An admin told me that the internet plainly does not exist in the lore. This got me wondering, why not?
Marines don’t spend all the time cryogenically frozen, there is some space for RNR. Surely some marines would want to contact friends or family back on home planets. If this method of communication exists, then social media and the greater internet logically would follow. Modern-day marines have access to the internet, and in some cases, carry phones with access to it. There’s a million reasons for this, even some that have nothing to do with plain enjoyment.
The internet is a boon for humanity in general. Unless it was explicitly removed from existence, why wouldn’t it continue to exist far in the future?
The same reason LCD screens don’t exist, or anything else. We’re retro-futurism, or cassette futurism or whatever. You can see in Alien: Isolation that communications do exist, but it’s limited to basic text and maybe images at best.
This is the canon explanation, though it’s not the one I prefer.
Personally I dislike the idea that Alien and Aliens are simply in the future of our real world, it makes vastly more sense for the majority of cassette-punk/retrofuturism settings to simply be divergent timelines (IE Fallout), because you no longer have to contend with all of the tech and cultural developments that happened after the movie/show/game/aesthetic was made, you can just say none of it happened for whatever reason.
The internet’s just an agnostic protocol for communication. You can run it over anything, it’s an inevitable and emergent property of digital communication complexity - you want xyz to talk to each other so you standardize the language and addressing and voila you’ve got an internet - and in every piece of media we see what are essentially colony/station/ship-centric internets.
What we don’t see is an interstellar internet; you can probably just handwave that as some kind of bandwidth/limited infrastructure, or intentional control issue. In the case of the USS Almayer specifically, it’s on deployment, crew wouldn’t be allowed to use unsanctioned comms. They might have emails for the crew downloaded/uploaded once a month or something like that.
Don’t know about internet, but there is intranet at least. The Corporate Liaison has an intranet terminal in his office, and the research staff has access to databases.
They have a pseudo internet based on early versions of the internet. The Intranet. (Though this may be debatably only accessible by WY since only the CL has access to it).
Shown by the PCs in game, marines do have the ability to send and receive emails to fellow marines (and I would presume probably their families).
With Aliens being a post-modern version of 80s tech, there are obviously limitations. Their technology didn’t advance the same way ours did necessarily. But considering that we can fax across the galaxy, I don’t think its super far fetched to assume that some variant of an email system exists for civilian use, especially since corporations and governments can clearly organize logistics and communications cross galaxy as shown in the movies and books.
Aliens computing technology is abhorrent dogshit, the personal computers they used are stuck in the 1980s despite all the other wacky and futuristic developments. So yeah, all you really get are intranets rather than a true internet.
It’s kind of like how in Fallout the transistor basically never got invented, computing remained inefficient and limited, and they still use vacuum tubes despite having literal cold fusion (which ironically would have caused the Great War to be completely avoidable if the US wasn’t an authoritarian eugenicist police state at that point)
They don’t have LCD Screens but they sure have this whole room hologram displays and tabletop hologram projectors. The damage of the prequel movies…
Even if the internet existed on earth (for our timeline it doesn’t) then it’s not scalable into space. Maybe in a set of close-ish planets but from memory it takes 13 minutes to send a command to the Mars Rovers, 26 minute round trip. And now you’ve got to send something across the galaxy, it doesn’t scale. Nevermind War and Maintenance and Accidents that could destroy one of your relays. The internet wouldn’t work, you’d maybe have a few encyclopedias that you could preload but otherwise you’d be stuck to your emails and faxes and traditional courier mail (faster than light ship travel exists)
Aesthetic.
And because hearing marines spout brain-rot nonsense all the time annoys people. And kills what little RP vibe the server has.
And that’s what it is Vibe. It’s not realism. It doesn’t need to make sense. It’s a Fictional universe.
Sure it’s nice when all your ducks line up in a row. But Aliens universe is vast and we see little of it. And stuff doesn’t make sense when you start to take into account all of the lore sources.
So even if it did exist in lore, it probably still wouldn’t in CM Lore.
The Aliens universe would need it’s equivalent of Hyper Pulse Generators from the Battletech Universe. That could be very interesting. WY could act like COMSTAR.
Headcannon, but probably control. Free and open communication is great for sharing culture and information, which is less amazing for maintaining order over your indentured servants on a mining world that never sees sunlight. Even on nicer planets, showing your citizens the horrible conditions other people are in on those less PR friendly worlds would be an issue.
Hell, consider some real world countries. They have the tech and infrastructure to make the internet, but their citizens are only given a heavily censored version. I imagine the rich and elite have access to the whole of it however.
Also, space is big. One planet might have some version of “the internet”, the Almayer even has computer terminals with email logs IIRC, but connecting multiple planets would be a expensive AF task. So expensive its mainly done by, again, the super companies who use it mainly to fax mission critical info about, and keep Mr. Weyland himself apprised of what is going on with his pet projects.
I think that the Alien Universe doesn’t have general mass production of a lot of things. Poverty is more widespread. The idea of luxury and RnR time is that of a past era. The industrialization and constant colonization in the name of “Humanity” is the reason for a lack of a singular Internet or singular LCD screen maker. There probably are devices like this in Universe but they are not the markets or selling point of the in universe corporations. They certainly have a social media but it’s incredibly streamlined similar to a Corporate social media that you only have access to as an employee.
The restriction to luxuries is the driving factor of the Alien Universe. People know that they need a ship and a crew and equipment and are incentived to work until they can operate their own corporation. Say what you will about Prometheus or some of the recent prequel takes on the universe. However the momentum of those movies, albeit mediocre attempts at encapsulating the universe, culminated in Alien Romulus. Which in my opinion is the gold of the new round of content made in universe.
Alien Romulus perfectly depicts what I am getting at about in universe tech. Human progressed to the point of regular internet/search engine/social media because these corporations have Synthetics that completely replace the need for all of that. Whether you are buying a synthetic to be the Captain of the ship while you are in cryostasis or a synthetic to be the Chief of Operations in your corporations. You just got your internet/ search engine / social media needs all assuaged with one synthetic.
So they definitely have a “Web” of internet but it was not so carefully gathered to be a collective database of all information. It became a way for individual corporations to organize their information and database into a single device akin to “MUTHR”. As for the LCDs at this point. No one in universe even has the time for such a luxury but they likely exist as a luxury similar to how computers existed in the 70s and 80s but no one started getting them for regular relaxation reasons until the early 2000s.
Why am I writing this? I think this is Dukes fault. Plus my year review told me I have a 68/100 readability which is a CS Lewis rating. I was hoping for a higher score. Who can I pay for a better rating? Does this read well? Are you still reading this? Just give me a heart emoji and tell me it’s too much for you to read like the rest of us.
