It pretty much foretold that the internet, or Wired, unlike previous communication systems, would become a place in itself that would be affected by the real world, and in turn, the Wired would come to host its own events that would affect the real world. As someone once said, "the Wired cannot be allowed to interfere with the real world". Now look at how critical decisions in the real world are driven by 140 char long messages and pictures of a kid dead on a beach.
So little content, yet so much impact, yet elaborate text discussion can easily be replicated today by the most primitive form of AI running on a home computer. It's absolutely insane how easily it can be manipulated. Everything on the Wired is so laughably "small", it reminds me that famous quote from Bill Gates: "No one will need more than 640 kB of memory for a personal computer"- he was made fun of for obvious reasons, yet consider it now, that's the equivalent of 4,681 full-sized tweets, more than enough to change the world whole twice over.
This is highlighted in the series by the duality of their identities, one real, one Wired, and foretold the societal impacts of it. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once explained that existence (within a society) rests on acknowledgement, thus if no one knows you exist, well you don't exist. Existence shifted from the real world to the online world, so if you have no presence on social networks, you barely exist, and considering the things happening on those social networks affect the real world, part of the real world escapes you. In the series, teenagers suicide their physical bodies because their real life presence came to matter little, so they could keep living virtually through no more than text messages.
It foretold online harrasment as well, with shaming and doxxing. Another famous quote, wrongly attributed to Andy Warhol, is the following: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes". Whoever said that forgot to mention their mothers will be accused of having intercourse with a variety of individuals for the rest of their lives. Success comes at a price, but somehow everyone forgot that, and as everyone exposes their identity on the internet completely ignoring that issue, they end up paying that price, and would rather blame it on others than their conscious decision to step into the spotlight.
The Wired is interfering with the real world, and we're now seeing how that is a problem. There's nothing deep in SEL, in fact, if you watch it today, it's more of a supernatural fable expressing what most people know today, albeit they generally fail to apply that knowledge. Thing is, when it aired in 1998, which for the reminder was some 18 years ago, was truly visionary. The real world doesn't need the Wired. The Wired is nothing more than an extension of it that can be easily subverted and controlled, hence why it shouldn't take so much importance.
Thinking back about my previous post , I realize that while perpetuating our old internet ways is important, it's more important to focus on the real world. Because it's the real world that truly matters, and the difference in the things we do on the internet reflect just how secondary it is. The most important thing is to encourage people to take part in it, and I'm sometimes thinking that the solution might be the opposite: create places in the world that are cut off from the internet and where phones and cameras are forbidden.
That and bomb the global infrastructure of the internet.
