Before the open web was an slop machine, it was a lying machine.

Anyone can post anything they want, and it can be read anywhere in the world, and that has made the Internet the most powerful propaganda weapon, the biggest advertising tool, the greatest source of lies and misinformation, the greatest tool for scammers and thieves, and the single greatest danger to the mental and physical health of the public, in all of history.

A lie can run around the world before the truth has its boots on, as the saying goes. Just to give one of a million examples, twenty people were murdered by angry mobs in India after a fake video about Pakistanis kidnapping children off the street went viral. It didn’t matter how fake the video was, or how hard Indian authorities worked to convince WhatsApp users there was no epidemic of foreigners kidnapping Indian children.

The problem is that the internet exists, and that lies and misinformation can be posted on it at all. Because people will be killed - have been killed, over and over and over again - before the authorities can catch and stop the lie that’s motivating the murder. And millions of people will see the lie and not see, or not believe, the correction - how many people in the United States today still believe Haitian migrants in Springfield were stealing and eating people’s pets?

The single greatest impact on world politics the Internet has had so far was the so-called Arab Spring - a so-called crowdsourced, bottom up, revolutionary movement across Africa and the Middle East. And every country that experienced an Arab Spring is worse off today. The “first online revolution” baited out and killed hundreds of thousands of the most passionate young revolutionaries while either entrenching dictatorships or replacing them with worse ones.

And the Arab Spring couldn’t have happened without the free and open Internet.

The information revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

And if that same freedom, to use the internet however you want, is what’s going to kill the internet by unleashing swarms of AI bots that force the Internet’s free protocols to change or die, good. Replace it with something that humanity can use responsibly, because we sure as hell can’t use the current one right.