I, like many people around 40, had a computer and played computer games years before I ever got online. I remember my mother showing me email when I was ten or so years old, and I barely cared. Around then, I used to go to my friend’s house after school to play computer games he had rented from “Floppy Joe’s” (GET IT?!). In those days, computers were essentially a novelty, and the web and browser simply didn’t exist.
I _think_ people connected to systems with telnet back then, meaning they were not using encryption of any king. On one hand, that’s stunning to consider, but as a practical matter, computers were not used for much, and they certainly weren’t treated like magic or deified or anything ridiculous, so the notion that you needed to encrypt everything was simply not a commonly-held opinion.
Indeed, throughout the early days of web communication, simply distributing information widely and quickly was considered a major benefit. Now, to the contrary, numerous market participants have determined a better bet would be to “flood the zone,” as they say. Rather than attempt to convey benefits broadly, the ambition seems to be to simply confuse people so much that truth seems fundamentally arbitrary. I got to thinking about this in the context of “AI” moments ago. There is a popular website where people post “humblebrags” about their professional context. When I say it like that, you probably immediately know the site — that’s how bad it is! In any case, I thought to login and post something trollish. However, I got to thinking about it and thought, “Why bother? They”re probably filtering posts with AI now.” And so I didn’t bother. However, it got me to thinking about how companies are using technologies to shrink the human experience, to put in place so many filters that everybody gets vanilla. That is supremely depressing.
Moreover, you could convince me that internet technologies were made to enable surveillance. However, the internet today bears little resemblance to the fantasies of the technologists of yesteryear. Companies and politicians today are trying to bolt their priorities on to a blank slate while wanting the things they want, and they figure it’ll be easier to get if they frame it like a historical inevitability or law of nature or something. In so many movies made in the …well, pretty much as long as movies have existed, honestly. In many movies, there are like evil rich dudes who want to use some technology designed to liberate for the purpose of somehow limiting or restricting or punishing. Indeed, there are entire tropes built around this, yet when it actually happens in the real world, the same folks who loved the movie now fail to see the parallels and split hairs over very insignificant details.
I mention this because the enshittification that seems to be ever-present now has a deleterious effect on human interactions while simultaneously hiring people to smile and nod and go along with whatever the borg determines is “optimal.” And now, resistance does look futile, because they simply spend money corralling folks, then helping eliminate any communication methods that do not entail using the tollgates they own. Sad.