But it could have been different. I just think we were responsible for the culture. This stuff was inevitable. But we had the ability to shape the culture and instead they dangled a trinket in front of us and we forgot and they captured the new frontier like they did with others.
But now maybe if we can reflect, find out what was done, create awareness and vigilance to fight them in the next frontier whenever that is
WUT? Why?
Monetization is the root of a majority of our issues. Without monetizing you don’t get data scarcity, profile tracking, Meta, Cambridge analyticals and eventually data that feeds into the current political systems. There is a direct arrow to our current problems that goes from early days of the internet up through the monetization into data scarcity, data collection and all the marketing tools that eventually feed into modern propaganda. Safe guarding against scarcity by creating a hostile internet and culture to monetization would have prevented all of this going on currently. We can’t ever go back to that. We only ever had one chance. New frontiers do not show up every century. Our job was to keep the people who ruined everything else away.
Hear me out. From day one we all needed to collectively reject any effort to make any profit online. I don’t care if you built something cool, sold furry art or create some neat SAAS. Day one everything should have been stolen and replicated. Everyone should have been terrified of putting anything online out of fear that the monetary value would go to 0 as it was digitally recreated. We wouldn’t be in this situation today with Trump if we stood our ground. We’d have flying cars and world peace
I think we have way more ability to shape things then people believe. I remember at one point reddit said something like only 10% of users comment. Even less posted. Those were us. It was the nerds.
And no we weren’t short sighted because the early days of the internet everyone knew about data scarcity and how eventually the people who ruined cable and movies and every other media platform would come for the internet. There was so many people yelling that we needed to safe guard against that. But then Metallica sued Napster. Pewdiepie made millions. YouTube introduced ads. Instead of fucking them up, we all just went with it and forgot.