IMHO it is not the Internet that's the problem. The constant connectivity is killing productivity.
Every morning I used to start my day with reading HN, on the bus to school I surfed the web. At uni, on every break I used to take out my phone and browse some more. After school I binge-watched TV shows and surfed more. My attention span got so divided that I couldn't concentrate watching a single episode, I constantly switched to a browser to surf more.
I learned a lot about programming, but my personal life suffered.
I couldn't meet deadlines, couldn't study for uni (studying law).
In the end I concluded that I had developed something like an internet addiction.
Furthermore, it wasn't just limited to internet. I stopped changing clothes, stopped keeping my already cluttered room in a somewhat liveable standard, stopped caring for my health, ate a lot of junk food, got hooked to TV-Shows.
Now, instead of constant short bursts of divided internet surfing, I am trying to set out a time for surfing. And outside those hours, I go offline.
It has been a though switch, but I slowly feel that I'm getting my impulse control back.
I recently started reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, I can recommend it to anyone trying to get off the vicious cycle.
I've also started to disconnect. I also find my productivity far higher without the Internet. Sometimes just a notebook and a pen are more than sufficient, and I can get some serious work done, manipulating equations, drawing diagrams, documenting ideas, even coding!
Although here I find myself, on Hacker News....
EDIT: This might be what I find troubling about Elon Musk's Neuralink project... I already find it very useful to disconnect from my "digital neocortex" (i.e. social media, Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc) to get work done... With a higher bandwidth connection that goes even directly to my limbic system and produces a more compelling experience than reality itself can... Would I just be stuck in a high tech opium den with no will to leave?
Every morning I used to start my day with reading HN, on the bus to school I surfed the web. At uni, on every break I used to take out my phone and browse some more. After school I binge-watched TV shows and surfed more. My attention span got so divided that I couldn't concentrate watching a single episode, I constantly switched to a browser to surf more.
I learned a lot about programming, but my personal life suffered.
I couldn't meet deadlines, couldn't study for uni (studying law).
In the end I concluded that I had developed something like an internet addiction.
Furthermore, it wasn't just limited to internet. I stopped changing clothes, stopped keeping my already cluttered room in a somewhat liveable standard, stopped caring for my health, ate a lot of junk food, got hooked to TV-Shows.
Now, instead of constant short bursts of divided internet surfing, I am trying to set out a time for surfing. And outside those hours, I go offline.
It has been a though switch, but I slowly feel that I'm getting my impulse control back.
I recently started reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, I can recommend it to anyone trying to get off the vicious cycle.