Against the centralization of the internet and other shortages, 3 strategies for optimism

You will notice these last times my pessimistic tone. After years disconnected for personal and important reasons, I return to a network that was going downhill and without brakes, but that seems to be reaching the end. First the poisoned manna of trashtubing and influencers, the shearing of some promising young people, then the progressive and unstoppable commodification of a web in which they grow, even hand in hand with crypto that promised so much as a democratic currency, spam, phishing, scams and so on.

I was writing all this, recording the video of 27 min. about the Crumb Society that comes later, when I was reading Jack Dorsey, founder of twitter about it:

“the days of usenet, irc, the web…even email (w PGP)…were amazing. centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet. I realize I’m partially to blame, and regret it.”

In short, we are headed for a terrifying future, centered on the following elements:

-Increase in inequality: 50 companies now account for 25 percent of world capital and the ratio is increasing. The population is getting poorer, the lower-middle class tends to disappear, said the economist Niño Becerra whom I quoted in the videos and listened to recently. Surviving, according to the author, are some highly technical workers of the new and omnipotent powers of information, of artificial intelligence, which relegate the majority to unemployment when they invent more and more robots replacing human labor.

And I add: the immovable castes return instead of classes: either we are pariahs blinded by the mirage of easy wealth (famous youtubers, big hits in cryptocurrencies) or the rich are absent from the worldly problems that control the free expression of the poor (network users). , little creators) from their crystal paradises.

-Scarcity, very much in line with the Crumb Society that we always talk about, also growing (this very week a law was proposed in Spain that would limit the purchase of products in the supermarket) and that can be summed up, in a few words, in the achievement of social, health, empowerment and freedom benefits, etc. even a minimum of insufficient well-being, which failed to save us from millions of deaths during the pandemic, which silences us more every day on networks, etc.

And it does not seem, again according to Niño Becerra, that there is going to be a revolution, it does not seem that we are going to change things. The system, based on basic income, marijuana and free (or low cost) leisure, will keep us satisfied.

We also anticipated it when talking about the coming commodified metaverse, exemplified in the movie Ready Player One and anticipated in the most varied cyberpunk nightmares.

I propose strategies to deal with it, so that from the networks, stop sleeping, accelerate the awakening that we need, focusing on the video in three aspects:

-Dodge the algorithm, proactively choose the alternative:

With everyone with a voice on networks but silenced by the algorithms of the most massive, we have to look for alternatives.

Competitiveness is in our favor… These days I see, for example, how Twitter, one of the networks that gave us more volume in the past, doesn’t do it to the same extent (unless you buy advertising) now. Could it be that in its text format it does not have too much competition? The visibility of a microvideo on reels, tiktok, instagram is much greater, an issue that must be taken advantage of to obtain the visibility of our impartial and therefore more critical message.

-Fraternity among small creators, radical generosity:

«Faced with a panorama of increasingly monopoly of the big media and brands in the majority social networks, solidarity between micro-creators remains the only solution. I intend from now on to write about the subject and set an example.» tweeted a few days ago (we delve into it in the video). Well that…

-Stay healthy, take care of ourselves and stay healthy, physically and emotionally:

I was commenting on it with a colleague on Tiktok and I will write about it shortly: the pandemic, the war now, have left us in a state of brutal emotional precariousness that increases with the individualism that we live in the streets, the antipathy and lack of emotional support of our congeners that crisis situations sometimes generate (even smiles or affection are scarce). There are two possible paths: the first, that of an affection, an institutionalized emotional support (psychology, therapy, are today the most promising businesses, the Swedish theory of love is a very interesting film that talks about it), the second, a commitment to the emotional care of oneself and others, is what can save us. We will talk about all this shortly.

Video about the subject here.