I’ve always been fascinated by internet culture and the internets affects on society. When you stop and think about it, it’s insane that 50+% of the people on this can access the entirety of human knowledge in their pockets. But not just that, also how the quirks of the internet affect the way people interact with eachother.
Similarly, the fact that the internet is just a bunch of seperate infrastructures duct taped together into something that works. The fact that I can go onto my computer and google how to fix some tech problem requires the cooperation of like 6 seperate companies and their products.
It needs my Windows pc (which is already an amalgamation of different companies) to connect to the internet through my Internet Service Provider to run my Firefox browser that uses Chrome’s search engine to browse through Reddit to find a post about it. And that’s not counting whatever companies they rely on to do their business. It’s incredible! But it’s also the a product of the fact that the internet is privatized. None of those companies are publicly owned by the people or the government (Firefox is arguably pretty open but besides the point). Any one of those companies could just decide one day “No, I’m not going to play nice anymore” and our Zip-Tie and prayers infrastructure will fall apart
We’re seeing the fallout of this right now, because Reddit decided it didn’t want to play nice anymore, and there’s nobody to hold it accountable. Hoards of knowledge on Reddit could be lost through this. People are joking about “oh how will I find my obscure bug fixes now?” But it’s not a joke, it’s very real.
The internet isn’t as robust as we like to think. It’s a thin balance, and we’re now starting to see that the balance is held in place by corporate greed