Post by @lispi314@udongein.xyz

2026-10-23 02:35 UTC

@mattsheffield@mastodon.social @Farbs@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social I have mixed feelings about a lot of it. Much of the issues are not the wider availability or accessibility (which are good things), but rather reflections of much larger problems with the society around it. Academia & industry at the time was very much not without its faults, either (we got to this surveillance capitalism nightmare through collaboration with oppressors, for instance).

Replies (1)

@mattsheffield@mastodon.social 2026-10-23 02:58

@lispi314@udongein.xyz @Farbs@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social I think it's fair to say that rapacious capitalism is the real culprit. But there's no question that morons and extremists joining the internet made it worse. In the 1980s, France had a different vision of what the internet could have been that was not rapaciously capitalistic, but still made room for business: the Minitel. Here's a previous podcast w/transcript on the topic fwiw: https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2023/01/richard-barbrook-californian-ideology-libertarianism-neoliberalism/#:~:text=SHEFFIELD%3A%20But%20at%20the%20same%20time%20though%2C%20I%20mean%20in%20the%20eighties%2C%20I%20mean%20there%20was%2C%20especially%20in%20France%2C%20there%20was%20this%20a%20different%20idea%20for%20the%20network%20society.

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