When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of “information should be free” has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.
Its a bit strange because, before, a few of us were here and getting to know the internet and everything it had to offer.
Nowadays, everyone is on the internet but most of them are confined to the apps they use and what those apps show them.
So it seems people are being silently manipulated without ever knowing there are many more things out there, but even then, the will to explore new things might not suit them, and they prefer to “live in the matrix”.
Internet mass manipulation is getting ever more developed and used as a tool to achieve an agenda.
For me it kind of feels this way, because there’s only a handful of sites I visit regularly, and if one of those sites is unavailable, it feels like I don’t know what to do. In a sense, I am trapped in this new browsing habit that has made me get used to constant short form content that is exciting, and a lack of it is now crippling. At least replacing reddit with lemmy has helped me recover a little bit, because I find that I’m unable to stay on lemmy for hours at a time like I was on reddit.
I miss it too, and even more now that I got reminded how awesome it can be to talk like this without a big american corp in the middle.
I feel like big tech has killed the fun very much. Before you had individuals building web sites, and you felt happy to see new creative sites. People didn’t create them for money but to show off their skills and create fun and useful sites.
Now the web is turning into cable TV as the corps have completely destroyed it with ads. I think we need web sites and services where ads are banned and where people create things for fun.
The fediverse can help with this since many small servers allow people to share the load and the cost.
I agree and now I find myself moving my entire digital life off of big tech platforms and towards free software to escape this madness.
The good old internet still exists and lemmy is living proof. You just need to dig a little because the corporate search engines won’t show you. sdf.org for example is a nice little corner of the internet.
As long as the internet remains open, even if it’s in our own private corner, then we’ll always have a place to go, even if the place changes. If Google’s “internet DRM” ever becomes a thing, we’re completely fucked.
“Enslave” is a bit harsh, considering there are about 38-50 million people who are currently slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
We’re choosing to allow a lot of the things these companies are doing to us; but we could choose to walk away at the cost of some shiny things.
“Choosing” something doesn’t always prevent slavery. Wage slavery, for example, is a perfectly reasonable use of the word, though still not as bad as chattel slavery or other forms of slavery. It basically implies the non-existence of meaningful choice. However, you’re perfectly correct to say the OP is not enslaved in this case.
