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.
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In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn’t really see it as being more broadly useful.
Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there’s just no way they could leave it out there, it’s too dangerous for them to do so.
Now I look at the thing we call “the internet” in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never “flipped the switch” on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.
The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never “flipped the switch” on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.
It’s death by a thousand cuts, and we’re not even at the death, yet. No matter how cut up and enervated the internet already is, the denial is present for those that refuse to see it or just don’t remember the time before the cuts. It’s even in this thread, basically wearing this face:
There didn’t even need to be a deliberate cartel for this to happen either.
Amazon realized it could make money and grow the company by offering cloud services and now AWS runs something like 30% of the internet.
Google turned their leading search algorithms into an extensive tracking and advertising platform that integrates with most of the internet.
Apple decided that people don’t need to be allowed to tinker with and repair their own devices so that hardware can be locked into a four-year cycle of planned obsolescence.
A whole bunch of profit-maximizing firms did the hard job of controlling everything for the governments.
The enshitification of all things is so frustrating. You witness perfectly useful technology being destroyed in the pursuit of like 5 dollars. I don’t answer the phone unless I’ve told someone to call me because it’s always a robot, my email inbox is full of garbage I didn’t ask for so I don’t check in much, now they’ve got robots texting me scams. I can’t even pay for petrol in peace, because they make a nickel having a tiny television try to sell me an energy drink. And nothing is done because heaven forefend that anything should come in the way of an extra .02% increase in some asshole’s quarterly report.
I was pumping gas a couple of weeks ago and that stupid TV came on and started playing ads at full blast. I stopped pumping, went inside, and pulled a Karen. I asked for the manager and then told him that I want someone to know that I’m never coming back to that station because it’s forcing ads on me when I’m already paying for a product. Then I left and will never go back. I know they don’t give a shit about one person, but if more people took these stands then we could stop having so much shit shoved down our throats.
I can’t in good conscience make a worker’s day worse because of something they don’t control, but I understand the sentiment. I agree though that collective action is probably our best shot at seeing change.
I wasn’t rude about it. I doubt it had any measurable impact on their day at all.
Yea, as long as you aren’t rude to the employee at all, you are good in my book.
If I was going to complain, I would start with something like, “Hey I know this isn’t your fault and you just work here, but can you tell your boss…” Not only will that let the employee know that it’s nothing personal, but the employee is more likely to bring it up to management.
The way I see it Steve Jobs marked a turning point with those Apple events. The corporate platitude bullshit with the “you told us and we listened” jargon. Before technology was mainly hobbyist nerds making stuff out of the love of technology. There was a two way relationship where the developers trusted the users and the users trusted the developers be acting in good faith. Now it’s lifeless and jaded beneath a veneer of forced corporate smiles. Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.
It’s an insult to our intelligence to push anti-patterns. All while expecting us to engage like sheep in the mandatory capitalist pep rally. ‘We made 20% efficiency to your oppressive experience. Now cheer! I said CHEER damn it’.
Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.
One of the posters in these replies, right now, is like an animated Steve Jobs turtleneck come to life trying to peddle hustlegrinds.
Now it’s up to you to take a shot at creating the next exciting thing. Aim high and give all you can to succeed.
if it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. this is just what capitalism does - monetize every single aspect of anything people enjoy.
But my great man theory!! 😫
Eh… He was a great marketer, but he didn’t usher in our current tech dystopia. I blame social media.
I blame Google. When the same company owns the most popular search engine, most widely-used browser, most popular email service, one of the largest video sharing platforms, and the largest online advertiser, that’s called a monopoly.
Our current tech dystopia has many facets and factors that went into creating it.
Jobs’ quest to simplify computing (great), unfortunately came along with a maniacal god complex and demand for control that led to Apple creating a monopolistic vertically integrated walled garden that stifles innovation and avoids competition. It’s the model that Google has increasingly pursued and is a part of why tech innovation has stalled out these days.
You can thank capitalism for this, back at the dawn of the internet it was largely just regular people running sites and building organic networks. Then the internet started getting commercialized, and the tech started turning increasingly user hostile and exploitative.
Corporations complain about how IOT was supposed to be the next big thing but it went bust. Meanwhile they are the ones who tried to use it intrude on everyones lives. Which is why no one wants it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
some goofball did a whole song about it
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
a classic
The death of this guy has to do with some of it, he worked on some pretty cool stuff and was an all-around pretty awesome dude working for the betterment of the world.
you mean the murder of this guy
miss him every day
I just ignore the news entirely and enjoy my little part of the internet with the people I like.
This is the correct method, my tiny corner of the internet with my friends playing games and chatting in ways we enjoy.
We use the internet for us, if I have to cut a huge swath of the internet in order to maintain my healthy space, I will.
Yeah but my corners were Reddit and Twitter…
Find a better corner, if I become dissatisfied with Lemmy, that’s exactly what I’ll do, it’s what I’ve done with reddit, Meta is next.
I’m really enjoying the fedi, but a return to the text and ANSI graphics and community of 93 BBS keeps calling me.
Hah, that’s part of what I want to do with z0rz.net
Godspeed with your effort.
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The ipad kid problem is mostly because parents don’t bother giving their kids attention.
Blaming individual parents and their consumer choices does absolutely nothing to solve a society-wide problem.
yeah you’re right
we’ve established pretty clearly by now that giving kids iPads makes it harder for them to learn
I work in a school, we got a box of ipads and I am interested in ho we established this.
I am convinced the ipads cannot help to learn anything better than a less expensive and open alternative could, but if I want to speak about that with colleagues or the head of school I need sources…
This is something I’ve thought was true for a while, but your comment made me go back and look for decent sources and while I found a few articles bemoaning tech in schools I also found a lot of good-looking scientific studies saying that it’s fine or even beneficial, so I deleted my comment.
AFAIK now, the negative outcomes are when it’s home schooling or COVID-era distance learning and the kid is only doing work on an ipad, so the problem isn’t the tech itself it’s the absence of a structured school environment with a teacher.
Millions, Billions even, of adults will learn and date and play with children in the Roblox metaverse if we don’t play IRL Minecraft
Funny I said the same thing in 1995.
The internet is what you make of it. Meaning, you don’t need the entire wide area network, you just need what you don’t want in your local area network.
In terms of an interconnected network, you need only what you need!
This is an amazing time. Lemmy, self hosting, docker, cloud hosting, $100 consumer devices that rival $10k servers from ten years ago, AI, LLM, global gaming, etc….
Yeah I’m with you. Just look at reddit. Enshitification has gone too far and it’s leading to decentralization. Here we are, after all.
I’m sure the streaming services are next. The nice thing about software tech is it is easy for folks to develop alternatives
100% + you can already see it on the fringes. The need for a server to stream content evaporates w/advancement in client-side compute. Why plex or jellyfin when you can do it all in the rendering layer?
Our interconnected network layers function because of open standards, with layers decoupling complexity up & down (sep of concerns) as well as left & right (standards that facilitate novel capabilities).
Out of curiosity, were you born roughly in the early 1990s? I asked because I could have written very much the same stuff as you, except shifted back 10 years. By the year 2000, in my view, the Internet was already locked down and was a completely shitty version of what I felt “the real Internet” was like. Technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s was (from my view) hopeful and optimistic, constantly getting better (computers doubling in speed and memory and getting cheaper every year), and by the early 2000s, it was just shitty AIM and MSN Messenger and Windows-only KaZaA garbage with MySpace and shitty centralization like that. MySpace completely shit all over the early web rings.
I’ve come to realize that it’s always been shitty. That’s my conclusion after going on a nostalgia trip and watching old Computer Chronicles shows and reading old computer articles from my golden age, now through adult glasses. I just didn’t understand all the politics and power manoeuvres at the time because I was a stupid kid who just saw cool things. Look at all the cool and exciting and great stuff that was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I thought was so wonderful, and realize that it was mostly just shitty attempts by shitty power-hungry companies trying to lock down something cooler that had happened earlier.
The difference in the early days I think is that companies wanted to control us and make our lives as terrible as possible. They just couldn’t because computers weren’t powerful enough yet.
Nah, I’m a Gen X’er. I agree that the internet in the 90’s was cool, but by the late 90’s, early 00’s it was a lot more polished and bandwidth was plentiful enough to actually get a lot of stuff done online without ridiculous wait times. After MySpace fell and Facebook took over, it was still pretty cool. It’s when Facebook established dominance over the web, sharing their shitty like buttons everywhere, Google started buying out cool companies and making their search engine worse, and blogs & forums started dying that I think the internet lost its soul.
@duncesplayed @Anticorp Or, as some people said at the time: “Windows '95 is Amiga '87.”
They just couldn’t because computers weren’t powerful enough yet
Yahoo and ISPs like AOL tried that. And were partly successful. Yahoo was the ‘literally’ the home page for 90% of Internet users. In India, ISPs were decentralized but it’s only JIO or Airtel now, if you 24x7 service and connectivity.
Enshittification my dear comrades.
Granted, the more academic term is known as rent-seeking. Even lib economists warn against this and is the source of so many ills of society.
Two exhaustively long comment chains in this thread so far insist that the problem is not enshittification but not enough passionate and innovative hustlegrinding.
Things that are hard to believe still exist:
- Linux
- VLC media player
- Pirate Bay (torrents/filesharing in general)
- hard drives
- google earth
Being a somewhat tech illiterate millennial (only knows how to navigate windows and passed a data structures class) it feels like any of these things could be eventually taken out next (probably not Linux just because it’d be the hardest)
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if they found a way to monetize hard drives into a subscription based storage service
Mostly I don’t understand much, but I know that I witnessed the internet turn from a fast clickable diverse wonderland to a place dominated by 6 websites which take up 4GB RAM to run, followed by the further decline of youtube (started going for ADHD related results in 2011), google (search results started sucking in 2019) and reddit (mods started getting banhappy in 2020)
Welcome to capitalism
Now go home?
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.
I read it as: ‘They embraced, extended and extinguished what you held dear’.
Exactly.
It’s not just the Internet, it’s all technology. In the 90s, there was sort of excitement over anything new coming to the market. Now it’s ”oh good, new tech for our overlords to somehow screw us with”. Doesn’t help that back then there were a hell of a lot more true technological progress, just look at what a PC was like in 1990 compared to 1999.
