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.
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….
In the meanwhile, EU legislation has gone from being so boring you would prefer to watch the grass grow to making headlines that make you smile.
Ironically, farmers, the people most interested and invested into watching grass grow, has benefited greatly from EU agriculture subsidiaries in the past.
What about the people who watch paint dry? Surely the EU has their back covered too.
Nah, that’s what the paint is for…
I’ve been using Linux for decades and I don’t use the big tech sites much. I get excited about a new release of Gnome or KDE or some cool command line utility…
Because you are right, the web is taken over and they want to turn it into cable TV subscriptions for sites and verified internet accounts etc.
The goals of the security agencies and the goals of the big tech ad agencies go hand in hand. None of them care about the users, and both of them just wants the user data, as much as possible.
I think using tech like Lemmy and Matrix gets us away from all of that shit, and it’s good enough these days for anyone to use without too much trouble.
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.
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.
A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They’ll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.
The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it…and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.
Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people’s lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you’ll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.
Part of that is just experience. We’ve lived though a few ‘revolutions’ for which the net effect was…arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they’re bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn’t there before.
And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn’t there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.
I think ever since I came here, it was with the same message: the time for postmodern cynicism where nothing ever matters is over, it’s time to embrace a new sincerity, a return to a more human Internet we imagined from yester-year, while still acknowledging the the advancement and progress that happened during the Web 2.0 era.
And I think the Fediverse, decentralized social media to something more akin to the various independent forums and blogs that still has all the advantages of centralization, is the start of something beautiful.
Let me tell you, that fear is warranted even at 22. Not even primarily just AI, but anything that has a connection with mass data harvesting
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.
In my teenage years, the Internet was my favorite escape from the horribleness of my offline life. I thought it would always remain so, so decided to start a career in software engineering because that would be an improvement to the world.
Now that I haven’t been a teenager for nearly ten years, often enough the Internet is actively bad for my mental health and I have to get away from it to improve my mood. I have no interest in participating in propaganda wars.
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
Welcome to capitalism
Now go home?
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’.
Eh… He was a great marketer, but he didn’t usher in our current tech dystopia. I blame social media.
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.
We are in a new phase and what you call stagnation is actually the maturity and stability of the internet that is spawning new services at the moment. For example:
Logistics are coming online. Loading lists, import/export paperwork, scheduling your truck unloading time from your smartphone. Lots of saas startups in that area.
Factories are coming online. Scheduling production across factories/countries on a single product level is still sci-fi, but they are working on it.
Trades are coming online. Billing software, planning, documentation. Each sector has their own ways to get accelerated and now they see value in it.
Plenty of stuff that was happening in excel sheets is replaced with a tailored web services which are content aware and allow live data entry/analysis from multiple end points.
There is so much work to be done. Universal availability and reliability of data centers, mobile networks, fibre connections were the backbone neccessary to build the next generation of services. They are in the making.
Yes there have been a lot of improvements to the way businesses operate due to the internet. I love how banking has changed, internet shopping, remote work, and all of that kind of stuff. I think that’s kind of separate from what I’m talking about though. I suppose I should have said the World Wide Web and not the internet, specially the WWW as used by individuals and groups for communication and sharing.
I actually despise the way banking has changed. Elder people, barely familiar with making calls from a mobile phone, are expected to use their phone banking app as a security token, to say something that happens every day. And that’s talking about people that can actually afford a mobile phone with internet access.
Old people can still go into the branch if that’s more their speed, assuming there are still any branches around. My credit union shut the local branch down and opened up some stupid branch that doesn’t even have cash on hand.
In theory, yes they can, in practice employees and elder people don’t work very well together, and these employers are there just for appearances.
And that’s why I don’t even nearly love how banking has changed. Cash is going away, the only private and widely accepted way to pay privately.
And the phone apps. Yeah, they work if you are running an approved OS. Debloated android? Linux phones? Forget about it, even if it would work, it will deny operation.
Who knows what this new money will do with the old ad-financed entertainment parts of the internet. VR/AR could actually get a second chance and maybe “smart” devices more usefulness than spamming ads. I hope cities and municipalities discover their role as online activity promoters for offline life.
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.
Internet was ruined with the rise of smartphones. Every dumb Karen and her friends started to post on the internet. With PC it was somewhat barrier for idiots. Pre social media times were the best. Nowadays idiots rule the internet.
I would argue it was ruined once social media companies found out how to monetize data. Facebook and MySpace were huuuuuge back before smartphones existed, and using a PC was actually not that huge of a hurdle for surfing the web. It was when companies went “oh shit, we can sell user data to market ads” that they all scrambled to make things easier to use and adopt.
AOL.com ruined the internet!
old man screams at cloud
Currently use the internet for Steam, Lemmy and streaming I cut down from Gigabit to 12mbps because I just don’t use it any more.
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.