Ordinary people now spend their lives promoting investments they barely understand, products that do not work, and political claims they have never examined. Many earn nothing. They are unpaid distributors for someone farther up the pyramid. The consumer, salesman, and product have collapsed into the same exhausted person.
Until everyone looks at their phone/app/online usage and questions how they are being ‘used’ it will still continue to drag along like a zombie. I regullay stop and ask whose tail i am wagging.
The modern internet is now a highly optimised machine for detecting human vulnerability, amplifying it, and placing a payment link beside it. Any insecurity can become a commercial niche, including the desire to escape commercial life itself. There is always a course, a newsletter, a private community, or a referral code waiting at the end of the funnel.
Just avoid social media. Social media is not the whole Internet.
Social media is not the whole Internet.
for some people it unfortunately is
Kind of? The money came in and ruined it like they ruin everything. Gotta wring out every ounce of value out of everything, even if you kill it in the process
It always comes back to financial incentives. Enshitification follows the almighty dollar. Unrestricted and subsidized capitalism amplifies it all along with socialized protections and policies for those that need it least. (And those same people and organizations who benefit most are the first to speak out and block similar practices from benefitting the people)
Now?
I remember using netgroups and UUCP in the early 90’s to piece together files from
alt.binaries.pictures.eroticaBack then there were fewer financially/data-predatory websites, mostly because we didn’t have payment methods on the Internet yet (we were just getting websites as opposed to news and gopher), and it wasn’t yet practical for companies to scrape your data.
So instead we were inundated with viruses. Like every few weeks, somehow, a virus would eat your frickin’ files. It was more simply malicious, not even greedy. Not going to try and argue which is worse.
I also used gopher, usenet, uucp, archie and all that in the early '90s. And if you were just a little bit careful, catching a virus or trojan was very rare.
Now, everything is monetized. You’re under constant surveillance on a scale it was unimaginable at that time, and being careful amounts to nothing (unless you’re super paranoid) because your security depends completely on how others secure your data, assuming that they’re trying to secure and not sell it.
In this respect, now it’s much, much worse than it was, even if in some other ways it’s somewhat better.
Peak internet was around 2005-2010, IMHO.
Getting drive-by zero click malware from an Adobe Flash / ActiveX embed banner ad, or JavaScript / CSS vulnerability, had nothing to do with how careful you were. You just randomly got viruses from your computer existing with an Ethernet cable connected. Antivirus were also pretty useless.
If you never got one, you were either extremely lucky, or just didn’t notice and it was sneaky spyware
Those came later (late '90s-early '00s), and ran mostly on Windows; believe it or not, at that time there were people that used Linux or Mac (I dual booted, Wintendo for games, everything else on Linux).
And most malware came from shady sites. Again, if you were careful, you rarely got it (rarely, not never). If you were not careful, well, it usually was obvious because even if your Windows was not infected with a virus or trojan, your browser would be full of toolbars and the PC would run like crap.
cesspits are not addictive
Are drugs not cesspits?
No, drugs are drugs and cesspools are cesspools. Apples and triangles are different concepts too.
Apples and triangles are different concepts too
Explain this then:
No, not “always has been!” Some of us remember the '90s, before the corporations found it and ruined everything.
Take the rose tinted glasses off. Dial up companies were charging long distance when you were on BBS/sited outside your local zipcode by the minute. Some companies were walled gardens and you couldn’t access the entire internet (compuserve)
Trolls, catfish, and cyber crime existed even before the '90’s.
I don’t remember anyone charging long distance for internet packets.
In fact, I don’t even know how you’d meter that? Did they just charge you for open TCP sockets outside their own CO? Wtf who did that fucking bullshit? I’ve had a dozen different ISPs since about 1996 and no one ever charged long distance for packets
Re-read what they said. They’re talking about modem dialup to a long distance number, so the phone call the modem made was long distance and hence charged at the higher rate.
It’s ok to not get it, this is pre internet and a very long time ago
