Almost Sunny

Tag: opinion

  • The Internet Was Supposed to Make Us Smarter

    There is a particular kind of clarity that comes with being a child in a classroom before the internet existed.

    Every day brought something genuinely new. Geography that made the world feel enormous and navigable at the same time. History that explained how the present came to be. Science that felt like being handed a key to understanding how everything worked. The teachers knew things you did not. The books contained things no one around you had told you yet. You sat down, you listened, you learned, and you left knowing more than when you arrived.

    Nobody questioned whether the textbook was lying. Nobody asked the geography teacher to prove that the Earth was round. The knowledge was there, built by people who had spent their lives building it, and the reasonable thing to do was to absorb it.

    That world still exists, somewhere underneath everything. But something has happened to it.

    What the Internet Was Supposed to Be

    The promise of the internet was genuinely extraordinary. Information that had previously been locked in university libraries, specialist journals, and the heads of experts — suddenly available to anyone with a connection. The democratisation of knowledge. The great equaliser. A child in a remote village with internet access would have more information at their fingertips than a scholar in a great library a generation earlier.

    That promise was real. In many ways it was delivered. Diseases have been diagnosed earlier. Movements have been organised. Information that governments and corporations tried to suppress has found its way into public view. The internet, at its best, has been genuinely transformative.

    But it arrived with a side effect that nobody adequately prepared for. And that side effect is quietly doing enormous damage.

    The Side Effect Nobody Warned Us About

    The same infrastructure that distributes knowledge also distributes its opposite with identical efficiency. A peer-reviewed study and a completely fabricated one look the same on a screen. A scientist with forty years of research looks the same as an influencer with forty thousand followers. The format is identical. The authority is not — but the format is what most people see first.

    Social media made this dramatically worse by building systems that reward engagement over accuracy. Content that provokes an emotional reaction — outrage, fear, the specific satisfaction of believing you know something that the mainstream is hiding from you — spreads faster than content that is simply true. The algorithm does not know the difference and does not particularly care.

    And so we arrived, somehow, at a moment in history where the following things are genuinely debated online despite being settled science.

    Ten Things the Internet Is Currently Arguing With Reality About

    The Earth is round. This has been known for over two thousand years. Confirmed by satellite imagery, space exploration, physics, and basic navigation. A Texas Tech University study found the majority of Flat Earth believers credited YouTube as their entry point — some went to debunk the theory and the algorithm pulled them in.

    Vaccines do not cause autism. The original 1998 study that claimed this link was retracted. The author’s medical licence was revoked for fraud. Dozens of studies involving millions of children have found no connection. The World Health Organisation listed vaccine hesitancy driven by online misinformation as one of the top ten threats to global health.

    Climate change is real and caused by humans. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree on this. Five independent high-quality studies confirmed that figure. The online denial movement was funded deliberately to sow doubt rather than disprove the science — the strategy was not to win the argument but to make people feel the argument was still open.

    Evolution is how species develop. The fossil record, genetics, and direct observation all confirm it. It is one of the most well-supported theories in all of science. Online communities pushing creationism are well-organised and particularly active in campaigns targeting school curricula.

    mRNA vaccines cannot alter your DNA. mRNA never enters the cell nucleus where DNA is stored. This is basic cell biology — not complex, not contested. A single TikTok video claiming otherwise was viewed 2.5 million times in January 2025.

    5G does not spread disease. Radio waves cannot carry viruses. Viruses are biological organisms. They require physical transmission. This is fundamental physics. During 2020, the 5G conspiracy theory spread so rapidly that telecom engineers were physically attacked in the UK and New Zealand.

    The moon landing was real. Confirmed by independent tracking stations worldwide — including in the Soviet Union, which had every reason to expose a hoax if one existed. Over 400,000 people worked on the Apollo programme. Recent surveys show a significant and growing percentage of younger people expressing doubt about this.

    The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Confirmed through multiple independent dating methods that all converge on the same figure. Young Earth Creationism — the belief it is around 6,000 years old — is actively and widely promoted online.

    GMOs are safe to eat. The National Academies of Sciences reviewed over 900 studies and found no substantiated evidence of harm. Every major scientific body worldwide concurs. Anti-GMO campaigns have successfully created widespread fear that has influenced food policy despite having no scientific foundation.

    Antibiotics do not work on viruses. Bacteria and viruses are entirely different biological entities. Using antibiotics on viral infections is not only ineffective but accelerates antibiotic resistance — one of the WHO’s top global health threats, expected to kill ten million people annually by 2050. Online forums recommending antibiotics for colds and flu are actively contributing to this.

    The Expert Has Left the Building

    What ties all of these together is not stupidity. The people who believe these things are not, in general, less intelligent than those who do not. What has changed is something more structural — the collapse of the social agreement that expertise means something.

    A doctor who spent a decade in medical school and twenty years treating patients occupies the same rectangle on a screen as someone who watched a documentary and decided they now understand medicine. A climate scientist with forty years of research data has the same number of characters available as a political operative paid to cast doubt. The format erases the distinction between them and the algorithm rewards whoever gets the stronger reaction.

    There used to be a reasonable social contract around expertise. Doctors knew medicine. Scientists knew science. Astronauts knew space. You did not have to agree with everything they said, but there was a baseline acknowledgement that years of dedicated study and practice meant something. That contract has eroded significantly — replaced by the idea that everyone who does a search is now equally informed, that credentials are a kind of conspiracy, and that the person with the most followers probably knows more than the person with the most qualifications.

    Worse, political parties and governments have learned to exploit this. Misinformation is not always accidental. Some of it is manufactured — deliberately introduced into information ecosystems to confuse, divide, and make populations easier to control. When people cannot agree on what is real, they become easier to lead toward conclusions that serve those doing the leading.

    The Danger Is Not in the Present

    The people who currently believe the Earth is flat are, in a sense, a manageable problem. What is harder to sit with is the next generation — children growing up with the internet as their primary source of information, with no memory of a time before it, and with algorithms specifically designed to find their particular psychological vulnerabilities and exploit them.

    When someone has arrived at a belief not through evidence but through identity — when believing that vaccines cause autism has become part of who they are, part of their community, part of how they understand the world — they are no longer reachable by logic. The evidence does not help because the belief was never built on evidence. This is what makes the current situation genuinely dangerous rather than merely frustrating.

    There used to be a reasonable expectation that as technology advanced, understanding would advance with it. That each generation would know more than the last, would be better equipped to navigate the world, would inherit the accumulated knowledge of everyone who came before.

    It is not obvious that is still happening.

    The Question Worth Sitting With

    The internet put the sum of human knowledge into the pockets of eight billion people. It also put the sum of human misinformation there, with better distribution, more emotional resonance, and a more sophisticated delivery mechanism.

    The doctors, scientists, astronauts, and researchers who have dedicated their entire lives to understanding one specific corner of reality — they are still there. They are still publishing, still discovering, still building the body of knowledge that has given us vaccines, space exploration, medicine, and everything else that has made the last century the most extraordinary in human history.

    But they are increasingly drowned out by people who did a search and decided that was enough.

    Whether the internet has expanded human knowledge or whether it has simply made us more confident in our ignorance — that might be the defining question of this generation. And the answer, right now, is not as obvious as it should be.

    These are personal observations and opinions. Almost Sunny is a personal blog.

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  • The Country I Used to Dream About

    There was a poster of the New York skyline on the bedroom wall. The Twin Towers were still standing in it. It stayed up for years.

    Growing up, America was not just a country — it was a feeling. A specific kind of optimism that came through every film, every news story, every NASA launch watched on a small television in another part of the world. When Hollywood showed you America, it showed you something that felt almost fictional in the best way. Glass towers catching sunlight. Highways that went on forever. A sense that the country was always moving toward something larger than itself.

    Even the worst films were worth watching if they were set in New York or Los Angeles or somewhere that felt like the centre of the world.

    What America Used to Mean

    In childhood, the United States was synonymous with a particular kind of achievement. Not just military or political power — though those were present — but the kind of achievement that felt genuinely exciting. NASA pushing further into space. Scientists making discoveries that changed how everyone understood the world. The tallest buildings. The fastest cars. Records being broken, frontiers being pushed, the sense that somewhere on the other side of the planet, extraordinary things were happening and America was leading them.

    There were contradictions, of course. There were interventions in other countries, wars that raised uncomfortable questions. But even those came packaged in a kind of moral confidence — the idea, at least, that America believed it was doing good in the world. You could disagree with the methods and still understand the stated intention. The narrative held together.

    The music was American. The films were American. The dream, for a while, was American. There was a serious plan, at one point, to study there. The plan did not survive contact with the realities of money and family responsibility — the things that quietly redirect a lot of youthful ambitions without anyone announcing it — but the dream of at least visiting remained.

    The Visit

    That dream was fulfilled in 2017. A solo trip covering six cities across the east and west coasts — Philadelphia, New York, Washington DC, Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles. Three weeks. The first time actually standing in the places that had existed in the imagination for so long.

    It was good. Genuinely good. The scale of everything, the variety between cities, the particular energy of New York at night — all of it delivered something real.

    But things were also noticed that the films had not prepared for. The friction between people of different backgrounds, present in a way that felt different from how it reads in headlines. The homelessness, not as a statistic but as an unavoidable presence on the streets of every major city. The absence of any meaningful public transport outside of New York — the way the car was not a convenience but a requirement, a fact of life so embedded in the infrastructure that its absence was essentially inconceivable. And the neighbourhoods that did not make it into the films — the parts of cities that exist behind the skylines, where the postcard version of America and the lived version diverge considerably.

    None of this made the trip disappointing. It just made it honest. The country was real, which meant it had the full texture of real things — the beautiful parts and the parts that needed work.

    At the time, it still felt like a country pointed in a direction. Working on something.

    What Changed

    It is difficult to identify a single moment. Things tend not to work that way. But at some point, opening the news became an exercise in accumulation — each story adding to a picture that bore less and less resemblance to the one on the bedroom wall.

    Global surveys and reputation trackers that used to show America near the top have told a different story recently. The shift in how allied nations — not rivals, allies — view the United States has been significant and swift. Countries that had the most invested in America being what it said it was have updated their assessments. That is worth sitting with.

    What is harder to quantify is the feeling. The particular disorientation of watching a country dismantle, piece by piece, the things that made it worth admiring. Not the military power or the economic size — those remain — but the softer things. The idea that there were rules. The idea that alliances meant something. The idea that institutions existed for reasons and that those reasons were respected even by people who disagreed about everything else.

    Credibility, once lost, is genuinely hard to regain. Trust, once broken, is not easily restored. That applies to individuals and it applies, it turns out, to countries.

    One Person

    It is a strange thing to observe how much a single person — or more precisely, the mentality of the people who put that person there and keep them there — can reshape the perception of an entire country. Not because one person should have that power, but because it turns out the perception of a country is more fragile than it looks from a distance.

    The racism that always existed but is now louder. The bullying that has moved from the margins to the centre. The absence of consequences that used to at least be pretended at. The treatment of long-standing allies as inconveniences. The open prioritisation of wealth concentration over everything else. The withdrawal from causes that, whatever their complications, represented some version of the country trying to be useful in the world.

    Any given day, trying to remember the last piece of genuinely positive news to come out of America is an exercise that does not resolve quickly.

    The achievements do not disappear. The history does not erase. But the way a country conducts itself in the present — what it tolerates, what it rewards, what it excuses, what it celebrates — that recalibrates something in how the rest of the world reads it.

    There is a particular strangeness in feeling relieved about a dream that did not come true. The plan to move to America, the one that fell apart for ordinary practical reasons years ago — it is hard not to look back at that particular failure and feel, quietly, that it worked out.

    That is a strange thing to feel. It is also an honest one.

    How Empires End

    History does not offer many examples of great powers that recognised their own decline as it was happening. The pattern tends to be more gradual — a slow divergence between what a country believes about itself and what the rest of the world observes. The gap widens quietly until it becomes undeniable.

    Every great kingdom, every empire that has peaked in history, has eventually met its turning point. Not always through invasion or catastrophe — often through a quieter erosion of the things that made it coherent. The Roman Empire did not fall in a day. Neither did any of the others.

    Whether America is in genuine decline or in a correctable rough patch is a question reasonable people disagree on. The country has reinvented itself before. That capacity has not disappeared and may yet reassert itself.

    But something has shifted in the global arrangement that feels less temporary. New trade relationships are forming. New alignments are emerging. Countries that would not have questioned certain assumptions ten years ago are making calculations they had not previously needed to make. Not out of hostility toward America, but out of a rational reassessment of what can be taken for granted about it.

    New friendships are being made on the grave of older handshakes. A new order is being negotiated in the ruins of the current one. The only question that remains genuinely open is the timeline.

    The poster came down a long time ago. The city is still there, still extraordinary in the ways it always was. But the feeling it used to carry — that specific, uncomplicated optimism about what America was and where it was going — that has not made it back onto the wall.

    Some things, once changed, stay changed.

    These are personal observations and opinions. Almost Sunny is a personal blog.

    If something here was worth your time, you can buy me a coffee — it genuinely helps keep this going. And if you’d like new posts straight to your inbox, no spam, no schedule pressure, subscribe here.