Discussion
What happened to the fight for the internet? https://dustycloud.org/blog/what-happened-to-the-fight-for-the-internet/
A new blogpost from me. I believe the fight for keeping the internet free is more important than ever but also under more threats than ever.
And the irony is, centralization is partly to blame: people don't feel like the internet is theirs anymore.
But we can't leave it there.
We HAVE to act.
For our sake, for our kids' sake, for ourselves, for the future.
@cwebber what we lost was search engines.
Back in the early days of the internet search engines were indexing magic. Metacrawler, ftpsearch, and later google made us able to find anything.
But then they abandoned us, and now, a website of the average Joe, is almost completely dependent (again) on inter-site links.
so make sure your website has a link list of the other awesome websites you know about! keep it updated!
@cwebber people are not tired, they became more and more dumb because they stopped thinking.
What the Epstein class, the fascists, oligarchs and power brokers, and their sycophants do, is similar to very effective Russian propaganda tactics. Create as many variations of the truth as possible, insert alternative facts and narratives, conspiracy theories, sow chaos everywhere. Wearing people out, have them wade through info overloads of doom & gloom, encounter red meat for internal fights, divide and conquer them. And use the Big Tech platforms and LLM disruption as superweapons. We are overwhelmed, can't deal with it. And that is exactly the point.
It only works if we let them. The real evil actors that are driving all this is but a tiny group. We must realize that.
Most people are like you and me, with similar basic needs, we crave simple happy and prosperous life, together with others. A vast majority able to do uplifting, positive things, especially together, united we're a superpower able to move mountains. Make the world a better place.
Ironically, I've found LLMs to be a great tool for countering propaganda. (I could take this thought further into action-items, but it starts to get complicated and long-winded.)
@woozle @smallcircles @cwebber llms are the exact tools that destroy the web. By using them (instead of your brain) you are part of the problem; you are just destroying the web even more, and propagating ideas of the oppressor. Stop it now.
I think you're being absolutist about this, ignoring the context, and distracting attention from the real problems which lead to the abuse.
Just to point out the obvious: if the LLM's output doesn't even end up on the web, how is it in any way affecting the web, much less "destroying" it?
As for the "instead of your brain" -- you have no idea how overtaxed my brain is these days. Anything I can offload means I can devote more attention to some other project -- and I do have better things to do than spend most of a day researching facts to rebut right-wing talking-points -- time which I have, in fact, spent in the past. Life is short, and there's more work for me to do than I can possibly do in the available time.
LLMs have deep problems, especially as wielded by profit-grubbing megacorporations, but this isn't it. I don't give them any money, I don't use them regularly for any of my work, but they do come in handy for certain tasks.
More to the point of your blogpost, though: I'm with a nascent group that is working kinda quietly, under the radar, to build some stuff -- and I can't imagine we're the only one. (We're still getting our infra set up, but it is moving faster than your average glacier.)
@cwebber Part of it is that social media sites have found ways to suppress these kinds of protests. Reddit, for example.
We need to make pre emptive legislation that protects our rights.
@cwebber I keep building Internet-in-a-box(.org)es for this very reason.
Like a microgrid, but internet resources.
My kids keep telling me I'm solving problems nobody has.
I tell them, I'm trying to help mitigate problems people don't know they have *yet*
@cwebber As much as I agree on age verification and other things you mention in your post being horrible, I wonder if looking back to actions in 2012 is helpful.
In retrospect, Wikipedia's blackout didn't do much but signal to an in-group that they're on the same side. AFAIK Wikimedia got lots of angry emails from esp. younger users who weren't able to do their homework, and had no idea about what the protest was about.
Overall, many goals of the protest back then were in the interest of the big 5 corporations: users should be allowed to communicate freely and in public—for most that meant, on the platforms provided by these corps, which were in thoroughly relieved from any responsibility for what users do there. This was a stepping stone to legislature amounting to the current situation which is mostly "this would be illegal, unless it is done on the internet." Platforms were in a populist manner aligning with interests of regular users because it fit their strategy during this time.
For instance, YouTube refused to pay rights holders via their rights management agencies and did their own "blackout" of music videos in some jurisdictions. People felt this was a similar thing as the Wikipedia blackout and felt they had an ally in Google.
So this time, coordinated action has to be thoroughly different.
@cwebber This resonates. The centralization didn’t just take our data, it took the sense that the internet is something we own rather than rent.
The way back isn’t convincing the platforms to behave. It’s building tools where there’s no platform in the middle to begin with. Harder, slower, less polished, but it’s the only version that can’t be taken away.
Thanks for writing this.
@cwebber
IMO dusty cloud is nonsense
why ?
things change and change is most obvious when something is new
to expect the internet of say 2000 to have persisted is just silly
@cwebber thank you for this post.
Fwiw, I’m a front-end designer so don’t have more than a superficial understanding of the underlying layers. That said, I think it’s highly probable that in the coming years the web will be subject to growing intermittency and brownouts/blackouts.
So I’m intrigued by the kinds of things that people like @jadehopepunk are doing with initiatives like https://merri-bek.tech
imo partly it's because good intentioned people say social media is bad when they don't mean fedi etc. we also don't talk about cultural/civic goals that good technology has enabled. enabling the Arab Spring was a good thing. why do we care about decentralization etc.
@cwebber there's no a lot of money behind age limits and ID checks. It's the absence of money that creates this push. It's the one piece of "Regulating Big Tech" that Big Tech won't fight. "Regulating Big Tech" is a popular demand, so politicians want to have such a policy.
Any other proposal to actually regulate Big Tech is shut down by paid lobbyists rather quickly, so politicians end up with this one.
@cwebber Great post! I've experienced a similar thing as you described: in discussion with my partner about age-verification, they did not understand my harsh criticism of that regulatoon until I explained the bad consequences for small non-corp websites like my local mastodon server. That actually lead to a change of mind for them.
@cwebber "It feels like people are tired." You're god damned right. I've been fighting for this shit for 28 long years. But every time I turn my back, there's a new batch of politicians, lobbyists, and scummy corporations with the same harebrained ideas. Again and again and again.
Every time the initial proposals get watered down a bit. But it adds up over time. It's death by a thousand cuts.
I'm tired, boss. I'm tired of trying to convince people to care.
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