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 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.
