When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of “information should be free” has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.
I agree and now I find myself moving my entire digital life off of big tech platforms and towards free software to escape this madness.
The good old internet still exists and lemmy is living proof. You just need to dig a little because the corporate search engines won’t show you. sdf.org for example is a nice little corner of the internet.
As long as the internet remains open, even if it’s in our own private corner, then we’ll always have a place to go, even if the place changes. If Google’s “internet DRM” ever becomes a thing, we’re completely fucked.
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Same here, I’ve become extremely disillusioned by how dystopian big tech has become. It’s a nice change of pace to use platforms like Lemmy or Mastodon where it’s just every day people running instances rather than a place for big tech to collect and profit off your data
“Enslave” is a bit harsh, considering there are about 38-50 million people who are currently slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
We’re choosing to allow a lot of the things these companies are doing to us; but we could choose to walk away at the cost of some shiny things.
“Choosing” something doesn’t always prevent slavery. Wage slavery, for example, is a perfectly reasonable use of the word, though still not as bad as chattel slavery or other forms of slavery. It basically implies the non-existence of meaningful choice. However, you’re perfectly correct to say the OP is not enslaved in this case.
Wanted to say something like this, I’m sympathetic to OP’s sentiments but I don’t like words like “slavery” being used as metaphors.
The complaining of censorship makes me think this is written by some guy just posting some bigoted shit lol. Also it’s true a lot of stuff has moved under centralized services, but this is very exaggerated.
Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable.
Also this is just sounds ridiculous lol.
I thought this was gonna be a post about feeling the burden of wage slavery and debt necessity, which is a real thing. But you’re right, it sounds like they’re upset because they can’t say the n-word on Facebook lol
When you want to feel like a victim while being extremely privileged.
Yup. That bit got me suspicious as hell. Looking at their activity, you are correct.
Try watching the documentary the great hack
As bad as it is, harvesting user data for an election campaign is not censorship.
Never made that claim
Then why are you replying this to a comment about your complaints on censorship?
Collecting information isn’t censorship, banning and blocking someone for a different opinion is censorship.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that the internet is captured by corporate capitalism.
I don’t really understand why you think the fediverse censors you though? The source is open, you can literally make your own instance.
Well I type removed and it gets censored, in my country removed refers to a type of food, removed also refers to a cigarette and removed also refers to someone who is annoying. So yes the fediverse censors it’s no different than other platforms.
I get what you’re talking about, but maybe it’s being a decently-educated American with a black mom talking, but “enslaved” is not the right word for this.
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“there was once a time when the sky was open, when the twilight beckoned one forth, when the nascent rivers of the internet flowed free with information”, he waxed nostalgic.
“Fuck you and keep your ideas to yourself”, he says when someone says something he dislikes.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Lol, spot on
Well that’s taking what I said out of context
Well you gave enough of a shit to express your not giving a shit, so maybe you give at least a little bit of a shit? Enough to express yourself anyways.
And it doesn’t appear that the above individual was attempting to enforce any kind of “you can’t say that”. More like its probably not the most nuanced or well thought out way of expressing your opinion, as it equates restrictions on internet speech with slavery.
It is intriguing that in expressing your lack of giving a shit on the aforementioned opinion you have basically shut down a possibly genuine discussion on the topic and dismissed an expression of the very free speech you are supposedly bemoaning the demise of.
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If by imperialism, you are inferring a supposed encroachment on a traditionalist culture, I would posit that cultures have never been a static entity, holding onto a static identity. Rather, cultures have been, and always will be an ever evolving and constantly changing collaboration of individuals who hopefully continually evolve as they continually re evaluate who they wish to be collectively.
There will always be backlash against this change of culture and values, which you are obviously exemplifying here, but I’ll point out that historically this kind of holding onto the past has never really worked out nor has such resistance ever lasted in the face of the general trend of humanity becoming more and more accepting of different ways of living and loving.
I encourage you to consider not holding on so tightly to the past and instead find your place as a peaceful member of the ever changing and evolving and more accepting society that will, in spite of the adversity to it, eventually come to be.
No I mean using woke shit as an excuse to push imperialism to maintain the global system of exploitation for cheap labour.
Well now you’ve peaked my interest. If you would please elaborate?
Please fuck of to whatever “Free speech” site idiots like you fuck off to these days.
This is suppose to be open source freedom of speech you know free as in freedom not beer
Its a bit strange because, before, a few of us were here and getting to know the internet and everything it had to offer.
Nowadays, everyone is on the internet but most of them are confined to the apps they use and what those apps show them.
So it seems people are being silently manipulated without ever knowing there are many more things out there, but even then, the will to explore new things might not suit them, and they prefer to “live in the matrix”.
Internet mass manipulation is getting ever more developed and used as a tool to achieve an agenda.
You just described AOL in the 90s.
This, they just described what it was like being on the internet and not being on AOL but seeing them all happy in their You’ve Got Mail walled garden.
I agree with your premise, but no, I don’t feel like the internet is just " echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced". And anytime I see someone complain about being systematically censored or banned, you’ve gotta look at what they’re posting.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/1697612
Banned because I made a meme that reddit was once a platform for free speech now a social engineering tool, found any excuse on my profile to give me a label of hate speech, and also because I disagreed with abortion.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/1692669
What is it with you lot with your obsession and fixation on rights? Why do you want the government to dictate your thoughts and actions so much?
https://lemmy.ml/comment/1693235
Enforcing policy is dictating lives though, how about just use a different name for marriage and do a different ritual? Unless that’s only if you actually only care for inheritance laws.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/1696649
How about people just treat each better than forcing it on people by the state.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/1693539
Marxism-leninism isn’t fascist though
https://lemmy.ml/comment/1677203
Like when your get older you appreciate the professionalism and authoritarian rules. No being more conservative doesn’t mean you hate gays and want death upon them, you libs sure do like to assume and generalise.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/1676143
Well the western left does have issues like being sex obsessed.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/1696276
So bad because he wrong thinked? Tate bad because he said a word? Please if he helps young men go to the gym and improve mental health then what’s the problem but it also highlights a gaping hole in society that hasn’t been addressed and neglected by this Western woke ideology, largely the needs of males have been neglected, shunned and ignored.
Just a quick 5 minutes of scrolling. So maybe people dislike what you’re saying because what you’re saying is anti-LGBT, anti-rights, pro-forced birth, conservative, tankie apologia? Also a fan of Andrew Tate so pro-rape, pro-human trafficking. I mean your record is speaking for itself.
Thanks for doing the digging on the very same suspicion I had. It’s kind of amazing how reliable a tell this tone is.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=-ZB2ftCl2Vk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I fucking knew it was gonna be goobus
@greyscale it was too good not to share.
It’s always the people you most expect.
How does highlighting the positive aspect of someone’s message equate to being pro-rape? I don’t think anyone can possibly be pro-rape…
No it’s not, why should positions be bannable? What if you got banned for simply having an opinion?
I’d need to know what communities/subreddits it was. But many subreddits restrict types of posting that may be seen as hate speech or against the community’s limited scope. Posting pro-tankie stuff to socialist communities, anti-abortion stuff to women’s communities, anti-lgbt stuff in general, etc, could get you banned. Most of that is probably fine in more general subs but I can’t imagine the pro-Andrew Tate stuff would fly in XX, for instance.
I said in r/atheist that I disagreed with abortion and that got me a permanent ban. Just for that opinion alone, I triedexplainning to the mod but they went on a tirade that I hated women against women’s rights etc etc which is completely untrue, I just disagree with abortion.
If you’re anti-abortion, you’re anti-woman. You can’t say you care about women if you deny our right to healthcare. Sorry, but you suck.
That is flawed logic, I want to develop the economy so people can afford to have a family and women don’t feel the need to abort their child because they can’t afford to have or raise a child. It would be preferable if people took personal responsibility and not have sex if they can’t afford children and not delve into hendonism having sex to have fun. I think it’s wrong for men to be pro-abortion just to exploit women into having sex without consequences for yourself.
The fact that you think that’s the only reason (or even just the main reason) people get abortions shows how you, like most anti-abortionists, haven’t bothered to look at the facts and have your head so far stuck in the sand that its not even worth talking to you.
There are other reasons but it’s largely to do with being in a capitalist system with the cost of living causing hardship straining the ability to afford a home let alone raise a family.
What opinion?
See the reply below, not explaining again
So, bigoted opinions? Yeah those should be banned.
If we’re talking about whether or not you like pineapples on pizza, no one gives a damn which way you lean.
If we’re talking about human rights, there’s a very clear wrong answer. If your ‘opinion’ falls on the Nazi side of that aisle, this might be your cue to ask yourself “are we the baddies?”
Instead of playing whack-a-mole how about seeing what inflames that ideology in their environment and fix that, at least if they’re vocal you can identify them and see where it comes from and fix that instead of forcing them underground and hiding it. No, no opinion should be banned, at least with bigoted opinions there an identifier that there is something wrong in the urban planning in which they live that needs to be fix, your solution is to ban and ignore the problems.
The larger point with pineapple was that where do you draw the line, in the future pineapple might be considered bigoted, just like the saying “stick a n##### on a rape charge” in considered bigoted despite it being normal before my time. In my day disagreeing with someone wasn’t considered trolling or hate speech. What is considered hate speech etc is largely down to perspective, being a nerd was considered a bad thing until we appropriated it and turned it into a compliment, would it not be better to turn offense to a compliment and just stop being so damn butthurt?
You’re conflating disagreeing with behaving like a Nazi. I don’t give a fuck what was acceptable back in your day. Today we draw the line at human rights If you get butthurt at being ridiculed for lamenting at the opposition you face when you try to marginalize other groups, then keep that shit to yourself. Or better yet, make an effort to actually get to know some people from the groups you’re directing hatred at - might find you actually start caring about them, and suddenly their rights will mean more to you than the pushback you get for posting slurs online
All I’m saying is why can’t you just be a better person and be respectful without being told to or by an authority or the big other, if you need to be told or ordered to be a better person, then your not really a good person are you?
Typing removed should not be an offence, buying a bag of faggots from a van should not be a crime and smoking a removed should not be punishable by law. I would like the UK not to be an Orwellian woke hell hole.
Maybe just stop posting racist homophobic shit?
And where is that?
At the risk of sounding like exactly what you decry, I’m going to pick on your choice of language, hopefully it will seem like it’s for good enough reason. I largely sense a similar, regretful shift in the way the internet is experienced and have some mixed feelings about it, but I would be very cautious in using a term like ‘enslaved’. When you choose to fire up your own high-tech information device to access the publicly available internet and you don’t find the experience exhilarating or thrilling, or fulfilling, in comparison to some relatively rose-tinted view of the same experience had during your childhood can you honestly say that that is similar to enslavement?
However, semantics aside, yeh it’s kind of a shame some of the quirky rough around the edges character of the internet has changed a bit since it became more mainstream and since corporate participation has refined and figured out how to extract much more efficiently from it. That said, as is often said when this sentiment is expressed, the old style of web is still there, you just don’t see it. Nothing stops people from hand coding a website if they want to, but it’s unlikely to be the top of any given search result from Google, and we all use Google. Similarly, unlike decades past, there is just so much stuff on the web that these types of things will likely not be noticed. There’s kind of a paradoxical relationship with how much more in general is available online with how much less varied our consumption of it is. Pretty much every web experience through a browser is going to start with www.google.com, either through the page itself or a default search bar and after that for many it’s going to be facebook, or reddit or amazon. Out of billions of pages, it tends to come down to about 4 for most and then a smattering of other larger media presences accessed via the portal of one of those 4. It can seem like there’s nothing else there in such a case and though not really true, it kind of in practice is true because you’ll much less likely find someone’s home made hobbyist website through major portals than you might have when by virtue of little else being available, that’s what a search engine returned or word-of-mouth recommended.
How bad a thing this is, is nuanced. The web is vastly more useful than it ever was, although the forces at work that made it so seem to be engaging in cannabilising themselves and one another and crippling their own utility in the never ending quest for more profit. I miss some of the feel of the earlier web, although when I was coming of age and using it heavily in the early 2000s, it was very well established already so I don’t have quite the same basis of comparison as someone who might have used it throughout the 80s or 90s. I think I have detected something of a shift away from the ‘edgy’ persona adopted by most on forums, but then it’s hard to separate my usage and interests at the time from the general web itself. I think, for one thing, there still remained even in the early 2000s, a nicheness and ‘geek’ culture to those who spent time on forums that tended to skew the demographic towards teenage boys although I have no evidence for this, this has gone unless you seek it out. I personally haven’t really had too much of a problem with shunning and banning, in fact that type of thing tended to happen more in my earliest web experiences where there seemed to be more places that had issues with swearing, however I have seen a similar puritanical streak that results in this. However I’ve only really perceived that on major platforms as they’ve reached their stage of the life cycle where they can cash-in and must become investor and advertiser friendly. That arc, a more recent arc in my opinion does match what you’re saying but I view that more of a change in how those specific platforms rather than the web itself operate. So it’s harder now than maybe 5-10 years ago to speak your mind with little to no consequence or backlash on a major platform whose reach and influence amplifies that opinion to millions and millions of people. I think you have about the same capacity to speak your mind now as you ever did on the web, but lost the ability to use corporate machinery to do it and not also expect human beings to react to it and to even be silenced when doing so flies against the interests of the owners of the corporate machinery.
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Ask yourself what results in the outcome of, everyone owning everything or everyone owning nothing.
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No, the point is they result in the same outcome just with a different path.
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I would prefer to be able to criticise identity politics and peoples self serving egos that maintain the status quo of capitalism
I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world
The BBS and early Internet days were dominated by people who read non-fiction books. RTFM was a common saying in those days.
does anyone else feel enslaved?
“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”
Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to DeathYeah, buddy… Tik Tok wrapped in a bow.
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Holy shit, go outside homie
Take thy upvote with grace
For me it kind of feels this way, because there’s only a handful of sites I visit regularly, and if one of those sites is unavailable, it feels like I don’t know what to do. In a sense, I am trapped in this new browsing habit that has made me get used to constant short form content that is exciting, and a lack of it is now crippling. At least replacing reddit with lemmy has helped me recover a little bit, because I find that I’m unable to stay on lemmy for hours at a time like I was on reddit.
The relative lack of content is an actual benefit to me too. When I doomscroll too long, it stops being rewarding and I now find something IRL to do. A much healthier mindset to occupy.
You should try lemmy, it’s almost everything what you describe you are missing. Jokes aside, I think that what you refer is mainstream internet, which like music is usually shitty if it’s mainstream, to find the good stuff you have to take your time to dig deeper. Internet is an incredible tool and it’s being used both to enslave and to free people.
Funny, yeah years ago it was easier to find interesting unique content. To quote slavoj zizek “when you think you escape it into your dreams, that is when you are within ideology”.
I get what you mean, but I also feel like the fediverse has given many of us a return to some of the freedoms and feelings of the early internet.
I’m writing this from an instance I admin, an instance that exists, specifically to make a better world for queer and gender diverse folk. We prioritise minority safety over “federate with everyone”, but that freedom to exist without institutionalised transphobia being ignored like it is on most social media platforms, with the ability for us to exist and communicate without being dogpiled by haters, and to actively remove the bigots, that is a freedom I haven’t felt in a long time!
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Cory Doctorow may have you covered; he just posted recently about his next book, which sounds like it deals with what you’re talking about, and tries to find ways to fix it: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/110809535924735163
Thanks for this! Love his writing. Just pledged for the audiobook on Kickstarter.
