Holger
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.
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"! ๐๐ป๐ฏ)
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 ๐ต๐ธ ๐บ๐ฆ ๐ณ๐ด@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.
Serge@amici @RobinDoody @existentialcomics @GeofCox I like those long gone olden days when people tried to make useful things in stead of just trying to maximize profit like today. Neoliberal ideology has destroyed so many things. It will end one day, but not before society collapses Iโm afraid.
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 ๐บ๐ฆ@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".
mc.fly@dom @existentialcomics it's the military who gave us IP. It's large scale science who gave us the web. It's universities who gave us email and irc.
It's not one group is all of them together
@mcfly @existentialcomics True, it's a bit of chicken and egg thing but the infrastructure was critical for it. Whether we like it or not, military development and innovation always goes together.
antimagic heart-sickness@existentialcomics the way capitalists and capitalist institutions take credit for things https://www.youtube.co...
Carnivorous UNDERCOVER caterpillar ๐๐ | 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 ๐บ๐ฆ@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 ๐ต๐ธ ๐ฑ๐ง ๐บ๐ฆ ๐ฟ๐ฆ ๐จ๐บ ๐@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 ๐ฑ@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
Ruakueqche@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.
Farooq | ูุงุฑููoh and don't forget spyware being normalized and embedded in almost any website.
Nick Silkey๐๏ธN5ILK ๐ช๐ชต ๐ชฃ๐ง@existentialcomics Public good and public service and love for knowledge as well as other humans just like all of us got folks connected.
Tired ass capital extraction wrecked it. Same boring basic bitch playbook!
It's fixable tho! By passionate people and their free will after learning this. The only way is through. ๐ซ๐โ๏ธ๐
CrypticCatfist@existentialcomics
I remember when the "Information Superhighway" was suddenly shut down and replaced with "E-commerce".
I remember when the "Information Superhighway" was suddenly shut down and replaced with "E-commerce".
A.A. Delafin, blackguard@existentialcomics I think that Benjamin Peters in his 'How Not to Network a Nation' says something like: the Internet wasn't founded in the Soviet Union because the communists behaved like capitalists, while in the US the capitalists behaved like communists.'
ezaquarii@existentialcomics actually, if was cold war and military that gave us the I internet.
June Blender@existentialcomics University professors developed the internet to share physics papers.
Gemma โญ๏ธ๐ฐ๐บ๐ธ ๐ต๐ญ ๐@existentialcomics The Internet was created primarily by government investment and government-funded research.
FTR, I've been "on the Internet" since 1986, which is a lot longer than 99% of people in the world even knew the Internet existed. My first email address was gs1v+@andrew.cmu.edu, and if you immediately recognize that domain and subdomain and know why there's a plus inherent in the email address, they you are at least as old as I am.
Marty Fouts@existentialcomics By the time the BSD protocol stack had become free, the modern Internet was well established and the backbone implemented in proprietary implementations on corporate hardware. The large scale cooperation was mostly corporate through things like InterOp and the infrastructure is still very much corporate, both the devices and the networks. Open protocols played a role but so did and still does massive corporate investment.
Pilsnerd
Space Hobo@existentialcomics https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/3470/How-Not-to-Network-a-NationThe-Uneasy-History-of โ This book tells the story of how the US won at making the Internet because they acted like socialists, while the USSR tried to do it through cOmPeTiTiOn, and failed.
Tallak@existentialcomics @TanteGulo capitalism gave us wap
David J. Atkinson@existentialcomics Government, specifically military research, gave birth to Arpanet, a technical example of an inter-network. About 10 years later, government decided to let anyone use Arpanet for educational, private, public or commercial use. It took an huge variety of efforts big and small by many communities of interest to make the newly renamed โInternetโ useable for anything other than academic email and file exchange.
We gave ourselves the Internet. We are also responsible for some parts of it getting screwed up. If we didnโt tolerate what we do, the screwed up parts would get fixed by the same kind of people who created it in the first place.
Mikkel Lentz@existentialcomics true. Capitalism cannibalized and commercialized the trust of the users. We should seek for altruistic based platforms.
Dopes The Frogman@existentialcomics capitalism gave us paywalls.
/dives off the plane
ottO@existentialcomics wasn't it fear of nuclear armageddon ?
beemoh@existentialcomics Now that isn't entirely fair.
Desktop websites *also* don't work because they're covered with fifteen ads.