alt Hacker NewsThe title is all bluster. Nothing wrong with going off to play in your own corner but I don't think it does this movement any good to play-act at some grand conflict.
Personally, I believe it would be better if we had more technological self-direction and sovereignty, but this kind of essay, which downplays and denigrates the progress and value of our modern systems, is a perspective from which the insights necessary for such a transformation cannot possibly take root.
When asking such questions seriously, we must look at youtube, not twitter. Mountains of innovations in media publishing, delivery, curation, navigation, supplementation via auto-generated captions and dubbing, all accreted over 20 years, enabling a density and breadth of open-ended human communication that is to me truly staggering.
I'm not saying we should view centralized control over human comms infra as positive, or that we'll be "stuck" with it (I don't think we will be), just that we need to appreciate the nature and scale of the "internet" properly if we're to stand a chance of seeing some way through to a future of decentralized information technology
Agree with a lot that you’re saying here but with a rather large asterisk (*). I think that ecosystems like YT are useless to the wider web and collective tech stack unless those innovations become open (which Alphabet has a vested interest in preventing).
If YT shut down tomorrow morning, we’d see in a heartbeat why considering them a net benefit in their current form is folly. It is inherently transitory if one group controls it.
The OP article is correct about the problem, but is proposing throwing mugs of coffee on a forest fire.