Cyberpunk

I miss this internet so much, as usual capitalism ruins everything.

I’m still optimistic about it. Sure, there’s plenty of shitty capitalist bullshit, but that’s no different than the real world. There’s always been, and always will be, places like Lemmy or Tumblr or Mastodon or whatever where you can mostly get away from that. Places where delightfully weird people get together to talk about whatever hobbies or interests they have.

No matter what Twitter or Facebook or Google do, they can’t take those away, and often they can’t even intrude upon them.

I miss the techno-utopianism of the 90s. I think it was built on naivete - we had no idea how capitalism worked, and the absolute hunger investors have for new markets.

One of the original sins of that utopianism was saying everything should be free (as in have no cost). So many of our current problems stem from how we refused to pay for stuff. News is a great example:

• journalists must be paid to do good work;
• so "free" news sites get their money from nefarious sources.

To be fair, part of that was because we had a hard time figuring out how to charge users for stuff. Newspapers gave their content away because they didn't have the technical acumen to set up a reasonably billing service. But I digress.

When we pushed the techno-utopia, we kind of forgot that people need to eat, and we pushed pushed pushed the idea that services shouldn't have a cost. And here we are: real journalism is hard to come by, while agenda-based drek is the default.

You made me feel old, calling Machinae Supremacy “a band at the time”.. I thought nah that can’t be right, that era wasn’t that long ago, surely? So I looked up when Overworld came out and it was 17 years ago. Oh.

I sorely miss that optimistic, anarchistic (and anarchic) old internet. But the older and more cynical I get, the more I have a deep-seated suspicion that the powers that be actively encouraged this early adopter hype-optimism, knowing they’d be able to lock us in to more exploitative forms later.

It’s a bit later in the timeline, but I also see that in the world of design language and HCI: the abrupt shift from skeuomorphic “Fruitger Aero” to soulless, flat “Material Design” encapsulates this feeling of being ensnared, of having the jail bars slam down shut behind you, in a more visual way.

Late 30s, so optimism was part of my introduction to the internet

I still joke that the tubes are clogged when the internet is going slow.

At least in part, the early internet was only accessible to people who wanted to access it (nerds), so nerds controlled the online culture for a long time. The democratization and onlinization of everyone through things like memes and social media has lowered the standard of participation

lmao i can still hear ted stevens' voice

This piece was in my feed right near this thread, as it happens. Seems to be approaching the same issue from a different direction.

I think there is a path forward where the internet and the content on it are sufficiently commoditized that the costs become trivial to average people, like the cost of running an LED at night, and so monied interests move into other areas like robotics and the internet begins to drift back toward the idealized vision mentioned in this post.

I doubt it will ever drift all the way back, but it is getting super cheap to run edge compute and store data on the cloud.

It's getting increasingly cheap to write code with LLMs too, and if that continues to evolve at the rate it's going then users are not going to feel locked into their big-name platform of choice anymore. Porting from Apple to Google to Microsoft to Amazon to Self-Hosted etc, will be a lower and lower bar with fewer and fewer barriers for the average user, making for a hint of that old wild frontier feeling online again.

I'll just add that the "series of tubes" comment was more fair than it's been made out to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

And for the layman, especially 20-years ago, the quote is relatable. I disagreed with his stance on net neutrality, but it wasn't a dumb thing to say.

And BTW, no that the GOP has trashed net neutrality, I have yet to see the dire effects we all talked about. What happened?