this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:
Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.
I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.
I wasn't aware that the big four were buying the transport infra too
Well I was aware of Google Fiber for years now, but the other three are indeed a surprise.
Especially Facebook? Like what the fuck do you need that for? Your business is entirely Instagram ads?
years ago facebook got extremely into owning the channel in multiple ways (for the reasons outlined in that post). the FreeBasics program, Libra, etc. all kinds of shit
because if you own the channel, you can charge others any amount you want for access, while giving yourself ~~special treatment~~ "having different internal cost structures between business units" (cf. amazon, as doctorow's written in recent years)
also, this stuff isn't "google fiber" as in the residential/muni shit but the undersea this-links-countries kind: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/learn-about-googles-subsea-cables
They got tired of all the "SV keeps re-inventing trains and buses à la carcinisation"* memes and decided to remove them from public consciousness altogether
*Yes, I did initially misread "transport" as "public transport" and not "internet transport" even after skimming the article. No, I will not change this joke. Yes, I look like a fool now, but when silicon valley vertically integrates away your precious commute I'll look like the best damn prediction marketeer out there.
I autocorrected it to transit in my head (because that's the term of art and unfortunately I am cursed with that tier of networking exposure) but it also threw me for a moment
and then I groaned because, as you remarked, it's also true in the respect of these dipshits trying to take cars and buses and trains
Me, a network goblin: wait what do they mean physical layer or did meta try to buy TCP somehow?
China tried pretty hard to push neo-IP a few years back..
it’s very bad news if so — we won’t even have the option to escape these assholes if they own all of the fabric of the network
it's a shame that packet radio is so fucking slow
actual fucking anti-monopoly enforcement cannot come goddamn soon enough
in before some fucking asshole posts “but how can it be a monopoly when it’s 4 companies colluding to control the entire market HMMMM? do you just hate capitalism and success?”
Wait but you already have this literal system for internet service in the USA, no? Isn't it literally four companies that partitioned the country into their ISP fiefdoms?
So nothing would change is what you're saying?
we have that fucking nightmare for residential service; what I’m saying is if they own the substrate, we’ll get that same fucking nightmare everywhere else too. and as we’ve seen in the US, it’s very easy for a broken regulator to see 2-4 companies colluding and decide that’s not a monopoly and no action is needed
Uhm, actually the correct term is ~~epheb~~ oligopoly.
oh fuck you crossed the libertarian streams, now the thread’s gonna be destroyed by bears
Well, I guess I will have to welcome our new bear overlords then.