Existential ComicsCapitalism didn't give us the internet.
Large-scale cooperation, open protocols, and free software gave us the internet. Capitalism gave us mobile sites that don't work because fifteen ads cover the screen.
Kagan MacTane (he/him)> Large-scale cooperation, open protocols, and free software gave us the internet.
Also government. The foundations of the internet started as US government research projects. That's why, to this day, reverse DNS lookups include references to the `in-addr.arpa` domain, with ARPA being the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.arpa
I am no fan of government, but I gotta give them their due on this.
(But yes, very much agreed on "not capitalism"! 👍🏻💯)
Daniel Lakeland@kagan
I feel like govt and capitalism had the same role. They didn't give us the internet, they directed resources via finance. They gave in essence "permission" for the researchers to do their thing. They gave "permission" for people to scale up data centers and lay fiber and etc.
They like to take credit. But if permission weren't required wed have the internet instead of browsers and phones that spy on you. The permission holds us back, but is sold as progress
@existentialcomics
Bram Moreinis@dlakelan @kagan @existentialcomics I love your reframe. Before industrial capitalism, any resource-intensive projects that could not be done in hobby time frames needed to be sponsored by the Rothchilds or Josef II. But history does not award authorship of these discoveries and projects to their funders.
Wolf480pl@dlakelan @kagan @existentialcomics
It's not just permission, it's also the society's resources.
If the scientists and engineers building the internet had to farm their own food, smelt their own copper, and make every single transistors themselves, they wouldn't have any time left in a day to build the internet.
Even if we don't credit the person who allocated the resources, let's at least acknowledge the many people who produced them.
@wolf480pl
Yes, everyone needs to use resources that other people are producing. What government and capitalism do is concentrate control of those resources into the hands of a few who can then take credit for "making" something when they pay for it. Which is just giving permission for those resources to be reallocated in a certain way.
So, agreed, but finance isn't creation, as Meta's billions for the metaverse it killed off before ever being used shows.
@kagan @existentialcomics
mike805@kagan @existentialcomics The government gave a bunch of hackers money to build a research and military resource sharing network.
The hackers very deliberately built protocols designed to network the whole world. 32 bits was overkill otherwise.
Much like von Braun took money to build the V2 and built the foundations of a space program with it.
Give technical people resources, let them share what they build, and things will get built that could not be done for profit with a trillion dollars.
Maronno Winchester 