The Internet made Everyone Loud

But only a few, a handful, are wiser to take it to their advantage

July 20, every year, is a normal day to everyone, but to the space explorers, it represents a significant milestone; two astronauts landed their feet on the moon surface for the first time in the human history. This rare feat, hatched out and boldly birth out, was an unfathomable stretch of imagination given the uncertainty, extreme elements, and limited technological capabilities at that time but it symbolised what you, when the intent and desire is there, can conceive and actualize it.

Since then, technological mutations with much bigger capabilities, speedier, meticulously effective have vigorously swelled and sipped into everyday way of living. And today, the hand-held devices you use everyday for normal needs is far more superior to the computing codes that the Appolo-era astronauts used to land in the moon in 1969. With 1 MHz clock speed, 2 KB RAM, 36 KB ROM, 40,000 operations per second, this internet machinery is comparably slower, inefficient by today’s standards but it much powerfully accomplished the mission.

Despite the current plenteous raw computing power—6-core CPU (~3.46 GHz, 6–8 GB RAM, 128 GB–1 TB storage, billions of operations per second—in case of the basest iPhone—you've perhaps not yet gotten closer to third fraction of what the duo managed under the now defunct, outdated, slower computer architecture or for the benefit of doubt, you haven't figured out what you can do with it.

The digital tools—spaning from social media to productivity to marketing and now the current breakthrough (AI)—you've access to close to zero rate give you more power, more leverage than you can imagine. You can author the future you want. You can reach out whoever you want. A newsletter. A video. A picture. With just a word, your presence on the internet looks like a distant satellite powering the whole world. Given the magical tools at our disposal, you can never fall short of what you desire to be.

But your crime is to let this digital power slip through your hands without turning it into something worth remembering and outlasting you. While others pull the trigger of hate, trolls, misinformation, you stand grounded in your mission, however small it is, to build, learn, inspire, connect, educate.

Growing up in the analogue era, the early 2000s especially, before the smartphone age, we had almost no contact with the outside. No smartphones. No Facebook. No TikTok. Just an old school Greatwall black and white television with a protruding toolbox of visible wires, which to me, was a wonder to us and a luxury at the same time. Countable families, if privileged enough, own it. And if any contact with strangers was there, our mothers—the first keepers of knowledge and guardians of the spoken word—would be the first to censor that exposure.

Today, you’re more connected than any other generation. Lucky enough with abundant resources but with scarce desire to make things better. A simple device at the palm of your hand makes you more powerful than a 19th century King with a vast swathes of lands and kingdom.

Regardless of all the digital tools we're hooked to, we don't connect to each other much often like we used to when the Internet was still new to us. It's fading. We tear each other apart like it's the only thing we know. Every online interaction blast us and pulls our minds in hundred directions we can't seem to return from. We sift through posts, handpicked those that sit with us well from a place of confirmation bias and dismiss those we disagree with like a detached sympathy accorded to a stranger's tragedy.

In conventional times, we would get lost in the pages of books, trying to siphon bits of hidden, fragmented information, cracking unrelated dots to hatch out something that's well-thought. And we would put in long hours in the quietude of libraries, searching for ancient treasures of artifacts, absorbing hard-mined information. Alone, the arduous journey of burying ourselves in the libraries, sieving, sitting down long hours was savoury. But nowadays, internet nerds lose even the patience of waiting a website to load. The attention span keeps shrinking and with every generation, with every tool of invention, with every misinformation, we stretch ourselves into disoriented selves.

We've descended to nothing but mobs of emotional reactors—swirling around outrage, hate raids, cancel campaigns, defamation, trolling, misinformation, conspiracy faster than sense can catch up. You are not just individually dumb but we're collectively dumb too. It's difficult to be persuaded of anything worth doing but so easy to be manipulated.

When this happens, emotions flare up, you lob missiles of hateful comments directed to your fellow human you know only their name and know nothing of their context. Algorithm picks up that energy from you and broadcast your outrage, your surface level reactions, your hate. Result? You don’t settle enough to build connection in a digital space engineered to distract you, to sell your attention, to flock your brain with a barrage of misinformation. You instead take shortcuts, chase cheap thrills, or fall for the illusion of something 'new.'

There is, however, still a chance to flip this script. Thanks to plenteous platforms, and especially, Substack, I can now leave an imprint of my thoughts and let it broadcast and grow elsewhere. I have learnt the value of my immortal being long after I have gone and I won't let that being harm another. I've learnt the impeccability of my own words and every time I pencil them down, I think about it, revise it, edit it before I winnow it across the internet land.

I understand the buck stops with me. I can use the gift of words to create the hell out of me or make heaven out of it. Every word you write and distribute online qualifies you as a magician. You can consciously or unconsciously cast a spell on someone or pull out someone from a spell. More often we put spell all the time with our opinions and without thinking. You stare a stranger post herself on social and gleefully commented on her timeline "look, your dress turns you ugly!" She listens, believes she's ugly and grows up knowing she's ugly. She assents to your opinion that she's ugly no matter how beautiful she's. We just a word, you've planted seeds of fear, self doubt, despair on her. This is a digital hell already.

Technology evolves—and continues to evolve faster than we can catch up with. It is undeniably powerful but our human connection is far more impressive for transformative, moreso when you pause, read, and respond with deliberate intent. You either turn out to be a spell doomer or a digital missionary with a healing message of hope.

Understand these contemporary tools are not the problem. The problem is how we dispense them, frequently like arrows. The ones creating and consuming and wielding them is still the same primal animal; tribal, domineering, superstitious. The internet and its suite of tools don't change you but it only amplifies who already you were, often on a larger scale. Unless you detoxify your words, your reasoning, your intention, you'll fall into internal decay of digital connection.

Photo by Deklanşör 67