• At a certain point, everyone’s gonna get tired of being online — or so goes the argument of one Dutch professor who thinks that eventually, the bad is going to outweigh the good and we’ll all finally get to log off.
• In a paper titled “Extinction Internet” with accompanying illustrations that would be at home in an old copy of Adbusters, University of Amsterdam professor and media theorist Geert Lovink poses a question for our age: “Can today’s internet culture withstand entropy and overcome infinite capture while facing its never-ending ending?”
• As the baby boomer aged Geerts writes in the paper, which was published by the school’s Institute of Network Cultures, his generation “found out early that the internet… is both toxic and curative.”
• While his cohort marveled in fascination at that juxtaposition, subsequent generations have become increasingly disenchanted, he argues — and, perhaps more importantly, have become more and more convinced that the internet cannot be fixed.
• “There may come a point when that’s no longer possible, after which time the adverse consequences can no longer be controlled,” Lovink said in the school’s press release. “The internet is headed for a point of no return, and Big Tech is probably already aware of this, too.”

Tagged: Futurism