The internet and all the technology surrounding it (such as smartphones) has brought a lot of innovations and good things, and arguably accelerated progress in technological, scientific and medical fields, as well as many others, in addition to allowing people to get information and education millions of times more easily than just a mere 40 years ago.
However, there's also of course the dark side of the internet, which may have a devastating effect on the human population, especially where the internet is readily available. And I'm not here referring to all the illegal stuff (while that, obviously, is very bad, it's not really the harbinger of death of modern society.)
One of the absolute main problems with the internet is how easily and readily accessible hard-core pornography is. And I'm not being a puritan here. The problem is that it's about as easily available to young children as it is to anybody else, and there's very little that can be done about it.
This not just puritanism and "think of the children!" thinking. It's a scientific fact that hard-core pornography has an extremely high likelihood of negative psychological effects on a young developing person. It's not something inconsequential. It's not something that can just be shrugged off. (Heck, such pornography can have devastating effect even on many adults. But the effect on children is much worse because their brains are still developing. This is not just speculation, as it has been studied.)
Before the internet it was the parents' job to watch what their kids were watching, and make sure that they weren't watching anything inappropriate. This was significantly easier back then because even in the era of television, broadcasts were (and obviously still are) heavily regulated, and certain type of content is outright illegal to be broadcasted at certain times of day, and thus parents had much more control about what their kids were watching. Access to other forms of media, primarily magazines, was also much easier to control (perhaps not as easy, but still relatively so.)
No more. No matter what the parents do, they just cannot stop their children from accessing extremely graphic material, and children are naturally curious and will end up looking for it sooner or later.
And the big problem with the internet is how easily available it is. Hell, you can go to Wikipedia, of all places, and find extremely explicit video footage there, if you search for it. You don't even need to go to any pornographic website to find such material. (Wikipedia, for some reason, has a rule that it will not censor material that's not illegal. And you can find completely explicit material there, of all sorts, in high definition detail.)
Parents can try to minimize the possibility by just not giving their children smartphones (something that in this day and age seems to be unthinkable for some reason, in many parts of the world) and extremely limited and monitored internet access at home, and that might help a bit, but it's in no way a certain way to stop them from using the internet somewhere else. Parents can't stop the kids of other, more irresponsible parents, from sharing what they have found, or providing unrestricted internet access to their friends.
Talking to their kids openly, and warning them about the dangers of such material might or might not help. It's of course worth a try, but once again it's not a sure way of stopping it from happening. Even a very well informed smart child can still succumb to the curiosity.
I have absolutely no idea what kind of effects this will have on society and humanity as a whole in the long term, but it most definitely will not be anything positive, and it most likely won't be neutral either.
Who knows, maybe the current political zeitgeist in many western countries might be partially fueled by this already, making young impressionable people more readily be indoctrinated into becoming zealots, bigots and activists who are obsessed with sex. (After all, why is the far left so obsessed with sex? Could it have something to do with what the majority of them watched when they were young?)
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