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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.
@dfr ... "privileged" in terms of money (that's why these services are "gratis") or skills (that's why these services are low-bareer and very focussed on usability). Maybe this is the evolution the (Software)Libre movement has to take as well: #SoftwareLibre was at some point (Four Freedoms) about empowering and providing freedoms to users back then, rather than being forced into arcane EULAs and NDAs. Maybe "Libre" right now needs to be about empowering untrained end users to be able to do ...