The Internet has failed to deliver what was promised over two decades ago. Or perhaps, we have failed to fully embrace that which it delivers.

We have at our finger tips facts, figures, and data. At any given moment, 24 hours a day we can validate and substantiate the tidbits of information which bombard us. We can negate rumours, stories, and marketing campaigns that tease our sense of logic or appeal to our emotional pleasures and fears.

Yet, we do not.

The Internet also delivers a kind of drug, an addictive substance which calls upon the very foundation of our DNA. We are drawn into conspiracies, twisted logics, and backward ways of thinking that support our innermost fears, the stuff that predates one or two generations as we give into eons of xenophobic behaviour.

While the spiritually minded speak hopeful of consciousness rising, I see instead the rise of the human species for who we are when the spiritually minded retreat to their havens of like-minded and similarly kind.

Perhaps some day the Internet will deliver an upgrade to humanity, a version 2.0 in which we care about the other as much as we do our own self. But for now, the beta release a few million years in the making will have to do.