#Mainstreaming talk about the internet so often completely misses the point, yep, it’s the FT so no surprise there. The actual internet, the one we built before the takeover, is a culture of #4opens protocols, stitched together with moth-eaten mythologies and messy traditions. It was never clean or pure, but it was ours.
What this guy in the article is describing isn’t the internet, it’s the #dotcons layer that’s been built on top of that original infrastructure. Worse, it’s one we helped build, feeding it with our time, attention, and data. Yes, it’s a mess. But what we often do is add to the mess instead of composting it.
From “unstoppable slop” to “enshittification” to the idea of a “hostile internet”, all of these have explanatory power, but none really get to the root. The sickness isn’t just tech, it’s culture, warped by power and profit. What we’re living in now isn’t a broken system, it’s a deliberately built one. Designed not for us, but to extract from us. This #hostileinternet is not inevitable. It’s the result of a thousand bad decisions made by #deathcult tech and #VC backed greed, not by accident but by design.
The FT piece ends up saying: “The internet makes us seem mad, always connected, always performing, always consuming – like streetcorner eccentrics amplified to global scale.”
And yeah, it does feel like that. But that’s not the fault of the internet. It’s the fault of which internet we’ve chosen to feed. We don’t need a new system. We need to remember the old one.
Compost the slop. Rebuild from the roots. Base it on #4opens, community, and the culture that carried us before this #dotcons mess.
#openweb #AI #AISlop #GenerativeAI #KISS #compostnotcode #nothingnew
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