I wonder if it is the internet that has changed or the world around it. No doubt this is hard to entangle, because in the last decades one begat the other. Sur

I wonder if it is the internet that has changed or the world around it. No doubt this is hard to entangle, because in the last decades one begat the other. Sure, today large corporations rule the net and build silos and politicians try to silence free discourse, often at the formers behest, but this is also happening outside of the net and especially we, the technical elite who create software for the net seem to have shifted from "Here is my page about stuff I like" to "Here is my portfolio which I hope to monetize somehow soon". So has capitalism just eaten the net, or is it eating the world? But at the same time, isn't it up to us, to change the net to what we want it to be? Sure, our parents will stay on Facebook, but that doesn't mean we can not have quirky websites, distributed systems and interlinked webs of discussions and pages on specific topics. And while one might argue, that the net is now bigger than us and this will change nothing, we have traditionally been the driver for innovation and trends in this space. Facebook and Google are what they are, because we evangelized them for years to all our non techy friends. So could this not happen again over time when we tell people how easy it is to setup your own webpage or why it's a good idea to join a federated service? I think we need to be the change we want to see.