Was it? It did a tremendous amount of harm as well. Future historians may judge us very harshly for how cavalier and flippant we were in unleashing this technology onto the public.
There was the time facebook enabled a genocide in Myanmar, there is the Uber and AirBnb operating criminally without consequence having significant negative economic impacts to countless cities, there is all the research that shows the deep emotional damage done to teens on social media.
It enabled crypto, which is a criminal exercise to defraud people.
It also massively enabled echo chambers and conspiracy theories, undermining our social cohesion and community.
The way we rolled out the internet was a mistake and obviously so.
-->could you name some positive things the Internet has enabled
This interaction? Honestly much much harder to list the positives.
I think much more regulation much much earlier. Cypto-currency should have been shut down immediately never allowed to grow. Same with Uber and AirBnB. Social media companies should have been banned from during algorithmic feeds and been required to moderate content much better.
> This interaction? Honestly much much harder to list the positives.
Well while I appreciate that, I'd urge you to dig a little deeper; I'm sure you can think of many things. The Internet has enabled creativity, the sharing of knowledge, scientific advancement, and international cooperation & communication (I'm speaking mainly between citizens) on scales unimaginable a few short decades ago, to name just a few things!
Certainly, there are issues that comes with it - and we can and should solve them! - but ignoring the massive good it brings is not good. I'd also point out that many of the issues you outlined certainly predate the Internet, and were in fact much easier to accomplish - genocides happened and were easier to hide (or at least shape the narrative of) when information was a lot harder to distribute. People believed in all sorts of crazy things too, with little or no hard evidence.
