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This is exactly how I feel about the internet: it should’ve been a reincarnation of the Library of Alexandria, not Wall Street.
I should visit the local library again
It’s not just the library. I’ve been doing a lot of the stuff I did two decades ago as a teenager. Thrift stores, Half-priced books, the library, the mall. As a chronically online person, I can’t explain the exact feeling of it. It’s somehow both less and more. The internet was this amazing grand archive and forum. It was everything, but now most of everything has been stolen and sold off.
Edit: but yeah check out your local library. It likely has an events calendar online that you can browser for reasons to go.
You should before the tech bros turn into a store or subscription service along with everything else.
lol no, I remember altavista categories sending you to shops. But it was a sane environment. Now the world’s gone crazy and the web with it.
Anyone else played around with reticulum?
Because it feels a lot like library-era internet.
They don’t want you to know this but the stores used to be libraries too, and then some fuckhead didn’t like the poors being on his commons and said “yes, private ownership is the best way to manage distribution of these communal resources!”
because the internet is a store but it used to be a library
Joke’s on you. It is a dumpster fire of long ai slop articles. the continous churning of slop is keeping the dumpster fire going with no end in sight .
The internet is Dead People. The internet is DEEEAAAAAD !
More like “mob-controlled gambling den” than store.
The pioneering days of the internet are over. We left the Golden Age of the web and are now in the Mafia-controlled phase as you pointed out. If history continues repeating itself it’ll be decades before anything gets better.
I find this blinding so I went and got another screenshot for yas.
That’s because it’s bathed in light.
Lmao 😂
I think the thing I miss most about the old internet was the fact that many people just produced things without worrying about getting paid all the time. Websites were basic but fun, people uploaded funny videos just for laughs, and sites like Reddit were hardly heard of.
This still exists, it’s just niche. Having a little personal website with all sorts of silliness and whatever you create is incredibly popular among the techie furries.
Yeah but I want to return to the days when normal people used the internet for fun, not just the freaks.
Heeey! We’re nice freaks! Besides, you’d be surprised to find how many of us are decently normal.
Like, not me, but there are at least a dozen.
“One of us! One of us!”
Normal people never used the internet for fun until Facebook lol. It was all freaks during the alleged golden age, that’s what made it great.
I know, I just wanted an excuse to hate on Furries.
Actual locus of Internet going from fun to shit.
The internet was also a place you went to, and you could actually turn it off or walk away from. Now it’s everywhere and stitched into our entire lives.
“We had computer rooms, and the Internet should have stayed in those.”
I still write and release open source software projects despite full well knowing they will likely have 0 users and that AI could replicate it in 1% the time I took. Doesn’t matter. I do it cause programming is what I love to do. I think it’s really sad that a lot of people have forgotten that’s the purpose of doing this kind of stuff. It’s not like we were ever gonna see a cent for it anyways. One of my projects was downloaded about 8000 times. That’s nice. Too bad it’s a project I discontinued because I no longer use it. No refunds!
You’re an artist and i hope you see the importance in that.
A programmer that does it for the love of the game! Here’s to hoping more people (yes human ppl, not agents) follow your example! These are the things that keep me vested in tech in the first place
I love people like you. I can t believe I was talking to my partner about this very case of FOSS programmers who do it just to scratch an itch but still benefiting others and the world more than any sycho-corpo can ever hope to
I have a few projects like that and I used to create itch.io pages for them (at least for those related to gamedev). I’ve discontinued all of them years ago but recently I started getting notifications about people paying a dollar or two for them for no reason.
What kind of projects are you working on? I really need to start some of my own or contribute to other projects but I’m not even sure where to begin.
Are you using Linux / Wayland? Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun using gtk4-layer-shell in creative ways. Imo a great way to come up with projects that you’ll enjoy and be motivated to finish is to explore something totally novel and see where it takes you. An even better way is to recognize that feeling of ‘I feel like my computer should be able to do X’ and then make it possible. My last project of that variety was a system to stream videos from torrents as soon as possible after the download begins. Can start watching a 10gb video file all the way through in full quality with no buffering after like 30 seconds of downloading if you fiddle with the torrent and analyze the video file as it’s being written. Unfortunately I won’t be releasing this one as I learned that it would be quite bad for swarm health, but it’s cool for personal use.
That is cool, and KDE Plasma is my home these days. This is all very relevant to my interests and I suspect it is to more and more others lately too.
Thanks for contributing even if it doesn’t get a ton of attention. You never know when your novel approach to something will end up being THE idea someone needed to solve their own problem.
Me too. Me too.
Something that I get angry about occasionally is how so many people have had their hobbies stolen from them. Like people who’d tinker about in their spare time making music, now feeling like they have to monetise it, and feeling the stress of not being able to supplement their failing income because they’re just one artist in a sea of artists, someone without a major label giving them a push.
I don’t blame the people at all, we’re all just trying to get on in this increasingly shitty world.
I do a little radio show once a week. It’s reasonably popular, but not so much that I could ever think about giving up the day job, and my day job’s pay isn’t too bad in the grand scheme of things. But even I’m at a point where I’ve set up a Patreon where if anyone wants to kick in £3 a month, they can. Ultimately it just helps with the running costs of my VPS and domain renewal, and will hopefully give me enough to be able to pick up a new midi controller.
It’s fine, and people are happy to help out because they get to be a part of something they enjoy, but I hate that there’s been an increasingly vocal bit of my brane over the past year or so that’s been telling me that if everyone who listens paid £3 a month, I’d be ‘earning’ an extra £450 (give or take). According to my stats, the episode from a couple of weeks back is up to 250 listens on the podcast feed. That’s £750…
It’s my hobby. It’s a thing I enjoy doing. But if I’m not careful it’ll veer far too closely towards something I have to do, and that’ll kill it.
I think about this peach vinaigrette story a lot in that context: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/142qfal/uusername_unavailable_offers_us_a_cautionary_tale/
Please forgive the Reddit link.
That was a legit horror story
God. Yes.
Marx had a lot to say about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
Edit:
In his analysis, Marx identified four key aspects of alienated labour. First, the worker is alienated from the product of their labour, which is appropriated by the capitalist and confronts the worker as a hostile power.
Second, they are alienated from the activity of production itself, which is experienced not as a fulfilling expression of creativity but as coerced, meaningless toil.
Third, this leads to alienation from their own human nature, or species-being (Gattungswesen), as free, conscious activity is reduced to a mere means of survival.
Finally, the worker is alienated from other people, as social relationships become reified and mediated by market exchange, fostering competition and indifference rather than community.
Looks like #2 and #3 apply directly to the situation in your comment.
Dude knew what he was talking about.
Here’s what N. M. Klein wrote about the internet all the way back in 1998, likening it to a labyrinth.
I don’t say this often, but this text has completely changed the course of my life.
Some choice quotes:1998 is still a dangerously nascent stage in the Internet, while a trillion dollar nest of dragons sets up shop.
Inside, you have seemingly infinite choice, but practically no way out. In fact, you prefer being trapped a bit. That gives the story some bite. Why enter Happy Imprisonment? Because you slowly catch your breath. You expect to outwit the program.
Pockets of confusion in the system let the player imagine that there are ways to subvert it. It’s a Faustian sim-bargain. The player submits to the labyrinth, then pretends to cheat.
Simulating revolt is more fun, and a better investment. […] But consider what sim-revolt implies as a broader model for public life? We pretend that the labyrinth of the Web makes us free of the global corporate program that builds and owns it. We feel above the swamp of idiotic web sites. We know how to surf. The demon apparatus can’t get us. We can dig out of anything. We’re never trapped.
Recently, there is talk of voting on the Web. Is a cross between ergonomic fascism and the shopping mall the best frame of mind for making political decisions? Let us not mystify information delivery too much. Despite the services, it is not fundamentally democratic, only the freedom to chat. The server and the search engine are a feudal plantation. They decide for us, when to plant, when to hunt.
The labyrinth is a mood of passivity. It’s like saying you’re never really trapped in bad traffic. Just because we can subvert the Web by saying nasty things or engaging in cyber-sex in the margins, or downloading information cheaply, does not mean that we are subverting any core reality.He was wrong about voting.
It would make voting easy and accessible.
They don’t want that at all.
Everything I’ve seen about internet voting has shown me that making it even little bit secure and fair is basically impossible. Would be interested in some information to the contrary!
The fundamental problem with online voting is that putting the data online even in an isolated manner immediately creates the potential for a small attack to affect large numbers of votes, which is much less cost effective an attack than when they’re on paper and physically distanced.
Someone will inevitably mention the Tom Scott voting machines video, whenever this topic comes up, so it may as well be me today.
The social contract was that everyone was a custodian of that library. That’s how we got Wikipedia.
Social media and monetization broke that social contract. Another building was constructed beside the library. People were checking out books from the library and selling them at the market.
Now with LLMs, those books are being burnt. There’s a trillion dollar giga-sized building next to the derelict library and the fast becoming defunct market that is industrial scale mass producing pulpy books.
Wikipedia still exists, in fact it’s expanding every day…
And the fascists have been going after it wholesale.
Yeah, and communists, and pedophiles, and greens, and…
Wikipedia has always been the target of people trying to bend public opinion, that’s why it has the processes in place that it has, and [citation needed] all around.
it still exists and will likely continue for decades
It’s a store where there’s a pickpocket in every aisle, all the products are cheap fakes and the registers are programmed to cheat.
But line goes up. It goes up!
I read this in Tim Robinson’s voice for some reason.
I Walk the corner to the rubble,
That used to be a library, line up to the mind cemetery now,Ugh. I get it, but I dislike poetry that avoids grammar to make something seem deeper than it is.
I walk to the corner
To the rubble
That used to be a library.
Line up
To the mind cemetary now.
Right but that doesn’t really fit with the song
I wish the internet WAS a store. It’s a lavatory these days, full of shit and scribbled texts on the door aiming to rot your brain and to destroy democracy.
Its a store and you’re the product
Hey there, now… it’s destroying more than just democracy.
Hey now, it doesn’t just destroy, it also builds fascist movements!
It’s a store. Profit and greed are a huge factor in what the internet has become. We used to have people paying for hosting so they could provide information to the public for free. Now every fucking moron wants to make money by making ‘content’, it predates AI, by a lot.
It’s a dying mall.
Capitalism is a machine that turns all freely accessible public goods into paid products and services.
But hey, look at the GDP rising. Don’t you feel richer?
