avoid the Internet
We live in perilous times.
Nobel prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa said yesterday:
We don’t have a shared reality; because trust is completely broken. And that polarization was created by the algorithms of the distribution platforms of news. The very platforms that are supposed to connect us are insidiously manipulating us for profit.
Also:
The goal isn’t to make you believe one thing. The goal is to make you disbelieve everything, to make you doubt everything, to make you distrust everything, because if you do, then you don’t do anything. And that, to me, is the ultimate danger. This is corrosive. It’s like termites eating wood and before you know it, you just step and fall through. That’s what I’m worried about.
(See her interview with the Gazette)
Back in the eighties and nineties, the Internet was built to be an open platform, but the big players have inevitably co-opted it. Big money has warped the incentives for creating software.
We should avoid this "big Internet" and get back to starting small and building trust.