alt Hacker NewsI think a lot of us old tech folks want to still believe in those techno-libertarian ideals of the old web. However, in order to do that we largely need to ignore the capitalistic and authoritarian ideals of the modern web.
Us not owing each other anything worked great in a prior era when people were largely correct in assuming most people were good actors. But as soon as the money and power of the internet became real, things started to turn more adversarial. The assumption of trust and lack of responsibility makes it easy for one side to take advantage of the goodwill of the other. And the technical and power imbalances inherit to the server-client nature of the web means that abuse is more likely to flow in one direction than the other.
I agree entirely. Those of us old enough to have experienced those dreams are naturally going to mourn the loss of the Internet as a place for wild experimentation because we know so much good came from it and there isn't any true replacement.
But it's become clear that in the absence of governance, standards of behavior, and rules both explicit and implicit, the Internet has grown toward tyranny and automated exploitation rather than freedom.
We need to set some rules and expectations that people can rely on, otherwise rules will continue to be imposed on us.