I’ll start: it wasn’t too long ago that one wasn’t expected to pay out of one’s coked up nose for programs (apps). One used to be able to buy a thing and then own the thing. Vacuum cleaners. Video games. Photoshops. Now one has to sign up for it, enter one’s credit card info and fucking pay monthly for some harebrained “service.”
And I blame all of you. Probably 9/10ths of you are on apple products and/or are locked into absolutely insane digital ecosystems and you all laid down and took it. All of you fucking libs. You took it, you normalized it, and fuck all of you.
I miss the stuff that got squashed by big companies or DMCA or whatever, and that falls under my first bucket, but my two main problems with the internet now vs the internet 15 years ago:
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Content: The vast majority of content is consolidated on just a small handful of heavily-astroturfed platforms. There are obvious problems with a half dozen or so private companies getting to control who sees what and what is or isn’t allowed. Beyond the implications about being able to spread leftist propaganda or express dissent about the owners of said platforms, There are so many content creators these days making good forward-thinking content that got their start making content on some corner of the internet that doesn’t exist anymore, or at least not at the same level, and there’s the question of what sort of art and ideas we’re missing out on because they’re trying to get their start on a platform that’s actively trying to suppress them. (I’m thinking specifically about the way that tik tok deprioritizes content from people who aren’t attractive and wealthy-looking, but it’s easy to make a case for any of the other major platforms doing the same thing.)
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Privacy: When you visit a webpage, everything about you is recorded, your browser is fingerprinted, and a profile is built around you. Even if you don’t ever interact with a service they can build a profile about you based on other people who have your phone number in their contacts, your email in their send history, etc. Thanks to smartphones, these companies have data on where you live, work, visit, when you sleep, when you’re out of the house, how big your house is, where your bedroom is, etc. Right now, as far as we know, they’re just using and selling that information for ad revenue, but the other implications - especially as we descend further and further into fascism - are terrifying.
I think the content part is what I was saying, that you’re sort of romanticizing things. The consolidation is real, but even in 2005, when you had Geocities and Newgrounds and Myspace and Friendster, the portents were already there. It’s not like my shitty websites in 2005 ever got any traction or eyes unless I made it onto Digg or Yahoo, so I’d still have to feed the machine then. It’s always been really hard to get started online. Is there something you’re thinking of that got eyeballs that’s differentiations then than now?
As for privacy, it’s not quite as dire as you’ve painted. I am very familiar with the adtech space and they’d KILL to see what you think they can see. They can see a great deal but they’ve always been able to do that. Even in 2005 we were using fingerprinting to guess who’s who. Now if you got a new computer it might take us a little time to figure that out, but your IP (which was definitely naked in 2005 since VPNs were not commercialized to the level they are now) would confirm for us who you were. That was without any mobile web at all. What you’re talking about is cookie swapping, but again that was already big in 2005. You could easily buy tons of info on anonymized users even then and advertise to a segment even then. All that I would say has happened in the past 15 years is they’ve gotten better at tying multiple devices together. But that wasn’t a priority in 2005 because mobile web was a joke then.
