margoti dont think the world was better or worse before the internet so much as the internet gave us all a brief glimpse of a world without the conventional logics of capital before capital was able to catch up
and i think sometimes ppl get that backwards
Video Game King@emaytch I wouldn't even say that. People tend to underestimate how commercialized even the early Internet tended to be.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1068/d140127
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1068/d140127
@Video_Game_King oh i mean it definitely was-- banner ads covering websites has been a joke basically as long as i can remember-- but bc it was still novel and most ppl's ideas of how to interact with it was based in old concepts, it was possible to stay ahead of most of the corporate internet if you cared to. now the digital natives are in charge, and that's no longer possible
Spencer@emaytch Reminds me of the the thesis of Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: that disasters, while catastrophic, are also fleeting glimpses of a life outside of the structures of capitalism.
Pat@emaytch thank you for posting this observation. It's a fresh insight for me. And explains much in my understanding of late stage capitalism.
xorox@emaytch Idk. I spent my childhood on irc downloading pirated software plugins on dialup modem. And it took f-ing forever.
Wulfy—Speaker to the machinesThe Internet allowed all the village idiots to have a village.
mike805@n_dimension @emaytch The early Internet (pre-AOL) provided an idiot-free village. There were loons and nuts on, but few idiots, because you had to be smarter than the average monkey to get the thing to work!
Then AOL got USENET support. That was where the downward slide began.
J.D. MacLeod 🇨🇦@emaytch I still remember the openness and kindness of interacting with strangers on the internet in the mid-90s....
MisterMaker@emaytch It's weird how things got to this. Like I ran a small gaming server for TF2 with a couple of other volunteers, we paid for the server and forum. Then people started to exploit the system by sending users spam and redirecting them to spam.
And instead of Valve stopping these specifically they just killed almost the complete custom server community by giving users an auto join button and dumping everyone in valve servers. They kept the old system alive but lots of users stopped coming in.
And instead of Valve stopping these specifically they just killed almost the complete custom server community by giving users an auto join button and dumping everyone in valve servers. They kept the old system alive but lots of users stopped coming in.
ManniCalavera@emaytch
Thanks, thats a very compmprehensive summary of what I answered in a longwinded way to a post mentioning this study that some young people wish a world w/o the Internet.
Post (in German) is here:
https://norden.social/@JohannesStarke/114563738319984889
Thanks, thats a very compmprehensive summary of what I answered in a longwinded way to a post mentioning this study that some young people wish a world w/o the Internet.
Post (in German) is here:
https://norden.social/@JohannesStarke/114563738319984889
Johannes (@[email protected])
Eben im #SystemCrash Podcast von der britischen Studie gehört, nach der die knappe Hälfte junger Menschen in Großbritannien lieber in einer Welt ohne Internet leben würden. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/20/almost-half-of-young-people-would-prefer-a-world-without-internet-uk-study-finds… (1/2)
@emaytch You can run all that 1990s Internet software on a Raspberry Pi. There is no technical reason we cannot still have that Internet. It is apparently just not addictive enough to draw people in any more.
Light@emaytch
I think the main downside of the internet is that it provides no inventive for civil behaviour, capitalism or no.
I think the main downside of the internet is that it provides no inventive for civil behaviour, capitalism or no.