big tech

Soooo, IBM? NVidia?

Or just the massively-enshittified ad-shoveling social media hoses?

This is a bit optimistic. It’s amazing that the tools exits to create a better, more open internet. However, the biggest barrier is convincing people to use them.

Personally, I’ve found that convincing the average user of just how much they are being taken advantage of by big tech is much harder than it should be. People are addicted to the convenience that lured them into these proprietary platforms in the first place. Humans tend to choose easier options over healthier options.

We should continue to carry the flag of open source, decentralization, and privacy-respecting platforms. However, we should be prepared that people will look at it an go… “Nah, that sounds hard. I’ll let them sell my data to save a few clicks.”

Yanis Varoufakis views Big tech as digital landlords in his book 'Technofeudalism" . He argues that they extract rents from owning the digital space as landlords did in the Middle ages while monetising our attention. They are not capitalists in the sense that they don’t sell goods and services for profit but rather control the environment where others buy and sell.

It’s an interesting take on where we are and how dystopian big tech has turned out to be.

I would love for this headline to be correct, but it seems far more likely that it is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. /Drcox