<
https://www.liberalism.org/p/enshittification-despotification-and-the-open-internet>
"In January 2011, somewhere in the crush of bodies in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a
man held up a handwritten sign. It read: “Facebook: against every unjust”
[sic]. He probably didn’t think of himself as making a statement about
technology policy. He was making a statement about Hosni Mubarak—the dictator
who, within weeks, would be forced from power, in part because tools like
Facebook had given Egyptians a way to coordinate, organize, and find each other
when state media was telling them they were alone.
Fourteen years later, almost to the day, the man who founded and still runs
Facebook sat in a place of honor at the inauguration of an American president
openly contemptuous of democratic norms. He was seated ahead of that
president’s own cabinet nominees, alongside nearly every other major tech CEO.
The same platform. A radically different relationship to power.
It would be easy to look at these two images and conclude that the
techno-optimism of the early internet era was a fraud, and that the tools we
thought would liberate us were always going to be captured by the powerful.
Easy, and wrong.
But not
entirely wrong. Something real did change between those two photos,
and pretending otherwise gets us nowhere.
What changed wasn’t the technology, exactly. Facebook in 2011 was already a
centralized platform owned by a single company. What changed was that the
underlying incentives of that centralized architecture had time to work.
Centralized systems create chokepoints. Chokepoints, once they exist, attract
everyone with an interest in squeezing them: companies looking to extract more
value from users, governments looking to extract compliance from companies, and
political movements looking to extract influence from both. In 2011, Facebook
hadn’t yet figured out how lucrative those chokepoints would be, or how much
leverage they offered to the powerful.
By 2025, everyone had figured it out."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
