4 ms·

The problem is that tech could be a positive force ethically and culturally, but we keep bending it to perverted ends. It seems to me that it's really the soci

The problem is that tech could be a positive force ethically and culturally, but we keep bending it to perverted ends. It seems to me that it's really the social media era that needs to end for us to start making cool things again.

jtode 3y ago
Nah, that gave us quite a lot of good actually. Neither he nor I are calling for some sort of Year Zero backlash. I got on the internet in 93 and I enjoyed about ten pretty great years of it. That internet never went away, people just stopped participating, for many reasons, including spammers laying waste to the infrastructure (usenet), but mostly because our nontechnical friends and family showed up and we mostly preferred to interact with them on the platforms than the weird collection of freaks we interacted with before. I have no idea where most of my old IRC channel are, and these were my daily friends for a decade or more (many of them go back to BBS days in the 80s). On the other hand, I miss the folks from alt.music.ween and I want usenet back, but I have little hope that that could happen. But if you mean, "get the large corporate platforms whose purpose is to extract money from attention off the internet and replace them with systems that work like the internet worked in the 90s, ie protocols" then you are correct. That's Rushkoff's message these days too - places like neocities get a lot of heat around here and it's for a reason, a lot of us remember that there used to be a good internet, and that internet did not have the purpose of making money, its purpose was to enable communication under any kind of duress, up to and including a nuclear attack. We need to get back to using this for its actual purpose, and kick off the people trying to use it to make money. If there is a service that we collectively want or need, we should either pay for it on an individual basis, or we should pay for it with taxes.

jtode 3y ago

Nah, that gave us quite a lot of good actually. Neither he nor I are calling for some sort of Year Zero backlash. I got on the internet in 93 and I enjoyed about ten pretty great years of it. That internet never went away, people just stopped participating, for many reasons, including spammers laying waste to the infrastructure (usenet), but mostly because our nontechnical friends and family showed up and we mostly preferred to interact with them on the platforms than the weird collection of freaks we interacted with before. I have no idea where most of my old IRC channel are, and these were my daily friends for a decade or more (many of them go back to BBS days in the 80s). On the other hand, I miss the folks from alt.music.ween and I want usenet back, but I have little hope that that could happen. But if you mean, "get the large corporate platforms whose purpose is to extract money from attention off the internet and replace them with systems that work like the internet worked in the 90s, ie protocols" then you are correct. That's Rushkoff's message these days too - places like neocities get a lot of heat around here and it's for a reason, a lot of us remember that there used to be a good internet, and that internet did not have the purpose of making money, its purpose was to enable communication under any kind of duress, up to and including a nuclear attack. We need to get back to using this for its actual purpose, and kick off the people trying to use it to make money. If there is a service that we collectively want or need, we should either pay for it on an individual basis, or we should pay for it with taxes.