Yet you participate in society. Curious!
> likely alive due to medical knowledge that could only exist through the internet
Definitely not true yet. Maybe some day. Maybe never.
You didn't say "the internet sucks", you said "I'd get rid of it if I could".
> Definitely not true yet. Maybe some day. Maybe never
Medicine has come further since the internet than it did in 50 years prior, imagine the hit COVID would have had if nobody fucking knew about it until someone they knew got it.
So many things depend on global information sharing, saying "blow it all up" because you don't like TikTok or Instagram is so ignorant it's unreal. The internet isn't just cat videos and short form content, it's the backbone of the last 50 years of innovation.
PCR goes back to the mid-80s before the internet became common at all. The news of a novel virus in China was all over the mainstream media outlets back in Jan 2020. Publication of the identification of the viral sequence happened in Nature, that could have still all happened over phone calls and fax machines.
The internet makes that all decentralized and faster, and now anyone can look up that information without going down to the medical library, and there's videos on youtube about virology where the average person can find good information (although you have to run the gauntlet of a plague of bad information without any training as well, so its kind of 50/50).
We still would have responded to the virus and developed the vaccines, and people still would have been able to be informed by the media. The ability of the average person to find out better information is also somewhat balanced by the ability of the average person to find out worse information.
It wasn't entirely the dark ages back in the 80s though and medical science still progressed.
