great article about internet, we should discuss it!
http://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/internet_quo_vadis/
Articles, blogs, and meetings about the internet of the future are filled with happy, positive words like “global”, “uniform”, and “open”.
The future internet is described in ways that seem as if taken from a late 1960’s Utopian sci-fi novel: the internet is seen as overcoming petty rivalries between countries, dissolving social rank, equalizing wealth, and bringing universal justice.
If that future is to be believed, the only obstacle standing between us and an Arcadian world of peace and harmony is that the internet does not yet reach everyone, or that network carriers are unfairly giving different treatment to different kinds of traffic, or that evil governments are erecting “Great Walls”, or that IPv6 is not yet everywhere, or that big companies are acquiring top level domains, or that encryption is not ubiquitous … The list goes on and on.
I do not agree.
I do not believe that the future internet will be a Utopia. Nor do I believe that the future internet will be like some beautiful angel, bringing peace, virtue, equality, and justice.
Instead I believe that there are strong, probably irresistible, forces working to lock-down and partition the internet.
I think anyone who's not a vegetable or coming-of-age would agree. Anyone who would even care to give it a second thought that is. It was inevitable. Meant to be this way. There's nothing you or I can do about it. It's so evident I wouldn't hesitate to say it's a natural occurrence. Honestly, it's a shame people who yearn for a better medium, one where people all over the world communicate the way people said it would be when the internet was first becoming popular. Only when the internet is largely closed off, if that for some god-knows-what reason this happens, will there begin to be private networks that turn up where people will freely be able to speak their mind across borders again.
I, for one, can hardly wait to move into my online gated community.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2853/2853-h/2853-h.htm
Why not read Quo Vadis while you're at it?
I agree with >>3.
Globalism has so far been terrible for culture, both on the internet and in real life. Maybe if we're a bit more partitioned, we can actually get some originality going.
Right now the uniformity being pushed by globalists has only resulted in groupthink.
>>5
I guess it might not be a coincidence that the international board is always the most cancerous. Of course, below a certain size it no longer becomes practical to maintain the internet. A small town might have a community radio station and a library, for instance, but because of its limited scale it is far more practical for its residents to go about whatever business they would have done on the internet some other way.
>>5
I think that moving away from a more open model to, eventually, "Big Three, but with apps" will not result in more originality.
>>7
The internet already does look like that though, with big sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on raking in the biggest number of internet users world wide. With a more partitioned internet, different countries or regions of the world can develop their own sort of websites like that. Internet protectionism is also nothing new for countries like Russia or China, where these local alternatives already exist.
A global Meshnet made with OLSR or BATMAN-ADV running everything on that network through I2P would be ideal, but it would never happen.
We need to build our own internet with our own IP address space. No "social media" or SJWs allowed.
So no /pol/ allowed either.
>>12
Oh, them too, definitely. They're just another version of an SJW anyway.
Indeed, that's why I said that.