The idea of free information is incompatible with the existence of corporations that profit from its commodification. The battle to make information free is the battle for an entirely different world.
The old hacker motivation of information should be free, takes me back. The internet was supposed to of made information free not reinforce the status quo… How wrong we all was in the 90s.
Yeah completely agree.
Back then we thought people would be objective and want to find objective material truth but instead it has done the opposite it has reinforced the ideals of individualism and personal truth in which people think reality it’s a matter of personal opinion that there is no truth.
The promise of the internet would help people see different views and then we’d come to find common truths sort of the way scientific consensus works. Instead, what we got are echo chambers where people are only exposed to opinions that they agree with. I suspect that corporate ownership of media platforms plays a big role in that. Pretty much every corporate platform uses some sort of an opaque algorithm to decide what content people see, and these algorithms are designed to maximize engagement. So, people end up seeing what they want to see.
A large part ofn how we ended up here is largely down to capitalism as well considering the internet and these services started out by hobbyists doing what they loved and what they thought was important which slowly went corporate over time as these servers cost money to run which needs funding, and your forced to monetize and put up pay walls. A possible way to get around this is using RISC based architecture servers and generate our own electricity however that might be (Personally i’m a fan of the stirling engine). However your also running into the problem of funding, though this is where i’m the most communist and advocate building the machine which produce electric generating equipment.
I absolutely agree, we can see how the internet completely changed once it started becoming commercialized. We got to the point where most people just visit a handful of websites like Reddit and Facebook. That said, I’m very optimistic about the emergence of the fediverse because it brings back the way the internet was meant to function. While the fediverse is still tiny, it is steadily growing, and it provides a serious alternative to corporate internet.
It’s still runs in the problem of price indexs with being funded, it will eventually fall into the same trap, wheither open source or propreitory the underlining economics of price indexs will the result in the same outcome no matter the best intentions. For example you can have universal healthcare but as long as it’s funded by price indexs it will still have the inherent problems associated with it.
I expect to see growth of non profit social networking where people run servers as a hobby without a monetary incentive. This is what we saw happening a lot at the dawn of the internet with people running BBS boards, IRC channels, and small personal sites. I think platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon capture some of the same appeal and a lot of people are starting become disillusioned with profit driven models. We’ll see how things develop I guess.