I think this community is a remarkable bastion of what's left of this.
"The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control."
@dfr Well..... I agree with a lot of what has been written there. But ... was the internet really *ever* a democratic thing or something about creation, creativity, ...? Was it ever "free", and what does "free" mean? Gratis (which is what brought us ad- and tracking based capitalism in the first place)? I thin we also should be honest to ourselves and try to understand how we got here before trying to figure out how to fix things...
@z428 this is personal opinion, but: I think democracy came with the lack of centralization and open access for those privileged enough to have access to it. Also I think it means free as in freedom, because companies always charged you to access to the internet from your landline, etc. I guess traffic was never free, but use was. It's an opinionated article but still has good points.
