Let’s be clear: the internet itself isn’t the problem. We knew how to build decentralised, humane, empowering networks long before the #dotcons turned everything into a behavioural extraction machine. The original internet – messy, permissionless, #4opens by default – can’t addict you. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t optimise. It just connects.
What addicts you are, the enclosure layers built on top of the internet. The sticky walls. The velvet handcuffs. The slick, dopamine-juiced engagement loops that the #dotcons built precisely because an open commons is unprofitable to their shareholders.
The tragedy is that we’ve let that thin, commercial crust redefine what people think the internet is. And because people can’t see the difference anymore, they blame “technology” or “the internet” instead of the actual problem, #dotcons corporate capture of communications.
This misframing is not an accident. It’s a political success for Silicon Valley. We do need to call out this #techshit, the compost layer we need to break down and return to the soil, but don’t mistake it for the internet. One is a commons. The other is a shopping mall with mirrors.
And this matters, because if we accept the framing that the entire internet is toxic, addictive, or inherently harmful, we give up the ground needed to fight for a public-first, #openweb future. We surrender the commons to the #dotcons by default. It’s classic #deathcult logic: destroy the shared world, declare it unfixable, then sell the gated alternative.
The #KISS path is still there, just harder to see under the sludge: simple tools, open protocols, people over platforms, and messy, real community instead of “curated engagement.” Things grow in compost. Even #techshit. Especially #techshit.
The task now is helping people tell the difference between the internet and the systems designed to trap them, and then getting them out into the open air again.
