this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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I'd actually argue the internet has been a net positive overall because it counters a lot of the control the oligarchs have over the media. For example, if Israel was conducting the genocide before the days of the internet we simply wouldn't know about it. And we've had the internet for a long time now, so access to things like social media and different views doesn't really explain why particular views become more popular than others.
In my opinion, the main driver of discontent is the deteriorating economic situation. We have major crashes roughly once a decade, and each time a crash happens we see a massive wealth transfer to the top occur. This happened during dot-com bubble, then in 2008, and now with the pandemic. Each time the rich got bailed out while the public was left out to dry. People end up being pushed further and further to the margins, and they have less and less of ability to absorb the next crash that comes. Many people are losing whatever savings they had, and have no hope of retirement. Younger people see little opportunity for themselves, while becoming increasingly pessimistic about the future and problems like the environment.
All of this is pushing people out of the mainstream because they see that the system is not working in their interest. Once people leave the liberal mainstream they become open to different ideas. These come either from the right or the left, and because the left has been effectively gutted in the west, the right is the main source of alternative ideas.
Right, consolidation of the internet under a handful of large companies has been a big concern. Notably, that's precisely why stuff like the fediverse is so important. Decentralized social media that's run by regular people is precisely how the internet was meant to function. I'm optimistic that things are looking up in that regard. Platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy are still niche, but they're starting to gain momentum and they show a path forward. It's encouraging to see that people are actively tackling the problem and we have tangible results to show now. The fact that we're having this discussion here as opposed to a closed platforms like Reddit is a huge success.
That's the beauty of open source platforms, the dynamics are very different. With a commercial company you're stuck with whatever the company decides, and that's what drives enshittification. Companies ultimately exist to make money for the owners and the shareholders. The users aren't actual stakeholders on these platforms in any meaningful sense.
On the other hand, open platforms are developed by regular people because they want to have publicly owned social spaces. Even when a project starts going in a bad direction then anybody can fork the code and take the project in a different direction, and anybody can run a server the way they like.
I wrote an article on the subject a little while back, talking about these dynamics in more detail https://justiceinternationale.com/articles/2020-12-02-we-must-own-our-tools/
This isn't a hypothetical, Mastodon has millions of users now and it's working fine. Larger instances run on donation, and it works fine. It only takes a small percentage of users to contribute at the end of the day. The nature of federation also helps amortize costs. You don't need to have millions of users all on the same server. It's a different model where you have many smaller servers with thousands of users, and there's overlap between them. This is also how internet worked during the time of BBS and IRC. The model of big companies running walled gardens is an aberration, and it's not how things were meant to work. The internet took a wrong turn for a period, and now it's self correcting.