The internet cannot save us

... or so say the fancy folks over at Foreign Policy magazine:

Two decades in, the Internet has neither brought down dictators nor eliminated borders. It has certainly not ushered in a post-political age of rational and data-driven policymaking. It has sped up and amplified many existing forces atwork in the world, often making politics more combustible and unpredictable. Increasingly, the Internet looks like a hypercharged version of the real world, with all of its promise and perils, while the cyber utopia that the early Web enthusiasts predicted seems ever more illusory.

I'm no hard-nosed cynic, but in many of the academic circles I've run in, I'm the Debbie Downer of the group. People seem to forget that the internet itself is neutral -- information, networks, etc. -- and that these networks and this information has generally been accessible in the past for those who were interested in pursuing them.

On grey days like today, I sometimes think of this digital life we subscribe to as helping out a self-sustaining entity -- like the machines in the Terminator movies, or how academia cranks out academics in order to make more academics. The youth we looked at in our studies seem to engage with the internet for its own sake. All the calendar management and information gathering and networking is in service to.... what? A higher purpose? More happiness? Or participating in a grinding of the machine's gears?

At the base of it all, the internet is still driven by people -- people with egos, agendas, hopes, fears, mortgage payments, broken hearts, silly hobbies.