Some say that these moves (Elon’s and Spez’s) mean that a economic catastrophe a la 2008 might come in the future. Sugs, but welp, it is what it is
Yeah well it’s called web 2.0 so naturally we need a dot.com bubble 2.0, only it’s just the data bubble and failure to monetize it or rather you can’t just monetize social media data. Turns out that data is still not much use to advertisers no matter how manipulative and optimized their method is. Data is still data and not money. The only institutions really actually getting use out of that would be governments (look at China). VC are pulling out and advertisers are pulling out.
Haven’t all the lay offs and strikes due to failing contract negotiations given enough of a warning?
Yep. You can even argue that causing a recession is why interest rates are spiking. It wasn’t happening naturally, and the plebians were getting too uppity.
To maintain class divisions the upper class decided that the best way to avoid this was to turn off the money spigot, because too much was starting to trickle down.
Turning off the money spigot meant that businesses couldn’t raise wages had to start cuts. Causing layoffs meant it would shift from an employee’s market to an employer’s market. They say it’s to “cool inflation”… by making people lose their livelihoods. Then people stop buying and inflation comes down, because the commoners have to keep scrounging instead of improving their lives.
It will get worse; we’re just at the beginning. Tech has been a bellwether, but it’s started spreading across the entire economy. Places that aren’t tech-related are facing layoffs, and as workers get shafted we see strikes coming back in a big way.
But the 1% will hold firm. The Fed will keep the money spigots closed until there’s a massive recession and everyone loses their homes. Then the rich will come in, buy everything up for a bargain, and rent it back to you at twice the price.
And of course, politicians won’t help you either - if anything, most of them stand to benefit from the change. After all, Biden himself told his rich donors “nothing will fundamentally change” - things were changing, and so he’s not going to stand for that. Instead, he’ll silently let things revert to the status quo, the way the rich like it. Everyone else kills each other in culture wars or fights over the scraps.
tl;dr - The author is either deluded (or paid to misinform the public) and thinks that the data stealing corporate internet is “open and collaborative”.
The open Internet was built by grad students and weirdo engineers, in a process involving frequent conflict. HTTP beat Gopher in part because Gopher was owned by a university that wanted to charge money for it. The Internet interprets bullshit that some nerd doesn’t like as system damage and routes around it, eventually.
Also: Today’s major tech companies succeeded (in part) by being tolerant enough to harness the engineering efforts of queer, trans, furry, fanfic-writing, burner, psychonaut geeks. IBM didn’t let you wear cat ears to the office, but Google did. Google is now worth 10x as much money as IBM.
~~Oh no… Oh no… Maybe someday but it’s too soon right now, for those still feeling the sharp sting.~~
Nvm, I misunderstood and probably should delete this, but instead will leave it edited like this.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I immediately felt at home on Lemmy. It legit gave me the feelings I had back when I first started using the internet in the mid 90’s. I thought that internet I knew was dead. But it seems a piece of it still lives on.
HTTP beat Gopher in part because Gopher was owned by a university that wanted to charge money for it.
I was not aware of any of this… I’ll have to read up on it as it sounds fascinating. So many people are unaware of how things came to be.
Gopher is like very simple and cool. Something similar to Telnet but it’s own thing. It’s free nowadays btw but ofc nobody uses it.
Gopher and telnet are not the same sort of thing.
Gopher is like the Web. Telnet is like SSH.
Gopher lets you fetch documents and directories off of remote servers that can link to each other. Telnet lets you connect to a remote server as if you had a terminal on that computer.
…me, summer of `93, insisting that the world-wide-web would never catch on when we already have gopher: cut to fifteen years later, i’m hanging out with its author on second life of all places, and yeah, that never really caught on, either…
…open platforms matter…
Ok thanks
I have a sneaking suspicion that the same economic changes are also (partially) behind the changing ways companies like Red Hat, Elastic, and MongoDB approach open source projects. It’s not the whole story, but I suspect it plays a significant part.
If that’s the case, then this is bigger than just “oh no twitter and reddit”.
