
The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control - kimburgess
http://lab.cccb.org/en/renata-avila-the-internet-of-creation-disappeared-now-we-have-the-internet-of-surveillance-and-control/
======
aww_dang
I skimmed the comments here. Then I skimmed the article.

Getting out there and developing the sites/apps you want to see will bring
change. Be proactive. Be the change you want to see.

The article is about a lawyer arguing for 'justice' through highly politicized
language. YMMV, but I don't think "The Internet of creation" was hindered for
want of lawyers, lobbyists or regulations.

Similarly, sitting on the sidelines and impotently lamenting the state of the
Internet today doesn't help. While this isn't detrimental in the direct sense,
it is detrimental if the prevailing belief is that changing the current
paradigm is impossible.

Creators are still active. New niches for content are still emerging.
Entrenched sites/apps are not immortal. Nothing is impossible. It all starts
with individual action, one developer at a time. Don't become hypnotized by
the bigness of institutions. We've seen solo developers release sea changing
software before. Be the change you want to see.

~~~
eitland
> Getting out there and developing the sites/apps you want to see will bring
> change. Be proactive. Be the change you want to see.

I now have my own stupid blog again[0] trying to add some good old fun and
weirdness to the web along with some hopefully useful or thought-provoking
posts in between.

I wish we could have a thread (possibly even a monthly thread here, like who
is hiring) where people could mention their blogs, web sites etc.

Back when Google+ arrived we did that and I followed a number of interesting
people from HN based on that I think.

Maybe it could help us rebuild a mini web of interesting blogs, websites etc.

Me, I'd be particularly interested in linking to pages related to electronics,
programming, outdoors (but not slick "travel" blogs) etc. A little politics
OK, but not much.

[0]: link in profile should anyone be interested.

~~~
kickscondor
Occasionally there is a thread for this (about every 6 months) and it also
happens in the comments spontaneously (such as on this post.) Here's another
example:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362319)

I try to compile the sites that people list here:
[https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/](https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/)
I will obviously be mining this thread. ;D

~~~
indigochill
I have a quirky and sparse personal page, but people are welcome to look at it
if they want to. I'm playing with a concept of presenting a personal site as
interactive (non?)fiction as an alternative to the expectations we have of
website UI. It may be counterproductive, but it's playful. And open source!

[https://maxsond.github.io/](https://maxsond.github.io/)

~~~
eitland
Nice!

------
stuart78
I think of this issue in a much more mundane way all the time. When looking
for product reviews, for example, the top results are, in my experience,
unusable. A search for espresso machine reviews returns SEO driven results,
and even the more genuine-looking results (sorry BusinessInsider, but I don't
need your input) seem to exclusively list products which the site manager can
get a referral link for. I don't mind the idea of referral links in theory,
but what happens to the entry that would be #1 except for not being available
on Amazon?

I don't know that there was ever a golden age of espresso machine reviews
online, but I do think that my trust in the quality of information I find
through general searches has dramatically fallen in the last ten years. I
imagine there is a Facebook group that might have better perspectives, or
'Coffee Twitter', but neither of those are easy to discover through Google,
and multiplying my search area across them all (reddit too, I suppose) gets
burdensome quickly.

So I'm not sure that the internet of creation has disappeared as much as it
may have become hidden. Either within walled gardens or by the
professionalization of page rank by SEO pros (against whom Joe's coffee corner
cannot hope to compete).

Either way, search suggests a much less creative internet than might actually
be there.

~~~
fossuser
My default for those kinds of queries now is “<item> reddit”. Google results
are generally poor otherwise. I’m not sure if this is because their algorithms
are gamed or if it’s just because the internet outside of the main website
hubs is just generally low quality (most high quality content has moved to
hubs like reddit).

~~~
mc32
It’s s sad state of affairs for product search. I do the same (site:reddit)
and I’m almost certain most people do too.

Google search I guess is good for entertainment search or “buzzy” things like
whatever is trending on the trendsetting social networks of the day, but
regular search is too spammy and farmed stuff. Often it’s junk.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I don’t think most people do, because if they did, Reddit would also be gamed.

~~~
dceddia
Not saying it is, but, how would you know it isn't?

I imagine that either "they" (the advertisers/companies) have either already
figured this out and are learning how to leave grassroots-looking comments, or
they will pretty soon.

~~~
MiroF
I think it's more the bot upvoting comments that happen to be favorable to
your product than actually leaving fake comments.

------
JohnJamesRambo
Normal people finally got on the internet and the average person can’t create
shit. All they can do is bitch and moan, be horrible to others, and be
surveilled and controlled. And that’s what we got.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

~~~
soulofmischief
A slightly different take on Eternal September:

In the old days, when you joined a community it could be very insular. That's
okay, there were communities for everything and everyone. So you had to read
the rules, learn the lingo, and shut up and lurk for a while so you didn't
invoke the wrath of the mods. Or you were gone.

Anti-social, attention-seeking, spammy, obnoxious or controlling behavior was
simply not tolerated. What right did you have to come into another's home and
begin making demands as to how they live their lives?

All of that has changed. The above behaviors are the new norm, thanks to the
simultaneous nature of the walled gardens of social media and the fact that
the walls are low enough that everyone can see into your garden.

Suddenly you have nosy neighbors saying, "Hey, I'll be honest, that crabgrass
in your lawn is making it harder to appreciate the beauty of my own lawn.
Maybe you should clean it up, _everyone else is doing it, so you must be anti-
social if you don 't_.

The entire meaning of the word "anti-social" has completely changed. I would
consider most modern online communities to be extremely anti-social.

The only answer is a return to form, going back to individual communities
where we can more freely express our opinions, just making sure to network our
communities in such a way that compassion and sincerity flourish, and we don't
just return to the echo chambers of the 90's (they did exist!).

~~~
theNJR
The reason most the web has been neutered is why Hacker News is so
great.[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20032259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20032259)

~~~
Krasnol
/s?

There are strong opinions here on certain topics that are not to be crossed or
you'll be punished by the upper class that is allowed to downvote. A class
that has established itself by following those opinions.

Also "newb-style" talk is not welcome also.

This is just as elitist as your average "scene" board these days. Not great
not terrible.

~~~
soulofmischief
Parent misses the point. Hacker News is an example of what one specimen in a
healthy ecosystem of forums would look like.

However, we do not have a healthy ecosystem, and as such Hacker News comes off
as oppressive to those with outlier opinions, because another forum of equal
quality (both content and diversity of users), similar size and a similar
topic of discourse doesn't really exist. Being banished from HN means being
banished from what some consider to be the upper echelons of discussion around
the tech and startup scene.

~~~
theNJR
That's the nature of large groups of people though.

If the outlier opinions have merit, shouldn't there be a forum for their
expression?

~~~
soulofmischief
I can only post 4 comments every two or so hours, effectively prohibiting me
from most of the fast-paced front page discussion and overall prohibiting me
from engaging.

Why? Because I likened whale poaching to genocide [0]. I didn't even believe I
was sharing a controversial opinion, because apparently that is starting a
flame war and I've been warned for it before after asking a relatively simple
(and apparently naive) question about black holes and getting engaged by a
vitriolic and hateful user who kept flagging me while simultaneously calling
me names and hurling insults.

But here I am, because Reddit is garbage, 4chan has melted, and niche forums
are dying and the bulk of communication is no longer taking place within them.
And there are so many amazing and talented people to draw inspiration from on
HN.

In my town's local subreddit, I am similarly severely limited to a few posts
every couple of hours, because I voiced the opinion in what is apparently a
majority conservative subreddit that someone was making racist, unempathetic
comments regarding black people and pitbulls.

I'm considering going back to a bunch of email lists...

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20326029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20326029)

------
n-exploit
This is the first time I have heard of a "tech crisis" \- and I think it's
appropriate. I think we, as industry leaders, need to accept and address our
faults and shadows. The first step to progress is to admit that you need help.

~~~
majjam
Hi, my name is FAANG and I’m addicted to money

~~~
rkho
Hi I'm a short-term mentality shareholder and I'm also addicted to money

~~~
gerbilly
Hi, I'm an end user who refuses to pay for software.

Why should I when all the tools I need are online for free?

~~~
user5284
Hi, I'm a Alexa paying end user and I'm surveilled anyway. I've paid for my
smatrtv and I'm being aurveilled. I've paid for cable and they told me there
where be less ass and more quality shows. Well I'm maybe wrong but people not
paying are looking smarter than me

~~~
chrisweekly
"ass" -> ads, right?

------
mcv
The Internet of creation is still out there. There are plenty of places on the
internet where people make cool stuff. Even YouTube is still a hotbed of
creation, despite the platform growing more hostile to it.

It's just that next to the internet of creation, there's also a big corporate
internet now, and it's pulling in a lot of people and trying to stake claims
in parts of the internet of creation. But creation is still thriving.

------
greggman2
> the Internet promised to be a democratising place to be turned to in the
> flight from the inequalities of the analogue world.

Okay, maybe that didn't work out so well

> It was presented to us a field in which to find freedoms, boundless creation

Mostly yes. People are instagraming, tiktoking, youtubing, blogging, open-
sourcing, unity-unrealing, more people are creating more things than ever
before.

> communication that transcended frontiers

Totally true. I talk to friends all over the world. Participate on HN,
discourse, discord, slack, email, facebook, etc and it's all free. Some of it
sponsored but much of it just plain free, run by volunteers.

> and free education for all.

Pretty much true. What can't I learn about for free online? Pick nearly any
topic and there are youtube channels, blog posts, articles, etc all for free
on how to do pretty much anything.

------
firefoxd
The internet of creation? You literally cannot think of an idea that someone
hasn't built a website for. And then someone see those websites and say, "well
theirs sucks, mine will be better" and they build their own.

It has never been easier to create something online. I ride with random people
on a shared ride and they give me a card with a website they created
themselves. It's ugly, it's crappy, but it's exactly in the spirit of the
internet of creation.

People who created in the 90s were a minority, a small percentage of the total
connected. Today, this percentage continues to grow. Though it is still the
minority.

~~~
j45
There might have been a minority of creators, but there was far less to
consume compared to today.

The creators in the 90s created because there was very little to consume
compared to today. When the creators of the 90s were kids they didn’t consume,
because there was little to anything to consume. But creating software was
limitless.

Creating content in someone’s platform is different than creating your own
HTML experience. Both are relevant... but the percentage of creation should be
a default skill of all users beyond working for companies for free to create
user generated content to sell.

------
codesushi42
The title says it all.

The Internet used to be about building and sharing things. Then it turned into
a giant and mindless message feed where everyone exposes everything about
their private lives, intentionally or not.

Now all of the hot new opportunities that exist are to spy on and exploit that
data. The latest AI hype is a consequence of the pervasiveness of "big data".

I miss building and sharing cool things instead with the online community.

~~~
Frost1x
Part of that was a higher barrier to entry to push content online. It wasn't
hard per se but it wasn't easy.

Now, my 5 year old nephew can do it. Before, it took dedication and creativity
to put something together. It's now more difficult to find needles in the
haystack.

~~~
codesushi42
Indeed.

Now all of the infrastructure is built. Oversaturated and consolidated.

At least the game dev scene is vibrant, even if overcrowded.

------
silveroriole
I like to fantasise about invite-only internet ‘shards’ off the main internet.
Each shard would have a maximum capacity, and that capacity would be small
enough that someone could create an index of every page in the shard. You
could only be a member of one shard at a time. Shards wouldn’t be topic-based,
they’re just deliberately small communities. Like the “mosaic of subculture”
and “community of 7000” in A Pattern Language.

Yeah we thought it was great that the internet could connect us to anyone, but
it turns out that I only liked that as long as “anyone” was likely to be
someone similar to me. Now that “anyone” is more likely to be a brand, an
advertiser or an influencer tween... no thanks.

~~~
pmlnr
There's already a system for it:
[https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/)

~~~
silveroriole
Interesting, I hadn’t heard of that - sounds quite similar to Mastodon? I wish
they weren’t social networks based around identities, friends and sequences of
posts, though. I would much prefer sites and pages to be the primary thing. I
don’t like the kind of content that social media encourages, even
decentralised social media.

~~~
mxuribe
Have you considered/looked into Indieweb[0] concepts? While one could argue
that it is a sorta type of decentralized "social media"...i would argue that
it simply is "sites and pages"...But that can be somewhat be connected to
other sites in a loose, decentralized manner - but only if you desire to be
connected. Not sure that indieweb is exactly what you seek. But, have a look
and see. Good luck!

[0] [https://indieweb.org](https://indieweb.org)

------
idoubtit
The way most people act on internet has changed dramatically. Web users are
usually consumers, and web "creators" are often standard sellers. People got
used to the fact the sites are there to attract them in a race for attention.

An anecdotal evidence: circa 2000, I published an old French dictionary. I
received thousands of emails about it during the first years. Some people just
asked about a word, or send their thanks, or noticed some kind of error.
Nowadays, the number of visits hasn't changed, but almost nobody sends email.
I probably wouldn't answer them anyway. I believe this is an side-effect of a
larger change. Maybe writing email is now a harder task. Maybe people aren't
used to non-promotion sites outside Wikipedia.

~~~
neilalexander
In the past it was much easier to attribute a website to a single person or a
small group of people, and maybe they were able to publish contact details
like email addresses without fear of them being harvested and spammed.
Websites didn't really have comments sections so often so the reliable method
for feedback was email.

Maybe email was also a lot less tedious back then - it strikes me that these
days the main purposes of email accounts are to allow registration with other
online services and to hold the huge amount of spam that usually happens as a
result of registering for online services.

I don't know many people my age (Gen-Y) who would even dream of using their
personal email accounts to actually communicate with actual people outside of
places where it is strictly required (like applying for jobs), even less so
their friends. They're too used to services run by corporate giants (like
FAANG) and are being trained to interact in very specific ways, e.g. in direct
messages in apps, in the comments sections or through "Like" and "reactions"
buttons.

------
api
I am glad this is being generally realized and people are no longer pretending
the status quo is fine. It's the first step toward changing things.

~~~
shadowgovt
I don't know. Given that the free internet gave us the likes of 4chan, things
are changing in the other direction for a reason. It's kind of unclear to me
whether the pendulum is ready to swing back towards lack of oversight again.

~~~
asteli
I think there's an argument that the consolidated internet caused 4chan to
morph from a benign imageboard to the relative monster it is today. 4chan
didn't start as a cancer, it became that way when all the 'normies' left for
reddit|facebook|twitter.

~~~
tomatotomato37
It's actually kinda the opposite, 4chan traffic more than doubled[0] (with a
matching decrease in quality) after gamergate and the election, and there is a
general consensus that it's going to get worse when the next election ramps up

[0][https://s2.desu-
usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1543/01/154...](https://s2.desu-
usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1543/01/1543019932974.png)

------
davidjnelson
Thank goodness for GitHub, it’s pure creative bliss and it’s growing obscenely
fast.

------
cookie_monsta
The internet is awesome. It's those goddamn users that is the problem.

------
ziggomat
Bit ironic that all of these articles about how the internet has lost its
creativity is always on boring yet slick graphic-designer-cum-ux-designer-in-
metropolis looking website.

------
dougmwne
Today I tried to read a few links off HN and hit endless paywalls and ad
infestations, all for a paragraph of fluff. I logged onto Facebook and my feed
was crowded out with promoted posts and memes. I went on Reddit and the tiny
bit of great content was crowded out with memes. I realized this is it. The
web has fully lost it's early magic and it will never recover it in this
iteration. There are ways you could fix it, but it's too late and all the
players are too entrenched for anything to change. The monetization model is
broken. This pony is all out of tricks.

We'll need to pioneer the next platform for tech to be exciting and fresh
again. Probably VR, possibly AR. I'll see you guys there.

~~~
thrower123
If everybody here would flag the paywall'd junk and not upvote it, it could be
a nicer place.

Liberally using the 'hide' button also helps, but only yourself. You kind of
need to cull out a third of it. One of these days I'm going to make a custom
skin that filters out the worst of the hosts that clog up the front page.

~~~
davidjnelson
Grateful for that hide feature, so useful. Thanks for adding that Hn team.

------
esotericn
Developers who work on adtech nonsense, GDPR popups, etc, should take a hard
look in the mirror.

Yeah, you might make a bit of money, and yeah, maybe your colleagues, in your
sick system, give you a bit of respect.

One day, I think you're going to wake up and realise that you wasted your
talents. Like a war veteran who thought what they were doing was right, that
the ends justified the means, until suddenly one day it all came crashing down
around them.

You have the choice, here and now. You're sitting in front of a general
purpose computer. You can make fun and interesting tools - you can make stuff
to break down barriers - the pathways you can take your craft are unlimited.

Choose wisely.

~~~
neilalexander
I understand the cookie choice popups are maybe a legal necessity in some
places with GDPR and so on, but the implementation of the entire thing is just
awful. Each website having their own badly-coded popovers which are either
slow, unusable or just outright deceptive, blocking page scrolling and causing
unnecessary page reloads.

As for advertising taking over the place, it's just getting insane with them
being inserted inline in article content and increasing the page load time
significantly, appearing at the beginning of videos or, worse, half-way
through them, making pages more resource-intensive and less responsive.

The web has never been so widely accessible and yet it has never been more
inaccessible.

------
maxwell
> three decades following the creation of the Internet

The internet turns 50 in a week.

~~~
ivankolev
People often conflate the web with internet, and given how predominant http
has become, I don't blame them.

~~~
1over137
Yeah, heck, with DoH, you could almost say there is no internet, only the web.
:)

------
badrabbit
I can accept some of what is said on this article but from a technical
perspective the internet (imho) offers much more opportunities to create and
collaborate than any other time in the past.

I believe most of the shortcomings and abuse of the internet is a result of
mass adoptation of the technology without correspnding legislature. Societies
just haven't caught up with technology,even well seasoned technologists
struggle to grasp the privacy implications and economic complexities at hand.
There is also the psychological aspect where the mechanics of the internet are
intangible and we have a hard time conceptualizing and grasping these
complexities the same way we do tangible constructs. Imagine how complex a
physical machine would be if it was as complex as a web browser,but we can see
it and we can easily grasp the scale of the complexity and adjust our approach
on how to use and secure it accordingly.

~~~
buboard
> offers much more opportunities to create and collaborate than any other time
> in the past.

We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers,
galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC, video
chats, joomla, wikis etc etc in the year 2003. Not much has been added. Video
is perhaps the only thing that we didnt have. A big deal but it s not
everything. The main change was the format - mobile. The internet today feels
less vibrant, less mysterious, with less corners to explore, and it's not
because we 've exhausted it all. Even the news have become extremely
repetitive, with every site posting the same stories slightly rephrsed. People
keep parroting the same obsessive ideas over and over and over in their
comments. Everything is memes, and that everything is actually a small number
of ideas being produced every day, possibly countable in one hand. You have to
dig hard into social forums to find a unique perspective, as the self-
congratulating, selfimportant crowds seem to have crowded out everyone else.

Anecdotally, how many sites do you find yourselves browsing daily?

~~~
badrabbit
You have to realize your experience is not everyone's experience. And
nostalgia is a lie.

> We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers,
> galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC,
> video chats, joomla, wikis

Signal,whatsapp,ipfs,discord,slack,github,confluence,twitter,twitch,stackoverflow
and so much more from a "techie" perspective. But have you considerer how much
more accesible the internet has become? Forums were nice but you had to find
the right one and once that site shuts you might lose all content and all the
people you know there but for most people social media is better.
IRC,icq,etc.. Were not very secure,they were not multi media friendly either.
You heard of Viber? Super popular in non-western countries on-par with
whatsapp. Skype you say? Zoom,webex,logmein and the like make video chat and
desktop sharing a breeze. Learning things is so much better too:
pluralsight,udemy,cybrary and MOOCs were not a thing in 2003. Free webhosting
,document editing,job hunting anf so much more (excluding things like
uber,doordash,instacart that provide IRL services). But more than all
that,there are so many more options for just about everything now.

The past always looks shinyand guess what,the internet is even more mysterious
now for those who get curious enough!

I think like most you're only looking at the popular sites and apps. E.g.:
peertube vs youtube or HN vs Reddit.

Daily I frequent 5-10 sites on a regular basis but I visit a lot more than
that when finding external content on those sites,certainly a lot more than
10+ years ago.

~~~
buboard
Half the services you mention either

\- require a phone and phone number to sign up

\- lock you in

\- will shut down next year unless someone buys them and bastardizes them to
oblivion

\- are services that replace services that were bought and bastardized
(skype). they re bound to repeat the cycle

\- arent as popular / dont work (ipfs vs torrents)

\- lock content away from search engines

\- are basically rehashes of the same idea with much heavier browser footprint
for the sake of ... i dont know what really

\- Are all platforms - they dont specialize, they force you inside an
eternally septembered community . I Liked having separate accounts in separate
forums - having many identities is a virtue - and good for privacy

\- are Incremental updates. E2E encryption is the one thing that matters, for
the rest, we had flash video converence in 2003, and it worked _better_ than
webrtc solutions today

\- MOOCs are not a successful thing today either though. good that we have all
that content, but it wasn't enabled by any of the aforementioned companies.

I m not sure i m convinced we have a fundamentally different - or better -
internet today. Everythinig you mention is repackaging. (and we had job ads
and lots of free webhosting too btw. You know neocities, they re even named
out of nostalgia for geocities, craigslist is still a thing).

~~~
badrabbit
I don't think I can change your mind but functionally I have a much better
expetience and in many cases a simpler experience than in the past. Lots of
lessons were learned and continue to be learned. I mean,popularity aside
forums,IRC,Skype (use it everyday!) and all the old tech is mostly still
there. In many ways isn't less more? Would you prefer forums with millions of
active users or IRC channels with 100K+ active users? I think the internet is
big enough and diverse enough to satisfy most people. But the trendy and
popular stuff isn't meant for people who like the older internet much like SMS
wasn't meant for people who love pagers and email wasn't meant to satisfy
people that like to write paper mail,so long as there are enough enthusiasts
of a tech it will live on but the future will continue to look a lot less like
the past. For me after not using IRC for quite a while I used Matrix and it
looked so much and so little like IRC,I think it's a good example of how more
internet users means more things that satisfy more groups. One size fits all
doesn't scale.

~~~
buboard
> and all the old tech is mostly still there

Only as ghost towns

> ways isn't less more?

Err, no. Have you used facebook groups, the social groups that we are supposed
to use today? Crippled intentionally, abysmally few options, impossible to
discover. These are platforms for users who don't care about discourse, they
want to come and shout, and shout often, to beat the algorithms. Yesterday's
content is already lost. Compare that with even yahoo groups.

> prefer forums with millions

No! But that's what facebook is, what reddit is. Eternal september comes too
soon

> for quite a while I used Matrix and

I wish matrix would catch on

> One size fits all doesn't scale.

Exactly . We have one size for everything today: platforms for billions. But
it's a bad fit for niche, weird communities.

------
peterwwillis
It's not colonialism if you can opt-out of it. Which, for most of the nations
of the world, you can.

Don't get me wrong. We've been manipulated by advertising since the 1850s.
_The Hidden Persuaders_ , written in 1957, detailed the ways advertising can
manipulate our subconscious to make us do things beyond our control. 'Big Ad'
has been a core component of American radio and television since its
introduction to the US. When the internet arrived in the '90s, so did a raft
of businesses floated solely by ad dollars. Google improved the game with more
personalized ads, but this was really just a form of direct marketing, which
had existed for a half century.

But most of the things we consume, we do because we are consumers, in a
consumer society. We have _not_ been captured by a foreign power and forced to
work for nearly nothing, with our lands pilfered for goods to power a foreign
nation. We are not 'unsalaried slaves'. We are willfully accepting the trade
of services for our attention and our dollars - the same way we did with
newspapers, and radio and television programs. We have been selling our
attention for cheap for a century and a half, buying whatever crap someone
feels like printing.

In most nations today, we have the complete freedom to pay for and use the
internet without advertising or restriction. You can pay for an internet
connection, pay for e-mail, send and receive files, communicate, etc, all
without ever being sold a diet pill, told to vote for a candidate, or having
your data changed out to something more profitable. And you can do all of this
with the security of a first-world military power.

The global internet is still the most powerful, affordable, _un-controlled_
communications tool in the world. You can talk about empire all you want, but
really the only oppressive forces are governments against their own people.
Yes, many governments have chilling effects on the rights of their people to
have free speech - but those are limits imposed within their borders, and not
to the internet as a whole. We still have an internet of creation, and we can
still use it to change the world (evidenced by how many nations are rightly
afraid of its power to allow people to freely communicate!) The only thing
that has left is our imagination, but luckily, no one can take that away from
us.

------
Animats
Recently I switched from Google search to Bing search. Bing is years behind
Google, and today, that's a feature. Microsoft just hasn't bothered to do the
obnoxious things Google does now. Bing doesn't have much content of its own.
The better search results seem to show up before the ads. It's not flashy, but
it's OK.

~~~
Daniel_sk
I think they also supply results to DuckDuckGo.

~~~
ahje
DDG also has it's own crawler, but the bulk of the results are from Bing.

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afpx
Let’s assume this trend continues for another couple decades. What happens
next? Something has to rise from the ashes, right?

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Porthos9K
It didn't merely disappear. It was murdered. Chances are you are complicit.

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Nasrudith
Digital colonialism is a deeply ironic phrase that underlies hypocrisy - it
has long been favored by communist circles, the fascists wearing communist's
clothing types, especially third world nationalists. It is a favorite for
attacking any outsidsers who interfere with "their" territory completely
independent of coerciveness or actual sins of colonialism. If a doctor came in
and brought real medicine into an epidemic they would deride it as
colonialism.

And yet here they are Johhny come lates now coming in to colonize their daft
ideas about colonalism and control when they were late adopters.

~~~
asjw
When you control the means of communication and are a foreign super power, it
is colonialism.

------
cloudyo
"our battle is not lost, but that we can control the use of our data, [...]
that the privacy laws that protect us are obeyed."

Privacy, privacy. We've actually developed a self-hosted private cloud
solution as a substitute to Dropbox for exactly these reasons. Basically a
private Dropbox at home (no complicated installation and no server needed)

We're currently in beta, could interest a few in this thread!
[https://www.duple.io/en/](https://www.duple.io/en/)

The point is to have a product that works just like a Dropbox, as simple and
straightforward, but that is actually private with no one interfering,
playing, accessing or reading your data.

~~~
phkahler
There's more to do than that. We need decentralized replacement for social
media And our own email servers for starters. This should all come in one box
like a wifi access point or modem.

~~~
buboard
We have always had email servers. You can set up one today. What we need is to
to convince more technical people to use the internet the way it was designed
for. And to find ways for these people to make money, because the monopolized
internet of today makes that unattainable.

~~~
rhizome
Maybe something to make would be an addition to mail servers that chat-ifies
group emails.

~~~
jimktrains2
Chatifies in what way?

~~~
rhizome
Group iMessage = CC list, cc list becomes messaging group. I suppose one way
this could play out would be simply to add an email submission API for text
messaging app(s), but it's an incomplete idea so far. :)

~~~
jimktrains2
I'm still not sure what you mean. Are you simply talking about an email client
that looks like a text messaging program?

~~~
rhizome
That's doable. The image in my mind was the reverse: a chat program that
displays email threads. Interactions in chat become mailing list replies
emailed out, and replies to the CC list are displayed in the chat channel.

------
thrower123
The normal people came to the internet, and crowded out the nerds. You can
still find all the weird, wacky stuff that used to be out there; I daresay
there is far more of it, by volume, than there ever was. It just requires more
effort to sift out the dross.

