Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
It’s more like it’s being revealed (or more obvious) what the purpose of the Internet was really for. Remember that it was created by DARPA for military purposes. It was never for altruism.
It wasn’t altruistic per se, but that doesn’t make it nefarious, either. At it’s core, it was just a network connectivity design that resists node failure. It was us that used that foundation to create a virtual space that everyone could participate in. We now have outsized bad actors like Google and Microsoft and Amazon and alphabet agencies that are trying to influence that virtual space, but its culture was built by us.
Altruism doesn’t need to be a part of it. And while the military started the Internet, universities made it what it is today, and for a long time it was merely a medium for sharing information.
The highway system was also created by the military, yet it has connected people far more than it has facilitated war. We definitely went too far on adapting to highways, but for many years it was just a better way to get from A to B.
The problem, I think, is that the average person just wants something better than what they have now (incremental change), and they don’t want to pay for it. People preferred roads to trains because they were faster and they didn’t pay for it directly, and now we have fewer trains. Likewise, people wanted content on websites for free, so content producers introduced ads to their products.
If you want something, you need to vote with your wallet and your ballot. Just doing one isn’t enough.