this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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Wow that a whole lot of several different things jammed together. This thesis would make a good article or book but as a shower thought it doesn’t really stand on its own.
Sorry, it was really just a shower thought. I was thinking of two things: 1. the hopes that were placed in the Internet have, in my opinion, not materialized at all. Of course, there are many positive effects, but on the whole, the Internet has by no means lived up to its potential. 2. we are now faced with a situation where large corporations control most of the internet used by the general public. This brings with it responsibilities that I don't believe these corporations are living up to in any way. Hence the analogy with climate change: a change for the better would probably be possible, but there can be no solution as long as those who are largely responsible do not accept their responsibility. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this will never happen.
I see it a little differently. I think the internet has lived up to and exceeded its potential. It’s done things we couldn’t even have thought of back in the beginning. Or course as it grew, it became no longer just the playground of academics, scientists, and creatives. It now has huge commercial regions and is as mainstream as any other medium. It’s no longer solely a cool place where cool people are doing cool things. It is now also playing a role much like television for a bunch of dumb masses to be shown commercials by corporations.
What’s worse is the unimagined downsides. Election misinformation. Hate group echo chambers. Terrorists using it to organize. We failed to imagine these things back in 1992 but maybe that really is just a failure of our imaginations, not the internet. I remember the heady dreams of democratization and universal access to quality information. It was all pretty naive. There were people who imagined television technology would be used for in-home education, too.
But the bad stuff doesn’t erase the cool stuff. It is still enabling creativity and science, arguably moreso than the halcyon days of HTML 1.0. Did any of us ever imagine in 1992 that thousands of scientists could use images from hundreds of locations around the world to construct an image of a black hole, sharing data, tools, code, and ultimately the image itself over the internet? It’s just wild. Remote surgeries, AI, self driving cars, tracker tags, home automation… it all runs on the internet. A lot of it is scary, but it’s also fascinating and far beyond what we imagined 30 years ago.
We used to talk about video conferencing like some far off future. Just because now we see it as mundane doesn’t mean the internet didn’t deliver on its potential. It delivered, and more. We just forget how cool a lot of it is, we were dumb to think it would be nothing but roses, and it’s changing life so much that it’s getting a bit scary.
But didn’t live up to its potential? Nah.
So I don’t really even see your posited problem, and this makes it hard for me to understand your point about a solution. I guess “corporations bad and no one will fix it,” is the bottom line? Well, that has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with capitalism. It’s the worst system there is, except all the others that have ever been tried. If you have any new ideas, we could sure use them.
You are of course absolutely right that there has been remarkable technical progress. I also completely agree with you that there have been wonderful developments in terms of the accessibility of knowledge, for example. Nevertheless, I still don't think that the internet has, on the whole, lived up to its full potential. What brings me to this assessment is that instead of having an equalizing effect, I think the Internet has created global monopolies that are now managed by just a few, all the more powerful companies (Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, etc.). I don't mean that all companies are bad or that it's not legitimate to make money on the Internet, but that a few companies have become so powerful that they basically no longer allow any competition in their industries. In my opinion, this is a consequence of capitalist market logic (an unregulated market will always produce monopolies) - and this logic is in turn reinforced by the network effects of the Internet (once a platform is the biggest, it will become bigger and bigger because it has the most utility). So I come to the conclusion that the internet has become more of a dystopia: I think it has even increased the centralization of economic power and thus inequality in our capitalist system. This is not to say that I don't see the good sides. But I think that technological developments should not be viewed separately from the logic in which they are embedded. And this is where I see the problem: the Internet is no longer a free medium with equal opportunities for everyone who can make use of it, but an (easier-to-use) platform economy, at least in the parts that are used by the masses. I don't have a godfather solution for this, just as I don't have one for effective measures to combat climate change. However, I think that nothing can change significantly in either case as long as the logic of excessive profit maximization continues to dominate. Or to put it another way: I fear that all the efforts of committed individuals will not succeed if we simply carry on as before - if it were otherwise, the utopia of the early Internet would have been realized long ago. That is of course a pessimistic view, but unfortunately I think it is also a realistic one. Nevertheless, I don't want to say that it's not sensible and worthy of all honors if everyone tries to do their part. After all that's why I'm here on Lemmy and not on Reddit.
The internet probably offers more opportunity to a small solo operator than ever before. I’m not sure what your memories of the early 90s were but it was not easy to set up a website and forget about an online store. Nowadays there are incredible tools for this and a million flowers are blossoming. The fact that corporations also profit from this doesn’t negate it.
I grew up in a time when 3 companies controlled virtually all the news media. The fact that a tweet can now sweep the world literally IS the “democratized” future we always dreamed about.