Oliver Drotbohm
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.
PRW@existentialcomics there's an early RFC on why capitalism won't deliver an Internet:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc873.html
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc873.html
Vincent392 
@prw @existentialcomics 1982, fuck.
Goes to show old documents can be right at times.
craignicol@existentialcomics capitalism took the web from us, and gave us apps instead.
Glitzersachen@craignicol @existentialcomics
And NAT routers and application firewalls. So if I want anybody out there talking to my home server, it's well-neigh impossible.
And to access any IoT device in the house from abroad, I need to go through some vendor's server that will be gone in 10 years (10 if I am lucky) and render the device so much electronic scrap.
@glitzersachen @existentialcomics how will they get their rent if you own your own servers? πΈπΈπΈ
@craignicol @existentialcomics
I think it's more a question of manipulating the consumer market by hiding costs. If you buy a device you own, you'd have to pay the cost upfront. Some (many?) might not want this. By forcing people into a dependency the useful time of a device in the field is curtailed, so that's ensuring the existence of a market in the future (the more if people also bought a gateway or other devices from the same vendor. E.g. as is the case with "internet speakers"). And of course there is the server/service rent (like storing stuff in the cloud but also access).
Personally I don't think it's a question of earning more money per device, but rather one of hiding total costs by subsidizing the device from revenue from aforesaid services. This in turn increases the market (counted in numbers of devices).
Personally I think this "strategy" is deeply unwise on the vendor side as well, because you are continuing a relationship with all those cheap (as in bad) plastic boxes you put into the field in the past. (On the plus side, of course is the possibility of updates, but then which vendors do this consequently, of the course of >10 years).
Greenpete@existentialcomics The U.S. government gave us the Internet, so the tax payer...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
I think you mean the (World Wide) Web.
CosmonautCat@greenpete @existentialcomics which is still not "capitalism" as in private ownership or a market.
@greenpete @existentialcomics what was your point then?
@sememmon @existentialcomics That the OP is confusing the Internet with the web.
@greenpete @existentialcomics colloquially these two terms are used interchangeably. You have proven your smarter than that. Congratulations. Your reward is that everyone thinks you're annoying.
Ariaflame@sememmon @greenpete @existentialcomics Now sure. Originally, nope. I remember being on the internet prior to the WWW.
Harry Wood@sememmon @greenpete @existentialcomics If you want to have a conversation about tech origins, it's pretty silly (and annoying) to conflate "web" and "internet".
But maybe you're both wrong, because it's not clear to me that OP *was* confusing internet and web. Anyway in both cases, although the very first inception took place in a particular institution, both the internet and the web were built through cooperation and open protocols. That's what "gave us" these things in some sense.
But maybe you're both wrong, because it's not clear to me that OP *was* confusing internet and web. Anyway in both cases, although the very first inception took place in a particular institution, both the internet and the web were built through cooperation and open protocols. That's what "gave us" these things in some sense.
Tony Kennick@greenpete @sememmon @existentialcomics
You can't complain about OP conflating the Internet with the WWW when you have confused ARPANET with the protocols it was built on, and the development of the internet from it.
While ARPANET was funded by the US government a lot of what came before and after wasn't. Some of it was funded by other governments, some by private corporations, some was volunteer driven.
You can't complain about OP conflating the Internet with the WWW when you have confused ARPANET with the protocols it was built on, and the development of the internet from it.
While ARPANET was funded by the US government a lot of what came before and after wasn't. Some of it was funded by other governments, some by private corporations, some was volunteer driven.
@greenpete @sememmon @existentialcomics
βLarge-scale cooperation, open protocols, and free software gave us the internetβ is a pretty good summary, even if it doesn't say much specifically about the diversity of funding models.
βLarge-scale cooperation, open protocols, and free software gave us the internetβ is a pretty good summary, even if it doesn't say much specifically about the diversity of funding models.
Glen, waiting for the pre-poll@thegreatgonzo @greenpete @sememmon @existentialcomics This. Australia was 10% of this era of the internet, and it was funded by universities under a variety of funding models, lead by a very small team*, supported by diverted equipment and a huge amount of seconded and volunteer labour. The word I like to use is "collegiate".
* I was fortunate to be a member of the third generation of that team.
Dr Adrian Simmons@thegreatgonzo @greenpete @sememmon @existentialcomics I think the origin stories are important, from what I've heard although a lot of early work went on at large corps (Bell Labs) it was carried out hidden from upper management. It wasn't always something they set out to create as a company, even if they paid for equipment and salaries.
@adrinux @thegreatgonzo @greenpete @sememmon @existentialcomics
> It wasn't always something they set out to create as a company, even if they paid for equipment and salaries.
And it wouldn't be possible today, because most corps wage war on this kind of projects that aren't consider "value driven". Agile directly contributes to this, since everything that is done has to be justified and hooked into the bigger master plan or into immediate customer needs (=> revenue).
@adrinux @thegreatgonzo @greenpete @sememmon @existentialcomics
I am not writing this because I dislike #agile (quite the opposite if done properly), but because this is a specific danger of agile (often only adopted in companies for the promise of "increased efficiency") which needs to be counteracted so that it doesn't destroy engineering culture and its long term value also for society.
Cryptopope@greenpete @sememmon @existentialcomics
I think that doesn't matter for the core message. We shouldn't get detracted by the side show.
Rasmus Kaj πΌπ¦The US government gave us ARPANET, an early experiment with some internet-related techniques. Countless universities around the world, through hi-profile research projects and drop-outs who still had had computer access and everything in between, gave us the Internet (this applies both to the web and to the Internet for 20 years before the web).
So some taxpayer money, some other sources. Certainly not capitalism and certainly not any one specific government.
Scott H.@rkaj @greenpete @existentialcomics While I see ARPANET in this thread, I don't see the OSI model (I assume we all know that the WWW was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, also there was an assist by the ideas of Hypercard (Apple/Atkinson) as well as formal ideas in graph theory that had built for centuries, including, even, triples by Charles Peirce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
@rkaj @greenpete @existentialcomics But the *real gem* besides @dk 's potential for #CounterAntiDisIntermediation is collaboration on knowledge facilitated by an open world assumption, so, really, in the end, I'm with the OP on this if the banal blue/red top 20 outrage points that modern culture tends to gravitate to is stripped away. There is much beauty, truth, and opportunity here. And *this* was what @timbl saw, and still sees. https://www.mkbergman.com/a-knowledge-representation-practionary/
A Knowledge Representation Practionary
Practical Guidance on KR, Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Technologies, and KBpedia A Knowledge Representation Practionary: Guidelines Based on Charles Sanders Peirce Michael K. Bergman Springer International Publishing, 464 pp., December 2018 ISBN 978-3-319-98091-1 This major work on knowledge represe
@greenpete @existentialcomics I just scrolled through this whole thing to see if this distinction came up. It is important to understand where things really come from so we can move forward better. BTW, the real magic of the WWW comes from a knowledge graph approach to structuring knowledge vs. a taxonomy. This facilitates collaboration without enforced structure (kind of like how key-value pairs require a vendor/schema, but triples can grow independently). Structure=committee/gov/corporations
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"! ππ»π―)
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
@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 
Robin Doody@existentialcomics Sounds like you're defining the internet as 'the bits I like about the internet'. The fundamental open protocol of the internet, TCP/IP, came from a defence research project.
Amici Is Me π΅πΈ πΊπ¦ π³π΄@RobinDoody @existentialcomics
if you want to go really far back, you can go further than that and tell almost any story you want depending on where you make the cut-off
but the fact of the matter is that The World Wide Web came out of CERN, and the internet as an actual internet connecting the world together came into being through universities and the education sector, and today the world's internet infrastructure is hosted on Linux servers running open source solutions
@amici @existentialcomics The OP was about the internet rather than the WWW. Of course there were networks before TCP/IP (various mostly commercial technologies used in education and other sectors) but the point is they couldn't all talk to each other. TCP/lP is the fundamental protocol that made internetworking possible. I worked in datacoms last century rolling out IP over previously incompatible legacy protocols.
Martin KosteraBS. ARPANET was before internet(TCP/IP). In 1983 ARPANET adopted TCP/IP and internet appeared. Made by military org. DARPA in capitalistic USA.
Karl Matthias πΊπ¦@existentialcomics @tdp_org yeah, capitalism gave us CompuServe and AOL. The government gave us the Internet.
Dom@existentialcomics Technically, it's the military that gave us Internet, just like global positioning systems and satellite images. For-profit corporations rarely develop something that is truly ground-breaking. They simply repackage stuff differently with a "brand" and some hype to make a profit.
Not trying to promote military development, but just showing that when money is not the goal, technological innovations often flourish.
Pat CM@dom @existentialcomics
Right but then universities were the first one to adopt tcp/ip and build on top of it.
Is the web tcp/ip or http ?
Right but then universities were the first one to adopt tcp/ip and build on top of it.
Is the web tcp/ip or http ?
@Mrpotatoqc9 @existentialcomics But that's a comms protocol to communicate over a network....said network being the web.
Sure, you could "Baud" your way to someone else's computer but that wasn't "the web".
dirty badwrong person@existentialcomics the way capitalists and capitalist institutions take credit for things https://www.youtube.co...
Carnivorous UNDERCOVER caterpillar ππ | Wild Isles - BBC
ferricoxide@existentialcomics
Government spending, like is being dismantled in the US, brought us the original Internet.
Government spending, like is being dismantled in the US, brought us the original Internet.
Justin Mason@existentialcomics also don't forget copious NSF funding
Zalasur πΊπ¦@existentialcomics Fun fact: Capitalism *did* try to develop a protocol on top of IP called OSI that was co-developed by a bunch of industry titans at the time. It was complex and bloated with a very proprietary tech stack.
It never caught on because of an open protocol that was much simpler overtook it back in the early 80s called TCP.
These days the only remnant from the OSI initiative in use today is the "OSI model" used to describe the tech stack for the internet in general.
@zalasur @existentialcomics pretty sure OSI was not built on top of IP, but in parallel to it. AFAIK it used X.25 for the network layer, i.e. the same role that IP plays in the Internet
@wolf480pl @existentialcomics OK, that I did not know. Thanks for the clarification!
Sage π΅πΈ π±π§ πΊπ¦ πΏπ¦ π¨πΊ π@existentialcomics Specifically the US government and the Department of Defense gave us the internet.
Irenes (many)@existentialcomics also, the core protocols were mostly built with military research funding
Kurio π±@existentialcomics Ads apart, mobile sites are also very painful to use and the design is poor and unoptimized purposefully, to force you to install another app to track you.
All these apps could've been well mantained, efficient websites!
Dustin Mitchell@existentialcomics and academia
@existentialcomics There is so many people arguing that "despite what existential comics say, it was actually the government and the military that gave us the internet"...
Like, Existential Comics is not saying that the *government* did not participate in the creation of the internet, but that *openness and cooperation* are what built the internet. The government and the military, along with universities and some corporations, developed *open* protocols for anyone to connect to each other. This contrasts with the tendency of Capitalism to make everything closed and restrictive to maximize profit, as seen in the mobile computing space.
Some of the people who added "government" did add interesting things to the conversation, but that angle is not a "gotcha", it does not contradict EC's point.
d10c4n3@ruakueqche @existentialcomics Actually the creation of the Internet involved significant intervention from the government, through funding in a manner that was not aligned at all with the principles of capitalism (ironically, the US govt). The public intervention allowed for overcoming the limitations of the private market, which had little interest in investing in such risky infrastructures. Still, I'm not so grateful for having the Internet under capitalism (or more properly, under the tecnofeudalusim of today).
@ruakueqche @existentialcomics to be more clear: the creation of the Internet initially involved funding and the development of infrastructure by the government.
Subsequently, the Internet grew thanks to the cooperation of researchers, academics, and volunteers.
Farooq | ΩΨ§Ψ±ΩΩoh and don't forget spyware being normalized and embedded in almost any website.