A lot of things have gone wrong since than
It’s so hard for me to read anything by Cory Doctorow or Ed Zitron these days because there’s always this giant, gaping void where class analysis should be. Is this the time they finally connect the dots, I ask myself? No! It’s never the time. It’s always enshittification this and business idiots that and never, ever a single whisper about capital. Brian Merchant and Ed Ongweso Jr. are much better in this regard - if you haven’t read anything by them I recommend you start.
As to the actual content here, this is precisely what the internet was always created to be. Do you think the
DoDsorry, DoW created this as a happy accident? Just to help people? It’s always been intended as an anti-informational weapon and a surveillance network in-one. And all the attempts by vassal states to wriggle out of the trap will prove futile. China is the only country handling it the right way, and no capitalist nation will ever have the motivation to follow their example. There’s too much money to be made in making their own little tech fiefdoms.I’ve found this also. He’s a liberal with zero class analysis or materialist literacy. If you’ve ever read his books, like his main one, enshittification, it reads like a middle-school age baby leftist wrote it.
It’s a testament to the sad state of US and canadian education that he’s considered a pioneer in any field.
this is precisely what the internet was always created to be. Do you think the DoD sorry, DoW created this as a happy accident? Just to help people? It’s always been intended as an anti-informational weapon and a surveillance network in-one.
Is there a book or well cited investigations I can read more on this history? I have always suspected it but I want to learn the facts.
There was an old episode of TrueAnon about the links between Epstein (and the CIA) to MIT that went over some of this stuff. I’m sure there’s probably a book or article about it somewhere, but I don’t have any better citation at the moment.
Corry Doctorow is a hack who stole his theory of entshitification from me. He’s incapable of thinking of anything by himself which is why you’ll see him milking this for as long as he can, because he’s a hack.
I agree, without applying a materialist lens, you just end up discussing symptoms endlessly and ignoring the actual mechanics of the system responsible for producing these outcomes. This is another example I just ran across today where the author is discovering the contradictions of capitalism from first principles. https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory
Thanks for the link. I found it very interesting.
I don’t know what Doctorow’s politics are now, but I know he was deep in the dot-com libertarian milieu 30 years ago.
That doesn’t surprise me. I think he’s probably a socdem at best these days, specifically the kind of lib that thinks that we are in Bad Capitalism and if we just trust bust enough, we can go back to Good Capitalism, and all the smaller companies definitely won’t just devour each other and repeal regulations, putting us in this exact position or worse in another 20-30 years.
China is doing internet right?
They’re sovereign.
American tech companies. American national security organs cannot touch them, cannot put the hurt on them. They are independent and there is nothing Meta, Google, Oracle, etc can do to them. Look at Europe, look at the rest of the world on Facebook and Oracle products with a big gun right at their temple held in the CIA’s hand if they do something the US doesn’t like. China doesn’t have that gun at its temple and because of that China can be truly sovereign from the US.
That’s a single positive. Not “doing it right”. What china has isn’t even internet. Its intranet with some exceptions. Not to mention what the USA has also isn’t truly internet but it’s somewhat closer.
As someone who has lived in China for many years, including now, I have to say it’s really not great for accessing the World Wide Web. Within China, the accessible internet is basically a Chinese national intranet. Which is not terrible if you are a native Chinese speaker, I guess. They censor because the US sending out massive propaganda. But China’s government is producing a lot of domestic propaganda, too. Different goals - the US to destabilize and take over, China to stabilize and maintain support for the system.
As I have lived here many years, I’ve put in a great deal of effort to learn the language. Unfortunately, with limited results. Learning to read and write in Chinese requires a structured learning environment and about 10 years of focus for most people. Due to illiteracy in Chinese I can’t just switch to using the Chinese intranet. And the government keeps cracking down on VPNs. It can be very frustrating accessing the internet outside the GFW. And frankly there is a lot of useful and interesting content that exists outside the GFW.
Totally understand your point. Iran has also imported the intranet bullshit from china.
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cry ab it
what’s worse is that gringos have their heads so far up in their asses that they dont even realize this kind of shit. and freak out when you try to propose something neutral.
The fact that people in the west don’t understand there is propaganda in the west has always been astounding to me.
“Become”
Yeah more like people are starting to realize the internet is too American.
the problem is, before all the politicians were on the same level. hell france and the uk just passed meta’s age bill with ease. but now as trump is destroying everything, i as an american dont trust the system at all. before it was “the government doesnt care about you” now its “the government is out to destroy”
people waking up to how a capitalist government actually functions and whose interest it serves is the one silver lining here
i am not sure you know what the word capitalist means. hint for you, it has nothing to do with profit.
It’s the mix of supreme ignorance and maximum smugness that makes people like you so loathsome.
when you definitely read and understood the comment you’re replying to
Become? It’s always been…
its always been
To be fair, it wouldn’t exist without DARPA.
But we shouldn’t be relying on some bullshit InterNIC crap either. DNS should be federated. Each country gets their cctld to manage and ‘international law’ ‘forces’ the varios nic orgs to cooperate. extra tlds are federated on a choice basis.
Like, to find the canonical DNS name of one of my home lab IPs, 209.180.104.202, you search for a PTR record for 202.104.180.209.in-addr.arpa. (You get git.mspencer.net. Note my username here.) The first A in ARPA stands for something. (That’s how you know I’m not a bot - bots don’t have 25-year-old domain names. . . . I didn’t say I was interesting, I just said I’m not a bot. :-) )
We don’t own it though. We never should - too much concentrated wealth and corruption. Like many technology stories, big wealth (whether Cold War military spending or giant corporations using money to squeeze out more money) creates something for one purpose, but people adapt and convert it for a better purpose. Business computing tech becomes home computing or gaming tech. Military redundant communications research becomes public redundant communication infrastructure.
