issue is it will collapse into neofeudalism, where the Czar Executive Officier of your network city will demand you work 16 hours every day, or he will send you to the wellness farms working 18 hours a day.
I miss when tech entrepreneurs just wanted to get rich and retire young instead of becoming real life James Bond villains. Tom Anderson got a generation to learn HTML, got Rupert Murdoch to hand over $580mil for a social network that'd be dead within a few years, then had the decency to peace out and travel the world enjoying his photography hobby. No evil schemes. No fascism. Just pretty pictures.
That would have required self-reflection, self-love, and not falling head-first into the absurdities of an Ayn Rand-ripoff who called himself Mencius Moldbug.
This is another reason why income and wealth inequality are bad for us. We have a natural level of psychopathy in the population. Some are bound to stumble into the kind of power given by obscene inequality.
I really miss that era of the internet..
Myspace was fun and everybody's, typically awful, profile had so much character. Felt like you really got to know the people you hung out with on there. I'll never forgive my shitty friend for convincing me to switch to Facebook lol
MySpace was such a “special” thing. So stupid. But so fun, and dumb. (Or go even further back to geocities, or some yahoo shit.)
It was niche. Then people try to capture that, to mainstream it. Which in a weird way could be justified. But then you end up with Facebook. And then the same thing with Reddit a decade later.
Long before anyone had a PCs or servers beefy enough for internet video, we still had tiny gifs. And before that, we all just had our own websites all over the web which you could make entirely your own, for free or for cheap. And it was awesome. <blink> tags everywhere!
I still have the html files for my first geocities site. It was a Commander Keen fansite with info that was already on every other fansite. But it was mine! And I used marquee tags and background midi files and gifs whenever I wanted to, and WordArt for the page headings.
Even then I was late to the party. My the time I joined, geocities was part of Yahoo. I remember when the URLs used to be cities and neighbourhoods.
I think it's kinda hard to find spaces where people are gonna be willfully ignorant of the issues currently plaguing our lives. Sure, everyone wants a break from it and not think about it the latest infringement on our rights but outrage fatigue is something we need to be aware of.
I opened Lemmy after like a year and this post made me smile. I don't see this as 'complaining' considering I just arrived from the cesspool that's reddit.
To be fair, it's probably not the same, but there is Spacehey. It is described as a modern Myspace. Haven't logged in to mine for a while since I still haven't learned how to make a profile theme thing, but it's pretty fun (coming from someone who was never there for the Myspace revolution).
It would be worse. The site got bought out by News Corp (FOX's parent company) in 2005.
The site would be some kind of TurningPointUSA / DailyWire right-wing trash factory. Every song on there would be Ben Shapiro rapping or Oliver Anthony releasing the "Rich Men North of Richmond" techno remix.
There really wasn't much online in the 80s, other than a lot of archives. After the invention of HTML and subsequently, the World Wide Web it became a lot more user-friendly and also got filled with a lot of garbage. After 2010 or so is when enshitiffication went into overdrive.
In my wildest dreams as well, I wouldn't have imagined the shit storm that is going on... and that too is amplified by internet which was supposed to be a good thing...
The criticism is that late stage capitalism corrupts itself and becomes fascism/technocracy/feudalism/whatever as the powers of corporation and state merge.
That or everyone dies from ecological collapse.
Of course, the idea that it's not capitalism when the state does it is a core capitalist conceit. A lot of socialists are trying to have their cake and eat it too on the definitions.