What a marvellous thing the Internet is. Now we can throw out the set of encyclopaedias, talk to all our friends for free, save a fortune on subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, download (pirated) films, check our bank account and order a smashing looking shirt advertised on Facebook for just nine ninety five.
Or two for fifteen, if we are quick.
And then, when you unwrap the package – if it ever gets to you – you find that the shirt is made of polyester. See, the Internet is service, information, and increasingly, opportunity.
Opportunity for scammers, hackers, fraudsters and crooks. Many of whom don’t even exist: that’s right, the woman with the large chest who wants to be your friend either on Facebook (‘I love your posts, you seem such an interesting person’) or in your Messenger (here’s one I just got from Busty Emma: ‘Hi Dear!’). They are both bots, like the empty phone calls or the get-rich-quick adverts.
I’m reading on Facebook this morning, in a paid-for advert, the following (in Spanish): ‘Donation of 544,000 euros. Please contact me to benefit’. I’m also getting tarot-reading and offers by Pedro Sánchez, Amancio Ortega and other Spanish household names to invest in a get-rich-quick scheme. Ya think?
Even in my private paid-for email account, I get scam adverts like, f’rinstance, ‘Get your free Oraal B Series 9 from Uniited Heallthcare’ – what’s with the misspellings, is it to fool the spam-guard?
Then, beware of anything that starts with ‘Congratulations…’ Indeed, I was offered a free Trump tee-shirt yesterday, just pay for the postage and send us your details.
Besides emptying your bank account, or taking your ID or your online-presence, or pushing extremist views down your throat (with a nod to the anything-goes policies of Elon Musk and The Zuck), the Internet can provide misleading information (The old joke of – ‘All climate scientists agree on global warming, but on the other hand and to be fair, Sandra on Facebook says that it’s all bollocks’).
The Guardian notes, ‘…it is possible to conclude that Zuckerberg has always cared more about his company’s proximity to power than to its proximity to truth’. Indeed, his reversal of the fact-checkers has prompted the joke site El Mundo Today to announce that it, too, has removed its ‘protocols of verification’.
Revealingly, the word “enshittification” has just been crowned as Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows. ‘The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking’.
Luckily, there are several fact-checkers out there, Snopes, Maldita, Wikipedia (currently under threat from Musk), and of course Russia’s bogus Global Fact-Checking Network…
By the way, Invermectin, which reputedly cures both cancer and Covid if you believe the Internet, is in reality a horse laxative.
Besides misinformation, or rather disinformation (used a lot in the recent American elections, and indeed, with anything to do with Trump); there’s the danger of cyber-warfare, hijacking, bluesnarfing (you should switch your Bluetooth connector off to avoid piracy); malware – (viruses, spyware, worms and so on); denial-of-service attacks which can break down a network; phishing and password attacks.
And note that, these days, only amateur hackers bother to break into your account – the professionals are busy hacking the hospital, or the bank, or the electricity company.
Twitter has become notoriously toxic, and some people are moving to an imitator called Blue Sky. The main advantage of this platform is that it doesn’t carry far-right posts along the lines of Elon Musk and his support for the AfD, the German fascist party (‘Jawohl, Hitler was a communist’), or his recommended invasion of the UK.
These days, it must be acutely embarrassing for anyone who owns and drives a Tesla.
We have rather taken to no longer following the news – neither buying newspapers any more (El País now prints around 52,000 copies daily – as against 470,000 just twenty years ago), or even watching the Telediario (75% of Spaniards now have a streaming service – Netflix, Disney and so on). Instead, we get our news from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, where it has little or no editorial control. Don’t believe me? Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Uber have all given Trump a million dollars for his inauguration fund (sic!) and Elon Musk pumped 277 million dollars into the Donald Trump candidacy. The incoming president’s goals will become clear enough in the weeks to come.
Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be too sure of investing in Bitcoin: like fairies’ promises and happy endings, it ain’t necessarily so.
Our phones – if we are important enough – run the risk of being spied on by the Israeli Pegasus – or for that matter, being blown up by the Mossad.
The Dutch professor Geert Lovink in an essay called ‘Extinction Internet’ explains that there will come a time when everyone will get tired of being connected to the Internet, because the disadvantages of sharing opinions online will be so great – the negative aspects far outweighing the good – that people will simply turn away. The Spanish news-site Infobae ‘consults experts on the implications of a web increasingly dominated by bots and artificial content’. They find that ‘the Golden Age has passed and now most traffic is either bots (no relation) or synthetic AI-generated content’. One advantage to this is that it’s a cheap alternative to paying journalists. As Forbes notes, ‘Beyond news generation and consumption, AI is improving the business and operation of journalism, which is important given the high cost and low revenue usually associated with the news media industry. Journalism can be a resource-intensive business…’
As for the Spanish Government’s plan to punish the media who publish bulos (fake news), we can only await events (as the Partido Popular and its allies criticise the proposals).
In short, corporate greed and Internet fraud between them will one day outweigh the social advantages, certainly for the ordinary consumer. Could it be happening right now?
Are we seeing the Internet die? Not for Industry as a whole, but rather as we – humble users and customers – might understand it? Maybe soon we will have to return to Telefónica and writing postcards?
It might not be such a bad thing.
So, where am I going with all this? Oh Hell, let’s see what’s on Facebook.