Marc Tabyanan

Photo by Michael Dziedzic, Upsplash.

It seems a cliche to hear that the Internet is dead now, but I have come to realize that statement really is true. What we knew as the Internet has been taken over by the corporations and tech giants.

Many people talk about the “dead Internet” or the “death of the Internet,” but what do I mean? I mean this: the Internet that we knew back from the late 90s through the 2000s is now just an historical footnote. The Internet today is controlled by large corporations, and especially the tech giants—Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and X (or whatever Elon Musk is calling Twitter today). The idea that anyone could throw up a website, start creating content or selling a product and make money is just not real anymore.

Why is this? A lot of people have written about this, so it is not a startling revelation that the tech bros have put a stranglehold on the Internet by controlling what people see. They have done everything they can to keep users within their walled gardens, their silos of “information,” for one reason: to make obscene amounts of money.

Their algorithms feed you what they want you to see, not what you want. And that is one way they make their money, by targeted ads. The other way is to track literally everything you do, so they can sell that money to anyone who will pay—from sketchy corporations to our own government.

Make no mistake: money and greed killed the Internet. It did not turn into this utopia of information, where democracy flourished. Instead, it has turned into this slick, artificially controlled place where oligarchs decide what you see and even influence what you think. People who do not have our best interests at heart, but their own.

And that makes me very sad. I remember the Internet in its early days, and the excitement of discovering new things to see, and even getting out there myself. Now I am just angry when I see the shit that is forced on us. And that makes me even more sad.

But I think I have found a place where I see hope. That place is known as the Fediverse. I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks, but basically the Fediverse is a peek into what the Internet used to be, not what it is now.

The Fediverse is really a collection of servers that are usually free, use open source software and not owned by any corporation. They usually have communities that have built up around them, and are policed by themselves—their own community—rather than some corporation.

The best part is that these servers talk to each other, letting you have account on one server, such as a Mastodon server, and follow a user on another server. You choose who to follow, not someone else. You see the information you want, from across all the servers that are talking to each other. This is what some people are calling the “social web,” as opposed to the “social media” that we have come to despise.

Why does this give me hope? Because Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Google are not controlling what I see. I am. And so can you. The Fediverse is open and raw, with all of the flaws that the Internet had in the early days. And that is the way I like it.

Marc #deadinternet #fighttheoligarchs #socialmedia #socialweb #fediverse