The internet didn’t just accidentally become shit. Yes, the #dotcons are responsible for plenty of it: surveillance, advertising, addictive algorithms, platform lock-in, spam, fake reviews and the endless extraction of human attention. But focusing on a few companies misses the bigger story, that the mess is the outcome of decades of wider #deathcult worshipping political and economic choices.
Yes, we allowed enormous platforms to buy competitors, capture markets, privatise public communication and turn common infrastructure into private profit machines. We then acted surprised when the resulting system prioritised extraction over any public value. But the problem is bigger than Facebook, Google, Amazon or whatever company is currently being hated.
The market structure is the machine, companies are collective organisms operating within that structure. Changing one corporation without changing the conditions that produce the next one simply gives us another version of the same problem.
This is why “just leave what ever #dotcons you are addicted to” is both right and incomplete. Yes, leaving matters, attention is power, every person or community that stops feeding the toxic platforms reduces there social legitimacy. But people are not simply choosing between good and bad technology.
There are real practical issues, a local council might put essential information on Facebook. A community group might organise there. A small business might depend on Instagram. Friends and family might all be locked into Messenger or WhatsApp. The problem is therefore infrastructure.
If essential social information is available only through a private corporation, leaving that corporation becomes socially expensive. That’s exactly why we need a working, good #UX #openweb reboot. Email still works. Websites still work. RSS still works. Federated media works, community archives could work. The technology exists, what is missing is the social infrastructure connecting these things together.
We have taken a first step on this path with the #Fediverse, the second step is projects like the #OMN. A part of a broader attempt to build a post-#dotcons media infrastructure based on the #4opens – Open Data – Open Source – Open Standards – Open Process.
But still the social side matters, the technology is the tool, the bigger project is breaking corporate dependency and rebuilding collective capacity. We need media systems where communities publish without asking permission where information moves between services, where metadata remains accessible, where moderation is human and accountable, and where communities retain the ability to govern their own spaces.
But there is another danger. If the #openweb becomes flooded with conspiracy, dogmatism, tribalism and endless ideological prat fights, ordinary people will leave. They won’t necessarily leave because they disagree with us, they’ll leave because the environment becomes exhausting. And when people leave the open alternatives, they often return to the #dotcons because at least those platforms are familiar, predictable and socially populated.
That means our behaviour matters, so while building real networked alternatives, lets focus on the #opens path as security is not enough, survival is not victory. We can build technically secure systems that nobody wants to use. We can build ideologically pure communities that nobody outside the bubble can tolerate. Or we can build useful social infrastructure that helps real people communicate, organise, remember and act together. The #4opens and good #UX are therefore not a nice-to-have, they are the minimum conditions for activist technology that actually matters.
To sum up the bigger story isn’t “Facebook (or what ever #dotcon) is bad.” The bigger story is we are breaking corporate dependency, rebuilding collective infrastructure, recovering the social possibilities of the #openweb to build technology for a post-#dotcons world. And we don’t need to wait for Zuckerberg, Google, policymakers, funding bodies or standards committees to give us permission. We can start building, but as we do, we need to remember the purpose – keep the media real – build trust – balance good and harm – and don’t #KISS reproduce the culture we’re trying to escape.
