cyber security by the way, is a problem that no entity on planet earth can buy their way out of – the most prominent figures in the cyber security industry today, some of which I have met personally, all agree that the next global scale destructive cyber event is only a matter of when, not if
• A world where the majority of online traffic is composed of bots, and yet this online activity (in a Youtube comment section for example) is still attributed to how “real” people feel about a given topic – in other words, the ability to create the appearance of a community online that believe in a certain cause, but no such community of people actually exists in the real world
• A political, economic, and psychological dependency on digital infrastructure for the functioning of society – the problem here being that digital systems rely on electricity… if we lose our ability to consistently/reliably generate electricity does that mean we are inexorably condemned to destruction? Seems like poor planning to me

Hang on a second… All of this sounds like exactly what’s going on in 2025… And I would say you’re right! If you’re interested in learning more about the degradation of integrity online, look into the “Dead Internet Theory”. It’s a surprisingly fleshed out theory; no tin foil hat required.

So how in the next 30 years can we avoid progressing any further into the digital abyss? How do we leave the world in a better state for our kids, and for the people that will be born in 2100, 2200, and so on (if we even make it that far)? Well, the first question to ask is how you define having a better life – if this means more comfortable, I put to you this is not a useful way of thinking. Instead, the way we make the world better for our kids is by making our civilization more sustainable. We can take steps towards building a more predictable, healthy, sustainable future, rather than one filled with obsequious ass wiping robots.  

A potential place to start would be to create an enterprise grade framework, similar to ISO, only this one would integrate the ethical dilemma of reliance on technology vs organic human activity. What would you call someone who wants to use the internet as a tool, but doesn’t want it to pervade every aspect of their existence? A neo-luddite? A person who has watched too many dystopian sci-fi movies?

A global movement towards physical/digital harmony would require some kind of “falling out” event which would knock the rose coloured glasses off of humanity. I fear what the consequences of this event will be.

With everything considered, I want to mention one final point which is that I think its important to remain “technology agnostic”. Thou shalt not gate keep innovation! The technology that powers the internet is remarkably cool, and we would do well not to forget that. For example, I hired a guy from Pakistan to help with the development of this website! It only took a few hours to reach someone on the other side of the planet to help with the formatting issue I was having (WordPress, why are you so hard to use?). The fact that this kind of service is democratized to anyone with an internet connection is an obvious sign of progress.

However, at what point does the internet cease to be useful in a framework for a sustainable future?

My dear reader, you get to decide where to draw the line.

FBI Internet Crime Report 2024 – page 8