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Both "The digital revolution has failed"
and "Another internet is possible" are great statements by @parismarx
disconnect.blog/the-digital-re

@becha @parismarx I think flower and vegetable markets make excellent alternative networks

@becha @rysiek @parismarx The parts of the web worth saving emerged from Fidonet and its ilk anyway. And indeed, federated BBSes predate the Internet in availability for most people.

Google accepted money, contracts and resources from glowies. If being corposcum wasn't enough of a warning sign, that should've been the proverbial air siren's ringing. No need for advertising, it was already fucked.

> if not just a bunch of AI-generated trash.
With gratuitous ads and tracking, not to forget. Google could fairly easily prune that garbage for their results if they actually cared.

> Meanwhile, the promise of streaming entertainment has turned into a nightmare after corporate consolidation and the sidelining of competition.
It was always a blatant lie to anyone used to filesharing. The addition of DRM just added insult to injury.

Uber was always only ever worth it because of its prices enabled by its abusive practices. And now it isn't worth anymore than taxis ever were (they never were worth it), so all that remains is the gratuitous abuse. Local authorities and their disregard for adequate public transit & sane urban design are to blame for the majority of it. There'd be need for neither Uber nor taxis if they hadn't ruined our living environments.

> The effort to route as many interactions as possible through apps and make our smartphones as addictive as possible has spawned an epidemic of loneliness and even social disconnection.
All of it untrustworthy and untrustable proprietary malware, it needs to be noted.

> but a wider problem where our appliances don’t last nearly as long in part because that tech fails so easily
If they actually bothered with due diligence and not making devices rely on malware, it legitimately should last just as long. Of course they don't, corner-cutting is lucrative.

> There’s a conspiracy theory that the web is effectively dead, and made up primarily of bots and generated content. While that may not already be true, the AI companies seem determined to make it a reality.
The changes we should be making should make it a reality. That is to say, no one should be using the clearnet directly for anything, so that anyone remaining on it would necessarily be forgotten and irrelevant bots.

We also really should be getting rid of the majority of user agents that expect everything to be working on low-latency networking. It reeks of infrastructural privilege (https://mastodon.top/@lispi314/111253066257920146) and isn't resilient to any meaningful disruption. Asynchronous Communication (https://www.complete.org/asynchronous-communication/) should be at the core of all designs intended for wider deployment than within one's LAN.

@becha @parismarx Facebook is not the Internet, nor are Google, X/Twitter etc pp. These are just services on the Internet. e.g. Usenet news is a service on the Internet, too, as are private websites or undertakings like Wikipedia or the Fediverse. The problem is not on OSI layer 3 or 4, more 7 and 8.

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