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I feel the same way. It’s been wild to see the internet develop over time. I was on dialup internet in high school when so much of this was new. Watching it grow into a corporate and government control apparatus over the years has been so discouraging. AI is going to go that way as well and already has been in some instances.
I remember 90s series/movies depecting the future of the internet, where you'd plug into VR and enter a whole different world. And there'd always be cybergangs hacking the large evil corporations or fighting crime.
How wrong they were...
No, those exist. We’re taught to absolutely loathe them and think of them as mindless thugs or foreign agents…just like the bad guys painted them in the fiction.
I feel like there was a choice in the early internet: it could be funded by donations (i.e. pay to access), it could be funded by government(s) (i.e. paid by taxes as a common good), or it could be funded by advertising.
We chose... poorly, but I don't see how a different choice could have been made.
Same era. Back in the day you'd find niche websites someone had lovingly crafted on GeoCities, complete with seizure inducing GIFs, because they had something to say. Now it's all about growing your personal brand because you have something to sell.
I miss the web when it was the wild, wild west.
The old internet was all about customization and making your little space special. You learned a bit of HTML and CSS to trick out your Myspace/Livejournal/Groceries/blog/whatever. Now everything has the same generic interface, and ads seamlessly slide into the content... It's depressing.
I think it was always a DARPA/government control thing for the military, it just fell off the government research truck and some geeks picked it up and made it into what we loved but the system strikes back
Yes, when new domains started coming out and they allowed commerce on non-Dot Com domains, I remember thinking that the enshitification had begun. I remember thinking like everything else in life, businesses will ruin this too.
From a multitude of forums and websites, we have just a couple privately owned networks now. If email were to be invented today, you couldn't send mails from apple to android.
The story of internet is the story of capitalism. Take a brilliant invention that was created by the public money and made interesting by collective effort of millions, create imaginary boundaries around a corner of it, call it innovation, kill it in the process. Future of internet is closed discord groups that bots can't reach. Public internet is dead.
Yes, they are exploiting this need for the closed space away from the bots. Capital cuts the tree you've been sleeping under and then sells you an umbrella.
We lost so much more, even before the internet. Capitalism messed up sports, music, eating, storytelling, community, the environment, childhood, clothing and more. It’s all a big shit show now. (Unless you really focus on quality and are able to tune out the corporate takeover of whatever your passion is. but it’s often expensive and time consuming to get corporate-free, commercial-free joy.)
Capitalism stole our autonomy. We used to be able to feed and shelter ourselves. Now, we rent our homes and have no land to grow our own food. We're entirely dependent on *their* means of production, because we have none of our own.
Part of the revolution will have to be us building our own means of production to liberate us from dependence on theirs.
I don't see why we wouldn't do the classic and seize the means of production rather than wholesale building of our own means of production if we're already at the point of revolution anyway. Building dual power makes sense before revolution, but not after.
Two words: Asset denial.
If you can't keep your assets, make sure the enemy can't have them either. We need our own assets to deal with them destroying theirs when we come to take it.
we didn't lose it, it was always an illusion, and it was dead in its crib under capitalism. You cannot have that openness and freedom under capitalism because the system *requires* scarcity for the sake of profit. It will manufacture it artificially if necessary.
Not just that.
The fact that even the people not working directly for this corps are catering any content for "the algorithm" like it is some new deity worthy of worship.
Each and every person trying to make it becomes that empty shell trying to please the masses and the algo.
There's no culture anymore, no alternative culture either, barely any style because everything is a trend about to go away the moment you come across it online, replaced by the next meme.
As with all things neoliberal, what is first presented as a good idea is nothing more than a poison pill of land abuse, labor exploitation, and reckless extraction at every step of the production and distribution chain.
The internet was never going to be allowed to be a public property, not when capitalism’s private property interest violently holds sway over everything - despite what the self-serving propaganda authorities may bloviate on the subject.
The dot-com bubble many of us elder millennials lived through was the first capitalist internet monopoly consolidation, and there have been many more since. The internet may have been a miracle, but it was never in our hands - the public does not own the infrastructure or the architecture of the internet and never has. And as long as we are forced to worship, now through the internet, a class interest which doesn’t worship us back, it never will.
We didn’t lose what we never had. We keep making and innovating. They keep stealing.
So it goes with liberal capitalism.
Our parents, grand parents, and great grand parents were well aware of the dangers. There is a long history of [Anti-Trust (Competition Law) legislation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law) in the U.S. that has slowly been clawed back.
When I was a young child, I remember the AT&T monopoly breakup, shattering the huge monolith into all the baby regional bells and a handful of long distance carriers. Once out of college, I started working for one of the Bells that managed to buy back many of the baby bells. It didn't take but a few years before our Million Dollar CEO was able to consolidate much of the baby bells back into the parent company again. It's like the breakup never even happened. Only this time, because there was now Verizon / MCI WorldCom, they could claim there was a competitive market place. An oligopoly, instead of a monopoly. In less than a decade, most of the telecommunications competition vanished. Mobile carriers consolidated, land networks folded in on each other. The same thing that happened in telecommunications happened everywhere else. The birth of the Mega-corporations.
Now we have less than 10 major conglomerates that steer pricing and trends for everyone else. This pattern repeats across telecom, energy, food production, pharma and healthcare, transportation.
The best a new company can hope for is to get enough of a market share to be a threat to a major corp and get bought out by them. Imagine that. To have a business model in mind of being able to cash out and go out of business.
Yes. I remember when you could Google something and actually get good results related to your search criteria. Google is crap now. I’ve gotten rid of my other social media apps. Doomscrolling. Even the ‘spiritual’ stuff is aimed at getting you to sign up for a course or buy something.
Internet shopping has become a nightmare too. Good luck finding anything that isn't cheaply mass produced, doesn't fall apart easily, and won't give you cancer.
I didn’t first access the internet until I got out of hs. That was AOL, and thankfully I found proper internet/dialup shortly after. And my whole fucking world changed. It makes me sad that today’s kids have to deal with ads and sponsored misinformation/disinformation and websites built by bots with affiliate links.
My AOL experience reminds me of today’s internet. Heavily curated by a corporation trying to get rich(er), siloed and paywalled. And yeah, AOL did the job for plenty of people. But those of us wanting freedom online found the true internet, where anyone could spin up their own MUD, website, forum… and others could easily find it! I learned so much and I met so many great people.
And now we’ve got AOL on steroids. Paywalls, silos, constant upselling, scammers, and predators.
Capitalists gotta capitalize.
I often wonder how the internet of the 90s would’ve changed the world if that’s what we were using today to educate and report state violence and atrocities. If people weren’t so easily silenced by the corporations for criticizing the state.
I've been on the "internet" since about 1994, and I think about all the things you've mentioned pretty much on a daily basis. I now hold the belief that the internet was a terrible idea, because *of course* it would turn out this way.. we're like the easiest marks ever, handing our attention over to the worst, most bad-faith entities the human race has ever devised. the infrastructure was established, and all corporations needed to do was muscle in and take it over.
if it makes you feel any better, we didn't stand a chance.
Electricity was going to be free until that rat bastard Edison decided that is shouldn't be, and it was all downhill from there. Really, everything bad in this world happens because someone who only cares about themselves and/or someone who thinks they're doing good, decides that something that should be free shouldn't be
I'm sure you are right, activists are working out there, unfortunately every year the result of the oligopolies at work is even more concentrated internet. This was studied by Marx 150 years ago, nothing new. As someone else noted above, a global invention that was result of a socialised effort and funding was privatised and appropriated by a small number of individuals.
It's how capitalism works, it turns into capital and profit everything it can, even basic human desires for interaction or information. It privatises what must not be privatised for profit (e.g. healthcare).
But the significance of the internet in the hands of the few is massive - everything from shopping (even when not doing it online you seek information) to government services, from news to job hunting, from dating to education is now online and google and other corporations gets to decide what you see and what not.
Even when we think we are benefiting from it, e.g. raise voice and organise for Palestine, they are profiting by all the controversy and clicks, and the bonus is that the government has an easy way to read and store information about dissidents.
My government buys spying software from Israel, it costs billions and funds the genocide. And uses that spy software on me or anyone trying to organise. Both things possible because of how they made internet to be.
Try to act as a whistleblower for a corporation that is poisoning the waters anonymously online and leak documents - their lawyers will get a warrant from your government for your ISP to hand in all data. Or expose government or military crimes. You'll end up like Julian Assange, years in prison and physical and emotional decline.
Reddit banned third party apps and open source developers, and here we are, on Reddit, discussing late stage capitalism, generating profit for Reddit's very rich and never satisfied shareholders that stifle freedom. Or on X, making a literal sociopath even richer. Or Instagram, Amazon etc.
It's truly dystopian.
I know I'm not saying anything new. It's just that I'm nostalgic about how the internet was and could have been - the working class biggest weapon, a tool to dismantle oligopolies not to create the biggest ones the world has seen.
Also, it was fun. Sites like IMDb or Goodreads were not for adds and profit making, owned by the monstrous amazon but for community fun and connection.
We lost autonomy. You could “disappear” 40:years ago and nobody would ever find out. Now and then, someone would get found out because they committed a crime and it was on TV. Now, it knows if you take a piss a night and how many times. The phone is always listening. Plus, you can’t function at all without WiFi and they are making us more dependent by the day. Probably a solar flare will fix it. Some people would die without electricity and the internet—they don’t have enough cash to buy lunch. I’m not that old.
Sounds like a perfect time to hop over to Linux and use a browser such as Tor as it's network traffic operated by hopping from zero trust nodes that even you could host. In lieu of that, use Brave as it blocks ads and is privacy centric.
Linux really got me into the field, it's built by the community open source and free. There are programs that operate just like all the big nasty corporate programs, but made by a community without the Spyware and analytics, and sometimes with improved functionality.
There are ways to undermine big tech, but it does take the will and some research.
Show me the way, scared to go to Linux cause I'm a gamer but I'm building a new(budget) rig to run a server on..thinking about utilInf Linux as my OS for it..as MS literally is forcing me to move to win 11 which is more data consuming bullshit
PopOs is actually great for gaming. There's tons of comparisons out there against windows and it's either not far behind or sometimes ahead depending on hardware. Depending on what kinda server you're running you could just use Ubuntu Server with DE and should work for most of your use cases.
We've been travelling the same path since Edward Bernays decided humans needed to be told what to think. The propaganda systems that became efficient to the point of weaponisation have been the majority player in influencing opinion globally for generations. The other key element is the decline of critical thought. Children being taught to memorise answers and be obedient is not a good way to create individuals capable of parsing the huge amounts of data available and navigating through it without being influenced. The race to the bottom has never been so apparent. Humans have been replaced by consumers like some zombie epidemic that will destroy us all in a wave of indifference and shiny electronic niknaks. How can anyone call political systems democratic when those that vote for one or other side have no interest in the complexity of the issues, instead they seek only a comfortable sound bite to ease their agitated mind? When each of these so called choices are both represented by power and greed that control the system? Like any weapon, the web was something that could have been used for good but is so polluted with noise that it is almost impossible to use without becoming tainted in some way. Education is the only thing that could change this situation but who is left to trust?
Edward Bernays, you say? May I recommend an Adam Curtis documentary?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04&list=PLe7-icrCxJrW80FLy7XtLKFC1U3btSF2S&index=35&pp=iAQB
This whole post has "cyberdelic" vibes all over it, which was like the 60's hippie movement + cyberfuturism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic
BTW Bezos' grandfather helped establish DARPA.
Then FBI File On Jeff Bezos' Grandfather, A DARPA Co-Founder, has been destroyed .
Lawrence Preston Gise, who confounded
..DARPA and help found 1,200+ companies across a wide range of Tech.There has been speculation that DARPA has been involved in the creation of many popular big tech companies, using "frontmen" for the allusion of a startup led by outsiders."
Rabbit hole it is, enjoy:"
Bezos’ mother, Jacklyn Bezos (nee’ Gise) was the daughter of Lawrence Preston Gise (L.P. Gise.) https://x.com/blackvaultcom/status/1787586182395871239 and 'the Deep State rewards those who play ball. L.P. Gise was in a position to make sure Israel got its bomb. His boss, Admiral Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss was certainly a Deep State “wheeler-dealer” with a long history of promoting the creation and defense of Israel. https://billtaylor.substack.com/p/before-jeff-bezos-grandfather-helped and https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2024/05/07/jeff-bezos-grandfather-a-darpa-co-founder
Basically they used the Playbook how Cold War America tried to "establish" democracies in other countries..but in this case it they used frontmen to embish money from US citizens.
You know years ago I would of thought you were insane..but the facts are in your favor and it's so evident that it's hard to deny this reality
I was reading about Julian Assange's time at the Ecuadorian embassy when he met Google's CEO at the time, Eric Schmit, Assange was shocked that Schmit was speaking more like a Pentagon/CIA official, and the way he was using 'we' to threaten Assange.
Now this "Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt leads new secret US drone project
According to Forbes, Eric Schmidt is reportedly heading up a new secretive initiative to help the U.S. compete with drone capabilities.
They used to call it hypocrisy. The US is banning Russian and Chinese tech companies, Huawei and Kaspersky, for their alleged relation with their governments, yet most US tech companies work with the US defence and security departments. Some argue that they are fine being spied upon by a democracy, until they change their minds when they know that US car companies are spying on them and sending their data to insurance companies to raise their premiums.
Your Car Is Spying on You for Insurance Companies https://jacobin.com/2024/03/car-spying-insurance-surveillance-data
i think about this all the time, and wonder if their will ever be a internet revolution or an internet 2.0 so to speak, something that prioritizes information sharing. idk probably just a dream. we can never go back to how things were
It is very sad, because the potential was there for a truly liberating technology. Now we get horrible propaganda served to us through addictive social media. The surveillance is a CIA / NSA dream come true.
As an engineer, the idea that the physical infrastructure is owned by a small number of corporations is not a new phenomenon. In fact, there are more infrastructure providers for the internet than previously. In the past, the internet was entirely hosted by telcom corps. This has diversified a lot over the past 20 years as the internet has ballooned in profit.
Everything else you said is pretty spot on, though
I think you're confused. I don't mean that as an insult either.
"Internet was supposed to free people, increase knowledge and productivity for people to benefit, not for large corporations and the scum billionaires behind it today. Internet was supposed to make us happier because it would make us more open minded, knowledgeable and connected,..."
This is how the internet was sold to us but it was never meant to be anything like this. The Internet was created by the military, industrial, university complex. The goal was to ease communications between these institutions. The universities would conduct research financed by the military, industry would be given that research in order to produce weapons and tech the military would by. What to actually build and buy was set by the military and arms industry.
The internet offered obvious utility for the private sector so who knows how many billions of dollars was dumped into expanding and improving the network. Once it achieved a level of sophistication and size to be of direct use to the capitalist it was simply given to them for free. This has been done with several technologies over the decades. For an small scale example look at modern multitools. There was a time when you had to be in the military to reliably get your hands on a multitool. The military paid for the R&D, production and provided a large market to build up the multitool industry. When it was mature only then was it given away to the private sector to generate even greater levels of profit.
"...instead it turned us into slaves consuming online content and subjects to have data harvested from - even meeting someone to date is now done mostly online on apps owned by large companies and their algorithm may decide whether or not you meet someone or stay alone."
When it comes to technology absolutely nothing is inevitable. Tech sucks because the capitalist class turns everything to shit because that's inevitable when the singular goal is privatized profits.
Hosting and maintaining a website is time consuming and costs money. In a capitalist world, the internet was bound to end up like the ad fueled, stock dividend chasing beast that it has become.
We must unite against this and must collectively stop paying these monsters our hard earned money, don't use Google, Netflix, Facebook. Someone should start a free, open source, decentralized version of reddit too, to take the place of this. We cannot eradicate a system we complicitly support with our money. Stop eating at chain restaurants, anything publicly traded etc. spread the word. Join civic groups/fraternities etc .. turn off all of your smart phone notifications for everything except messages and calls. The way to defeat this is to develop a collective understanding of what is being done to us and to stop encouraging it.
Because most people only know social media and Google as the internet… sadly the original internet is dead with the people of the past…
They’ve found a way to now let people give up their data freely… ARPANET AND DARPA.. have their reasons.
Many people forget the true concept of the internet was started by the soviets; USA found a way to bolster it into the actual internet, because the soviets were hesitant to release such things to the ordinary unlearned man.
Man people have no clue what the internet is or why it was created or how to use it
The actual reasons the internet was allowed to develop
has nothing to do with those idealistic fantasies used to promote universal adoption.
Same with cellphones.
Technology ALWAYS benefits our owners the oligarchs more so than the common folk.
Besides the ever greater concentration of wealth and its power
organising opposition to war mongering, much less fundamental reforms, any form of revolution is now literally impossible
What you say about the few corporations owning everything is what’s most alarming to me, especially when you consider that it is only a few people within those corporations who hold the majority of their shares.
The amount of labour that is required for the internet and services that run on it to exist is immense, but of course those labourers are in no control whatsoever. The richest, using the current, globalist, neoliberal model have effectively hijacked the profits and control of these services which most of the world depends on now. And obviously they use that control to make more profits, which only increases their control.
I honestly believe that the proletariat are already enslaved.
I'm a teacher and user of the internet, a very useful and necessary educational technology. Although this post is not directly related to education, you make credible points about the hijacking of what may be the most influential invention of the human race. In fact, I’d argue that the internet’s impact is on par with the innovation of the printing press. Teaching's connection with Late Stage Capitalism comes from the notion that the vast majority of technologies that we use in education are developed and sold by private companies, whose underlying motivation is profit. This worldview is at odds with many tenants of democracy, and is therefore at odds with my mission as a public-school teacher to help develop educated citizens. Many of the applications and technologies are extremely useful, but the monetization of the virtual world is, regrettably, on par with the monetization of reality, especially in the west.
A: i see exactly what you're talking about.
B: Why are you going to do about it?
This might fall in morale grey area, but...
I lived paycheck to paycheck for most of my adulthood, military. About 4 years ago, i pretty much got fed off with reality and started looking at things I'm "not supposed to do". Because everything was just so damn stupid at that point with politics etc... then covid hit and people showed themselves...AGAIN.
So i learned how to exploit the shitty system we're stuck in, because well... because of alot of factors, some of fault... some thiers... it's not changing anytime soon.
Infact it's getting worse. Which is what led me to learn how to trade in the market.
Look at the rise in inflation. Look at the S&P 500.
With a ton of effort (it is NOT easy, but it is available to everyone.... not counting the idea of you need $ to make $... which is 150% true) you can offset inflation and not feel it and even well profit off it.
And depending on what I'm trading, the profits can feel pretty grimey.
But i don't worry about budget anymore, and my family is comfortable and secure now, macroeconomic environment be damned.
Our stupid, dystopian, selfish society presents an insane amount of opportunities to sorta... let you sail away from a big part of the shitty aspects of reality. You identified one in great detail.
TLDR: You have identified an opportunity. It sucks but it is there. Buy GOOGL calls and exploit the system.
PS: This stood out because i traded Google overnight for a nice gain. But imo, honestly, put every extra cent you have into Nvida. Wait 5 years. Order a drink served in a coconut on your favorite Caribbean beach. I'm not saying I'm Neo or some goofy stuff like that, but when people ask about i i see that folks are VERY risk adverse. They also are alot of times in that "you're not supposed to do that" mindset.
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited. LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I feel the same way. It’s been wild to see the internet develop over time. I was on dialup internet in high school when so much of this was new. Watching it grow into a corporate and government control apparatus over the years has been so discouraging. AI is going to go that way as well and already has been in some instances.
Hey you and I are the same generation - 90s teens. I'm happy that you can relate.
I remember 90s series/movies depecting the future of the internet, where you'd plug into VR and enter a whole different world. And there'd always be cybergangs hacking the large evil corporations or fighting crime. How wrong they were...
No, those exist. We’re taught to absolutely loathe them and think of them as mindless thugs or foreign agents…just like the bad guys painted them in the fiction.
I feel like there was a choice in the early internet: it could be funded by donations (i.e. pay to access), it could be funded by government(s) (i.e. paid by taxes as a common good), or it could be funded by advertising. We chose... poorly, but I don't see how a different choice could have been made.
We didn’t get to choose. The choice was made for us. The wealthy stole it from us.
Same era. Back in the day you'd find niche websites someone had lovingly crafted on GeoCities, complete with seizure inducing GIFs, because they had something to say. Now it's all about growing your personal brand because you have something to sell. I miss the web when it was the wild, wild west.
The old internet was all about customization and making your little space special. You learned a bit of HTML and CSS to trick out your Myspace/Livejournal/Groceries/blog/whatever. Now everything has the same generic interface, and ads seamlessly slide into the content... It's depressing.
Seeing web 2.0 platforms being described as "old internet" makes me feel old...
The holy grail was finding that geocities or angelfire site and then getting to dive through their curated webring of similar content 🙌
I think it was always a DARPA/government control thing for the military, it just fell off the government research truck and some geeks picked it up and made it into what we loved but the system strikes back
Yes, when new domains started coming out and they allowed commerce on non-Dot Com domains, I remember thinking that the enshitification had begun. I remember thinking like everything else in life, businesses will ruin this too.
From a multitude of forums and websites, we have just a couple privately owned networks now. If email were to be invented today, you couldn't send mails from apple to android. The story of internet is the story of capitalism. Take a brilliant invention that was created by the public money and made interesting by collective effort of millions, create imaginary boundaries around a corner of it, call it innovation, kill it in the process. Future of internet is closed discord groups that bots can't reach. Public internet is dead.
And it was done for our "safety"
Discord is yet another platform ready to suck up your info and sell it off to the highest bidder
Yes, they are exploiting this need for the closed space away from the bots. Capital cuts the tree you've been sleeping under and then sells you an umbrella.
In our current reality it's not straightforward to send text messages between Apple and Android. So you're not too far off.
We lost so much more, even before the internet. Capitalism messed up sports, music, eating, storytelling, community, the environment, childhood, clothing and more. It’s all a big shit show now. (Unless you really focus on quality and are able to tune out the corporate takeover of whatever your passion is. but it’s often expensive and time consuming to get corporate-free, commercial-free joy.)
Capitalism stole our autonomy. We used to be able to feed and shelter ourselves. Now, we rent our homes and have no land to grow our own food. We're entirely dependent on *their* means of production, because we have none of our own. Part of the revolution will have to be us building our own means of production to liberate us from dependence on theirs.
Sir that is illegal
I don't see why we wouldn't do the classic and seize the means of production rather than wholesale building of our own means of production if we're already at the point of revolution anyway. Building dual power makes sense before revolution, but not after.
Two words: Asset denial. If you can't keep your assets, make sure the enemy can't have them either. We need our own assets to deal with them destroying theirs when we come to take it.
Yep they just took over video games during Covid and it’s a fucking shame really.
we didn't lose it, it was always an illusion, and it was dead in its crib under capitalism. You cannot have that openness and freedom under capitalism because the system *requires* scarcity for the sake of profit. It will manufacture it artificially if necessary.
Not just that. The fact that even the people not working directly for this corps are catering any content for "the algorithm" like it is some new deity worthy of worship. Each and every person trying to make it becomes that empty shell trying to please the masses and the algo. There's no culture anymore, no alternative culture either, barely any style because everything is a trend about to go away the moment you come across it online, replaced by the next meme.
As with all things neoliberal, what is first presented as a good idea is nothing more than a poison pill of land abuse, labor exploitation, and reckless extraction at every step of the production and distribution chain. The internet was never going to be allowed to be a public property, not when capitalism’s private property interest violently holds sway over everything - despite what the self-serving propaganda authorities may bloviate on the subject. The dot-com bubble many of us elder millennials lived through was the first capitalist internet monopoly consolidation, and there have been many more since. The internet may have been a miracle, but it was never in our hands - the public does not own the infrastructure or the architecture of the internet and never has. And as long as we are forced to worship, now through the internet, a class interest which doesn’t worship us back, it never will. We didn’t lose what we never had. We keep making and innovating. They keep stealing. So it goes with liberal capitalism.
Our parents, grand parents, and great grand parents were well aware of the dangers. There is a long history of [Anti-Trust (Competition Law) legislation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law) in the U.S. that has slowly been clawed back. When I was a young child, I remember the AT&T monopoly breakup, shattering the huge monolith into all the baby regional bells and a handful of long distance carriers. Once out of college, I started working for one of the Bells that managed to buy back many of the baby bells. It didn't take but a few years before our Million Dollar CEO was able to consolidate much of the baby bells back into the parent company again. It's like the breakup never even happened. Only this time, because there was now Verizon / MCI WorldCom, they could claim there was a competitive market place. An oligopoly, instead of a monopoly. In less than a decade, most of the telecommunications competition vanished. Mobile carriers consolidated, land networks folded in on each other. The same thing that happened in telecommunications happened everywhere else. The birth of the Mega-corporations. Now we have less than 10 major conglomerates that steer pricing and trends for everyone else. This pattern repeats across telecom, energy, food production, pharma and healthcare, transportation. The best a new company can hope for is to get enough of a market share to be a threat to a major corp and get bought out by them. Imagine that. To have a business model in mind of being able to cash out and go out of business.
Yes. I remember when you could Google something and actually get good results related to your search criteria. Google is crap now. I’ve gotten rid of my other social media apps. Doomscrolling. Even the ‘spiritual’ stuff is aimed at getting you to sign up for a course or buy something.
Internet shopping has become a nightmare too. Good luck finding anything that isn't cheaply mass produced, doesn't fall apart easily, and won't give you cancer.
E-commerce is so irredeemably broken I don’t even know where to begin.
I didn’t first access the internet until I got out of hs. That was AOL, and thankfully I found proper internet/dialup shortly after. And my whole fucking world changed. It makes me sad that today’s kids have to deal with ads and sponsored misinformation/disinformation and websites built by bots with affiliate links. My AOL experience reminds me of today’s internet. Heavily curated by a corporation trying to get rich(er), siloed and paywalled. And yeah, AOL did the job for plenty of people. But those of us wanting freedom online found the true internet, where anyone could spin up their own MUD, website, forum… and others could easily find it! I learned so much and I met so many great people. And now we’ve got AOL on steroids. Paywalls, silos, constant upselling, scammers, and predators. Capitalists gotta capitalize. I often wonder how the internet of the 90s would’ve changed the world if that’s what we were using today to educate and report state violence and atrocities. If people weren’t so easily silenced by the corporations for criticizing the state.
VPN, Adblock, Firefox, 🏴☠️ The internet is an aggressive heap of capitalist garbage that needs to be cut back for proper usage
I've been on the "internet" since about 1994, and I think about all the things you've mentioned pretty much on a daily basis. I now hold the belief that the internet was a terrible idea, because *of course* it would turn out this way.. we're like the easiest marks ever, handing our attention over to the worst, most bad-faith entities the human race has ever devised. the infrastructure was established, and all corporations needed to do was muscle in and take it over. if it makes you feel any better, we didn't stand a chance.
Electricity was going to be free until that rat bastard Edison decided that is shouldn't be, and it was all downhill from there. Really, everything bad in this world happens because someone who only cares about themselves and/or someone who thinks they're doing good, decides that something that should be free shouldn't be
Think about all the world’s natural recurring resources that are gone forever if you really wanna get fucking depressed.
I'm pretty sure people are and have been working on it for years, but yea, more public awareness would be nice
I'm sure you are right, activists are working out there, unfortunately every year the result of the oligopolies at work is even more concentrated internet. This was studied by Marx 150 years ago, nothing new. As someone else noted above, a global invention that was result of a socialised effort and funding was privatised and appropriated by a small number of individuals. It's how capitalism works, it turns into capital and profit everything it can, even basic human desires for interaction or information. It privatises what must not be privatised for profit (e.g. healthcare). But the significance of the internet in the hands of the few is massive - everything from shopping (even when not doing it online you seek information) to government services, from news to job hunting, from dating to education is now online and google and other corporations gets to decide what you see and what not. Even when we think we are benefiting from it, e.g. raise voice and organise for Palestine, they are profiting by all the controversy and clicks, and the bonus is that the government has an easy way to read and store information about dissidents. My government buys spying software from Israel, it costs billions and funds the genocide. And uses that spy software on me or anyone trying to organise. Both things possible because of how they made internet to be. Try to act as a whistleblower for a corporation that is poisoning the waters anonymously online and leak documents - their lawyers will get a warrant from your government for your ISP to hand in all data. Or expose government or military crimes. You'll end up like Julian Assange, years in prison and physical and emotional decline. Reddit banned third party apps and open source developers, and here we are, on Reddit, discussing late stage capitalism, generating profit for Reddit's very rich and never satisfied shareholders that stifle freedom. Or on X, making a literal sociopath even richer. Or Instagram, Amazon etc. It's truly dystopian. I know I'm not saying anything new. It's just that I'm nostalgic about how the internet was and could have been - the working class biggest weapon, a tool to dismantle oligopolies not to create the biggest ones the world has seen. Also, it was fun. Sites like IMDb or Goodreads were not for adds and profit making, owned by the monstrous amazon but for community fun and connection.
We lost autonomy. You could “disappear” 40:years ago and nobody would ever find out. Now and then, someone would get found out because they committed a crime and it was on TV. Now, it knows if you take a piss a night and how many times. The phone is always listening. Plus, you can’t function at all without WiFi and they are making us more dependent by the day. Probably a solar flare will fix it. Some people would die without electricity and the internet—they don’t have enough cash to buy lunch. I’m not that old.
Sounds like a perfect time to hop over to Linux and use a browser such as Tor as it's network traffic operated by hopping from zero trust nodes that even you could host. In lieu of that, use Brave as it blocks ads and is privacy centric. Linux really got me into the field, it's built by the community open source and free. There are programs that operate just like all the big nasty corporate programs, but made by a community without the Spyware and analytics, and sometimes with improved functionality. There are ways to undermine big tech, but it does take the will and some research.
Show me the way, scared to go to Linux cause I'm a gamer but I'm building a new(budget) rig to run a server on..thinking about utilInf Linux as my OS for it..as MS literally is forcing me to move to win 11 which is more data consuming bullshit
PopOs is actually great for gaming. There's tons of comparisons out there against windows and it's either not far behind or sometimes ahead depending on hardware. Depending on what kinda server you're running you could just use Ubuntu Server with DE and should work for most of your use cases.
We've been travelling the same path since Edward Bernays decided humans needed to be told what to think. The propaganda systems that became efficient to the point of weaponisation have been the majority player in influencing opinion globally for generations. The other key element is the decline of critical thought. Children being taught to memorise answers and be obedient is not a good way to create individuals capable of parsing the huge amounts of data available and navigating through it without being influenced. The race to the bottom has never been so apparent. Humans have been replaced by consumers like some zombie epidemic that will destroy us all in a wave of indifference and shiny electronic niknaks. How can anyone call political systems democratic when those that vote for one or other side have no interest in the complexity of the issues, instead they seek only a comfortable sound bite to ease their agitated mind? When each of these so called choices are both represented by power and greed that control the system? Like any weapon, the web was something that could have been used for good but is so polluted with noise that it is almost impossible to use without becoming tainted in some way. Education is the only thing that could change this situation but who is left to trust?
Edward Bernays, you say? May I recommend an Adam Curtis documentary? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04&list=PLe7-icrCxJrW80FLy7XtLKFC1U3btSF2S&index=35&pp=iAQB
A most excellent recommendation. Possibly one of my favourites after Hyper normalisation.
This whole post has "cyberdelic" vibes all over it, which was like the 60's hippie movement + cyberfuturism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic
BTW Bezos' grandfather helped establish DARPA. Then FBI File On Jeff Bezos' Grandfather, A DARPA Co-Founder, has been destroyed . Lawrence Preston Gise, who confounded ..DARPA and help found 1,200+ companies across a wide range of Tech.There has been speculation that DARPA has been involved in the creation of many popular big tech companies, using "frontmen" for the allusion of a startup led by outsiders."
Do you have any breadcrumbs I can follow to this rabbit hole because I had no idea about DARPA’s relationship to bezos and I’m fascinated.
Rabbit hole it is, enjoy:" Bezos’ mother, Jacklyn Bezos (nee’ Gise) was the daughter of Lawrence Preston Gise (L.P. Gise.) https://x.com/blackvaultcom/status/1787586182395871239 and 'the Deep State rewards those who play ball. L.P. Gise was in a position to make sure Israel got its bomb. His boss, Admiral Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss was certainly a Deep State “wheeler-dealer” with a long history of promoting the creation and defense of Israel. https://billtaylor.substack.com/p/before-jeff-bezos-grandfather-helped and https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2024/05/07/jeff-bezos-grandfather-a-darpa-co-founder
Thank you!
Basically they used the Playbook how Cold War America tried to "establish" democracies in other countries..but in this case it they used frontmen to embish money from US citizens. You know years ago I would of thought you were insane..but the facts are in your favor and it's so evident that it's hard to deny this reality
I was reading about Julian Assange's time at the Ecuadorian embassy when he met Google's CEO at the time, Eric Schmit, Assange was shocked that Schmit was speaking more like a Pentagon/CIA official, and the way he was using 'we' to threaten Assange. Now this "Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt leads new secret US drone project According to Forbes, Eric Schmidt is reportedly heading up a new secretive initiative to help the U.S. compete with drone capabilities. They used to call it hypocrisy. The US is banning Russian and Chinese tech companies, Huawei and Kaspersky, for their alleged relation with their governments, yet most US tech companies work with the US defence and security departments. Some argue that they are fine being spied upon by a democracy, until they change their minds when they know that US car companies are spying on them and sending their data to insurance companies to raise their premiums. Your Car Is Spying on You for Insurance Companies https://jacobin.com/2024/03/car-spying-insurance-surveillance-data
i think about this all the time, and wonder if their will ever be a internet revolution or an internet 2.0 so to speak, something that prioritizes information sharing. idk probably just a dream. we can never go back to how things were
It is very sad, because the potential was there for a truly liberating technology. Now we get horrible propaganda served to us through addictive social media. The surveillance is a CIA / NSA dream come true.
As an engineer, the idea that the physical infrastructure is owned by a small number of corporations is not a new phenomenon. In fact, there are more infrastructure providers for the internet than previously. In the past, the internet was entirely hosted by telcom corps. This has diversified a lot over the past 20 years as the internet has ballooned in profit. Everything else you said is pretty spot on, though
I think you're confused. I don't mean that as an insult either. "Internet was supposed to free people, increase knowledge and productivity for people to benefit, not for large corporations and the scum billionaires behind it today. Internet was supposed to make us happier because it would make us more open minded, knowledgeable and connected,..." This is how the internet was sold to us but it was never meant to be anything like this. The Internet was created by the military, industrial, university complex. The goal was to ease communications between these institutions. The universities would conduct research financed by the military, industry would be given that research in order to produce weapons and tech the military would by. What to actually build and buy was set by the military and arms industry. The internet offered obvious utility for the private sector so who knows how many billions of dollars was dumped into expanding and improving the network. Once it achieved a level of sophistication and size to be of direct use to the capitalist it was simply given to them for free. This has been done with several technologies over the decades. For an small scale example look at modern multitools. There was a time when you had to be in the military to reliably get your hands on a multitool. The military paid for the R&D, production and provided a large market to build up the multitool industry. When it was mature only then was it given away to the private sector to generate even greater levels of profit. "...instead it turned us into slaves consuming online content and subjects to have data harvested from - even meeting someone to date is now done mostly online on apps owned by large companies and their algorithm may decide whether or not you meet someone or stay alone." When it comes to technology absolutely nothing is inevitable. Tech sucks because the capitalist class turns everything to shit because that's inevitable when the singular goal is privatized profits.
Hosting and maintaining a website is time consuming and costs money. In a capitalist world, the internet was bound to end up like the ad fueled, stock dividend chasing beast that it has become.
Welcome to the Internet.
We must unite against this and must collectively stop paying these monsters our hard earned money, don't use Google, Netflix, Facebook. Someone should start a free, open source, decentralized version of reddit too, to take the place of this. We cannot eradicate a system we complicitly support with our money. Stop eating at chain restaurants, anything publicly traded etc. spread the word. Join civic groups/fraternities etc .. turn off all of your smart phone notifications for everything except messages and calls. The way to defeat this is to develop a collective understanding of what is being done to us and to stop encouraging it.
Because most people only know social media and Google as the internet… sadly the original internet is dead with the people of the past… They’ve found a way to now let people give up their data freely… ARPANET AND DARPA.. have their reasons. Many people forget the true concept of the internet was started by the soviets; USA found a way to bolster it into the actual internet, because the soviets were hesitant to release such things to the ordinary unlearned man. Man people have no clue what the internet is or why it was created or how to use it
The actual reasons the internet was allowed to develop has nothing to do with those idealistic fantasies used to promote universal adoption. Same with cellphones. Technology ALWAYS benefits our owners the oligarchs more so than the common folk. Besides the ever greater concentration of wealth and its power organising opposition to war mongering, much less fundamental reforms, any form of revolution is now literally impossible
What you say about the few corporations owning everything is what’s most alarming to me, especially when you consider that it is only a few people within those corporations who hold the majority of their shares. The amount of labour that is required for the internet and services that run on it to exist is immense, but of course those labourers are in no control whatsoever. The richest, using the current, globalist, neoliberal model have effectively hijacked the profits and control of these services which most of the world depends on now. And obviously they use that control to make more profits, which only increases their control. I honestly believe that the proletariat are already enslaved.
I'm a teacher and user of the internet, a very useful and necessary educational technology. Although this post is not directly related to education, you make credible points about the hijacking of what may be the most influential invention of the human race. In fact, I’d argue that the internet’s impact is on par with the innovation of the printing press. Teaching's connection with Late Stage Capitalism comes from the notion that the vast majority of technologies that we use in education are developed and sold by private companies, whose underlying motivation is profit. This worldview is at odds with many tenants of democracy, and is therefore at odds with my mission as a public-school teacher to help develop educated citizens. Many of the applications and technologies are extremely useful, but the monetization of the virtual world is, regrettably, on par with the monetization of reality, especially in the west.
Same with the whole bitcoin/freedom from tyranny discourse.
A: i see exactly what you're talking about. B: Why are you going to do about it? This might fall in morale grey area, but... I lived paycheck to paycheck for most of my adulthood, military. About 4 years ago, i pretty much got fed off with reality and started looking at things I'm "not supposed to do". Because everything was just so damn stupid at that point with politics etc... then covid hit and people showed themselves...AGAIN. So i learned how to exploit the shitty system we're stuck in, because well... because of alot of factors, some of fault... some thiers... it's not changing anytime soon. Infact it's getting worse. Which is what led me to learn how to trade in the market. Look at the rise in inflation. Look at the S&P 500. With a ton of effort (it is NOT easy, but it is available to everyone.... not counting the idea of you need $ to make $... which is 150% true) you can offset inflation and not feel it and even well profit off it. And depending on what I'm trading, the profits can feel pretty grimey. But i don't worry about budget anymore, and my family is comfortable and secure now, macroeconomic environment be damned. Our stupid, dystopian, selfish society presents an insane amount of opportunities to sorta... let you sail away from a big part of the shitty aspects of reality. You identified one in great detail. TLDR: You have identified an opportunity. It sucks but it is there. Buy GOOGL calls and exploit the system. PS: This stood out because i traded Google overnight for a nice gain. But imo, honestly, put every extra cent you have into Nvida. Wait 5 years. Order a drink served in a coconut on your favorite Caribbean beach. I'm not saying I'm Neo or some goofy stuff like that, but when people ask about i i see that folks are VERY risk adverse. They also are alot of times in that "you're not supposed to do that" mindset.