Astroturfing reddit, turning Twitter into truth.social, algorithm censorship on meta platforms, and of course
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites—it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.” —Sen. Mitt Romney
They're either doing it on purpose or they're actually that fucking stupid. I'm not sure anymore which is the more charitable assumption
Both. They're doing it on purpose and in a really stupid way. Stupid ans evil aren't a binary or even a spectrum, they're two unrelated traits. Both is often the case for the rich and powerful.
Considering the following was the sentiment regarding the internet 30 years ago, yeah, of course the ruling class is ruining it on purpose. Can't have masses of people challenge Capital, now can we?
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all.
Of course. Itxs the whole Tower of Babble all over again. Can't have the masses of the world collaborate together, communicate together and figure out how much they are getting fucked by overly rich assholes that they don't need.
I wouldn't be suprised to see the net hard segregated by countries or regions.
But then people could organize better locally. We wouldn’t want that would we?
This take is older than me and I'm in my 30s
Idk if that's a hot take, seems pretty obvious
I recommend everyone read Techno-Feudalism by Yanis Varoufakis for a really solid Marxist analysis of the Internet. He described much better than I could how the Internet went from a free and open commons to a tool of oppression, and speculates how the Internet may one day become a tool for liberation.
I like his math, but don't like his thesis about it being a regression to feudalism.
Not much about the employer-employee relationship is changing, and big tech engaging in rent-seeking on other businesses doesn't change the primary relationship people have with labor.
If most people performed their labor via a system akin to Uber or Doordash, then I'd be more inclined to agree.
The phenomena seems closer to finance capital supplanting industrial capital as the hegemonic form of power. Technology and information systems may have begun supplanting finance capital as the next stage of evolution of that process.
Otherwise, I think his analysis is solid.
If most people performed their labor via a system akin to Uber or Doordash, then I'd be more inclined to agree.
IIRC he started this line of inquiry ~5 years ago when "Gigification of the Economy" was a point of discourse going around and I think in that context it would have been reasonable to go there, but otherwise I agree there's hairs to be split about the specific social relations and relations to production that make it hard to view it as regression as you noted.
Same as any other means of production. Mass media is what started the really revolutions of the proletarian era, the Internet is still young.
Which way are they ruining it? Theres so many different terrible things happening to the internet and many of them have been set into motion long ago. As insidious as they are I can't give them all the credit.
Well yeah. It's cheap. Can't have the groveling classes saving money, that's bad for the economy.
i dunno. the internet was good for a little while because only a tiny fraction of people were on it and those people deliberately chose to be on it, which also made them much more likely to search out things and form communities.
but now that everybody is always on the internet and it's no longer a place people specifically search out, it has become like any other medium: the vast majority of people just want to be served stuff, they want radio without the talking (and maybe a bit more personalized), tv without the ads (and slightly more convenience), the newspaper without paying for it. The "the whole world at your fingertips" thing was never something the average person has ever had any interest in.
Add onto that the obvious fact that the more savy an internet user is, the less likely he is to get swindled (and seemingly the only viable business model on the internet is scamming your userbase) and its obvious that the part of the internet that is actually kinda good is going to shrink by every passing year.
I disagree. The Internet was mostly good in the early days, not because of the people using it, but because corporations hadn't yet figured out how profitable it would become. Everything was free, the standards/protocols all open, if someone made a thing for the Internet it was because they thought it would be useful, not because they thought it would make them a lot of money.
Look at Wikipedia, one of the last remnants of the early Internet. It's a mostly good tool because it hasn't been overrun by profit motive.
Profit motives are destroying the Internet. Because profit is divorced from the actual value a thing provides. Enshitification works because a worse technology results in higher profits.
There have been companies making profit from the internet a lot longer than you suggest. They've just gotten more ruthless these days as its much easier to collect user data to monetize when theres a requirement that normal people have to use it to function in socisty.
So yes, more people that can't participate in society without internet makes more marks for these vultures and it becomes an oroboros of cringe
i tought this was common knowledge here at this point
after cambridge analytica type shit, or how elites shut it down whenever it needs the people to be in the dark, or how the dumbest shit is always being shoved in our faces by the algorithm while important stuff gets buried
These sound more like reasons for them to keep the internet around.
I believe it.
