No.
I thought about making this just a one-word essay, but do you know how hard it is for a writer to write just one word?
While I can certainly acknowledge that not every single aspect of the internet is totally evil, I have to say, stepping back and looking at it with clear eyes, the overwhelming majority of the internet is, at best, pointless, and at worst, pretty fucking evil.
The never-ending cycle of beefing-up-security and then having that be hacked, then beefing up security again, only to see that layer get hacked seems to be never-ending. I want my thieves to be a little more old-school. They should have to have a detailed plan. They should have to wear black ski masks. They should at least have to be in the same country as their targets. This whole cycle feels like some sadistic game perpetrated by the soulless tech billionaire lunatics who currently run the world.
Secondly, we’ve put some pretty important information on the net. People now routinely use digital technology for medicine and finances. Both of these aspects of life are simply far too important to share with twelve-year-old Bulgarian hackers. Wasting time at work watching YouTube videos of cats and crocodiles bonding is probably fake, but largely harmless. Losing your life savings because your bank encourages you to go online and hasn’t kept up with the latest “security” update is the opposite.
Third, lacking any actual large-scale privacy laws, the entire digital ecosystem has been leaning toward con-artistry for the last decade. AI fake videos giving AI fake advice, Elon Musk and his ilk’s social engineering, vast troves of email scammery, identity theft. Do I really need to continue?
Being old enough to remember the pre-internet world, I can definitively say that life was better. People talked and interacted more (texting is not an adequate substitute), it didn’t feel like the whole world was mapped, giving humans a sense of exploration, something we need. Now I guess space really IS the final frontier, and guess who’s leading the charge for sending humans into space? Hint, it’s not Magellan.