rf/_input/posts/slow-down.md

title	published
Slow Down	2019-12-12

my smile is stuck

...and its been buffering for thirty seconds now, what for? the average size of a webpage is bordering on two point five megabytes, for comparison, thats like fifteen times the size of the entirety of hamlet for each web page you load.

wanna look at an item on amazon? thats a whole fuarkload of hamlets your yeeting through the internet pipes.

looking at a funny cat video you want to send to a friend? sending the imgur page instead of the raw video is a nutter butter amount of hamlets being sent along with it.

netflix is hamlet out the wazoo, spotify is hamlets for days.

your website slash phone app slash operating system slash laptop slash phone slash router are silently and without your consent sending absolute metric shit tonnes of hamlet to its makers all day every day.

get to the point

back in the day, people had to work around the limits of their technology. hard limits, and either you came up with neat, code wizard solutions, or you changed your specification to something you could implement, and that was it

you know what was far less of a useful solution? saying

oh just get a better computer lol

you know what was an ever shittier solution than that?

oh just get faster internet lol

yet somehow we're living in a time where my grandparents are caring about their downlink, where my tech illiterate brother needs an i5 for some godforsaken reason.

who do i blame? as usual its those pesky gamers, but i also blame the entire corporate tech sphere

give us a solution then

heres a hot take, but something i think could be incredible for everyone except business (so really everyone who matters) (its also not my idea i first got it from here who says it in a much better and less ranty way than i spoilers in the title)

we need a speed limit on the internet. a nice slow one. (we also need computer software that isnt shit)

imagine a world where download speed was throttled, where we couldnt just throw more electricity and more computing power at a problem and call it a day.

imagine a world where we actually had to gasp think about our internet usage in the same way we might think about our water usage

you just wanna ruin everyones fun, you can take my 4k cat videos from my cold dead spider limbs human hands

but i dont want to steal that from you, just think of it this way. how many copies of hamlet could you save if you only downloaded the video once, and then saved it?

and does it really matter if it takes an hour to download that video rather than a second? will you enjoy it any less?

if you would enjoy it less, was it really worth watching in the first place? or was it simply a small hit of dopamine to keep you going, like a hamster wheel of memetic hazards.

fast internet has made us sloppy its made us arrogant and its made us into what we in the business like to call fuarken shitcunts

and its only going to get worse, the business tech sphere basically controls the entire energy use of our planet by dictating how fast a computer and how speedy a connection we need to uhhhhh

send messages that are a lot smaller than a copy of hamlet to each other.

yeah let that sink in for a second.

fin

if we want to make the planet a better place, make computing easier for everyone to get into regardless of whether or not they have the latest hardware and live in part of the world where they can get a decent internet connection, then we should put a speed limit on the internet.

we could all develop better, more patient habits in using technology, and everyone and everything would be better off for it.

(in addition we should all switch to a global mesh network of self made nodes but thats a rant for another time)

:wq