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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

There was a scene of very well-meaning academics and young people in Cambridge around the Free Software/Free Culture movement and the Berkman Center in the early/mid/late 00's. There was a lot of idealism and a belief that digital interconnectedness was going to change the world for good. At the time, it was really fun and inspiring to be a part of.

I realize now that the leaders/notables of the movement were, for the most part, morally bankrupt careerists who all went to work in surveillance advertising. The worst are the lawyers but lots of the hackers are just as bad. The academics and activists moved from digital rights issues to identity social justice issues when it became trendy. Nobody gives a fuck about digital rights any more, if they ever did to begin with, and the only people who are left behind are embarrassingly out of touch with the real state of affairs.

I no longer think that the internet is a force for good in the world.

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We tend to overestimate the impact of technologies in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. The Internet visionaries overestimated how rapidly the Internet would change the status quo. Instead the status quo came and colonized the Internet. The night is young though, and we have generations coming up right now that don't know what one-way broadcast media even is. The printing press took a long time to totally transform society, but transform it it did. Society changes much more slowly than technology.

I personally think we are living through the "Empire Strikes Back" period -- a period where the conventional powers (political think tanks, advertisers, ideological and state propagandists, etc.) have learned to attack the Internet using its own systems (social media, forums, memes, etc.) and the Internet hasn't yet learned how to defend itself. This is probably peaking now with "peak social" and the explosion of hip and effective social media based state and political propaganda. I don't know what "Return of the Jedi" will look like, but I think it's likely coming. Some of the problems that need to be solved are technical but many are just a matter of people learning how to mentally filter BS in the new Internet era.

I'd like to think that, but I don't. I haven't seen any evidence for any meaningful resistance. I think it's very possible that the internet will just continue to get worse and worse and worse. It's already worse than television ever was.

The only real resistance I can think is Tor, but it turns out that the cost of being able to buy psychedelics online is global child rape gangs and a nationwide Fentanyl problem. Not a great trade off, in my opinion.

I don't see any technological way out of this mess.

We are still in the Microsoft era of social media; people using the major platforms out of inertia and network lock-in. But there's no reason to believe the next generation of digital natives will have any such inertia, and could easily adopt distributed protocols over centralized walled-garden platforms.

> I don't see any technological way out of this mess.

In another 10 years computers may be fast enough to make No Code actually viable at scale, which will enable entirely different types of people to start making things for the first time.

And even failing that, we now have muppets teaching 3-year-olds the basics of coding. Not everyone is going to know how to code in 20 years, but the percentage of new high school graduates who can make a webpage might be comparable to the percentage who can read.

The basic reason the tech industry is fucked up is that the FAANG companies have a monopoly on discovery right now. But that's not going to last forever.

> It's already worse than television ever was.

You have a myopic view of the internet. I don't use any social media. Unless you consider hn or Reddit that. And I run ad blocker. I spend most of my entertainment, educational, and social interaction budget on the internet. The internet is ducking amazing. I could never publish on tv. I could never consume what normal people published, unfiltered by FCC /network execs/advertisers.

The internet is not social media. Social media is "the masses", the mainstream. And regardless of platform those always suck, banal, lowest common denominator, and manipulated for profit or power.

Checkout of the mainstream, not the internet.

The irony is that the technical architectures with which the Internet can defend itself existed in the early 90's already.

My generation's despair was watching them being supplanted by the social media companies who provided platforms with a fraction of the capabilities and none of the user empowerment.

It's never too late to go back to federated architectures.

Will take this as an exercise to reader. What is the equivalent of leaking the battlestation construction site location and defense system and an appropriately authorized vehicle perfect for a first strike special ops force while having your starfleet and a ground legion lying in wait.

Conveniently forget about the indigenous population that hates you and can be co-opted by the special ops into the defenses take-down.

And, for talent recruitment purposes, the dear leader invites a known mind-hacker and terrorist pilot into his battlestation office with a view, sends the guards home early (because confidentiality) and offers the temptations that come with a weapon and concerns for friends and family.

Lesson: Malicious leaks in a quest for galactic domination may backfire, as may insider threats if you're not careful.

Need more Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.

Edit addition: Lesson 2, don't double down on failed moonshoots

Somewhat agree. I've been getting back into blogs and personal websites - some of this is categorized under 'indieweb'. There is a lot of good work being done out there, great conversations going on, strange and wonderful new hobbyists.

But I don't know if the Web - or the digital rights movement or Occupy or meme culture or whatever your personal fancy is - will ever be retaken. There's space for an underground now - which is good enough for me. Perhaps better than trying to fit all of mainstream society in. And maybe social networks can stay - as a kind of fly paper.

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