Ancestors

Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 19:41

The wild thing about the tech oligarchs is that if they stopped offering their services tomorrow, most of us would be at a loss for maybe a week, then replace them with the dozens of other, smaller alternatives that they keep beating down below the fold.

They're nothing like the robber barons, who could materially fuck you up just by like, losing a shipment on their railroad or forgetting to ship you steel or cutting you off from oil.

These people bottle and sell the air like it's gold.

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Toot

Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 19:43

This, like a great deal of material differences between this era and the last time we saw this kind of rise of fascism, is why I don't think we can game out how this is going to go.

You can't do anything with a broken search engine that looks for information on an internet that is 90% hallucinated "AI" content. A social media network is nothing if it doesn't have any actual users to pay it or attract advertisers.

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Descendants

Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 19:55

Everything that big tech does at scale so they can dominate markets can be done in much smaller scales for not that much more money. Look at Mastodon! Each instance is mostly run by normal people who occasionally raise some money for server fees. You don't need Xitter or FB-level infrastructure to have vibrant online communities and social networking.

No matter how you slice it, web tech is not steel or food or clothing or medicine. It's just fucking ad-supported entertainment without overhead

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 19:55

Basically, it's interactive reality television where we provide the programming.

As a friend said to me: "Social media makes actors of us all".

My point here is that all the folks hyperventilating about "the oligarchs" are literally their product, and if they stopped being their product (it's easy) those oligarchs would...disappear.

Knocking out the monopolists in the early 1900s was a lot more difficult, because they controlled material goods that you couldn't get elsewhere, but you needed.

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Written by Simon Brooke on 2025-01-22 at 21:32

@johnzajac or, in the case of #Mastodon, not ad supported. Not surveillance supported. Not snoop supported. Not grift supported.

User and volunteer supported.

Voluntarily.

I think that's better.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 22:28

@simon_brooke

Federated everything is the future of tech.

Literally everything.

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