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Technology
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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.
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:![emoji this-is-fine this-is-fine](https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/a7983510-a3d7-4586-be32-28edeb143334.gif)
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.