this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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I’m old enough to have lived through the advent of the World Wide Web. I was so enthusiastic about the potential of these technologies. It was going to finally democratize information and do away with misinformation and pseudoscience, and promote critical thinking, freedom and democracy. I crafted an entire career around my optimism about this stuff. It’s now obvious in retrospect that none of that happened and we have collectively regressed on all those fronts. I’m not making a causal claim about damage that the internet might have done. I don’t know if this stuff would have happened anyway. But, it certainly didn’t deliver on the promise we were so excited about. IMO it all went wrong when we handed the keys to the whole thing over to commercial entities.
I'm guessing I'm probably slightly younger than you, but I'm still old enough to remember how things were before the web took everything over. I definitely agree with some of your point, but I think there's some cause for optimism!
That's also my perspective, speaking as someone who also remembers the early days of the Net.