like would it have been better if we did that?
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The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is now
Your digital footprint is an extension of yourself and how much effort you put into it is up to you. In the same way we encourage people to not eat junk food made by shitty companies, we encourage people to manage their digital presence and support non-shitty companies.
But its hard to eat healthy in the same way its hard to set up accounts and tech that you control, its a concious effort. Do not let perfection be the enemy of progress, anything done to improve your footprint is progress in not feeding digital dragons.
We SHOULD be passing laws that protect people’s rights from corporations the same way we protect those rights from the government. We SHOULD be passing laws that enshrine the right to be forgotten, by forcing companies to either respond quickly to delete requests, or have massive penalties per day, paid to the person, not to the govt. We SHOULD be building public, free alternatives like a library in cyberspace that is for public good, not profit. We should stop forcing ID laws, and start forcing encryption. Think bigger than tech withdrawals, instead take the opinion that tech should serve everyone, not the rich and powerful. Hobbyists and open source built practically all of the internet, and only later did money and politics take over.
The internet used to be a quirky free library. They turned it into an aggressive rent seeking monster.
We should have enforced monopoly laws
Most people, most of the time, do not care about anything that doesn’t directly affect their daily life.
In order to accomplish most things, it requires going against basic human nature.
We should’ve slowed down tech earlier. It’s gotten too rapid.
The issue isn’t creating the tools, but making them easy enough for mass adoption. Big tech got big, not because they had the best tools, but because they made sure that anyone could use them in a way a lot of open source tools aren’t.
And generating those tools was easier when you can pay people to work full time on it; open source doesn’t pay nearly as well if at all.
I would say the biggest unifying factor for all Lemmy users is the belief that big tech sucks for one reason or another. If you want someone to answer ‘No’ to this question then you need to ask it somewhere else.
Yes.
We should have done that yesterday.
But the next best time is now.
Depends on who you mean by we; if you mean literally everyone then yes absolutely, but I highly doubt we’d be that coordinated or monolithic. If you mean the people like us on the fediverse who are currently trying to do it then I think starting earlier would only make a mild to modest increase in our number.
Yes. We already screwed it up when Internet Protocol took over and DNS was established. There were better methods. There are better methods.
That aside, we did have alternatives to big tech software for a long time:
- Linux
- Berkeley Software Distributions
- All GNU software
- LibreOffice
- Mozilla software, at least historically, and forks of it
- Etcetera
Good point @bold_omi.
I was playing with Linux back in the kernel 2.0 days. The tech was mostly ready for us geeks, but not for everyone else. Switching meant new habits, and “it’s free and open” was never a strong enough reason for most people.
People use big tech products for convenience: already installed, works out of the box, compatible with everything their friends use. Microsoft knew that playbook very well.
No matter how much we argue and explain, if it isn’t more convenient, most people won’t switch.
The silver lining: building small alternatives has never been cheaper
I’m curious as to what issues IP and DNS caused that were so glaring. I assume better methods were (and are) available for addressing and routing, but that seems more a discussion about network architecture design than the kinds of societal problems that “big tech” is generally considered responsible for (if I am interpreting OP’s question correctly, that is).
I’m curious as to what issues IP and DNS caused that were so glaring.
Internet Protocol makes addresses location-based, allowing for geoblocking and tracking. It’s also centralized by design, allowing for consolidation of power, censorship, and control. DNS is one of the greatest examples of that consolidation of power, and is the reason owning a web domain costs money. In a decentralized public commons registrar or some kind, this would be no issue, and that works better with a decentralized protocol.
I assume better methods were (and are) available for addressing and routing
Look into Reticulum. It’s a good example of a better design.
Thanks, I’ll read up on it. I hadn’t considered the geographic implications baked into the IP system before
I’m glad to be helpful. :)
Yes, of course.
Yes but most people don’t give a fuck if companies collect and track everything about you just so they can get their menes.
Yes
We did. #Linux #LibreOffice #Thunderbird #DuckDuckGo #Nextcloud #Signal #Mastodon
Yes, or start raising the potential problems much sooner.
To any anti AI millennials I try to point out that there’s a direct line from google search (which millennials were crazy about in the day) to AI.
