I don’t see eye to eye with Cory Doctorow on many things, but he hit the nail full on with enshitification. I sometimes think that a lot of the public goods we take for granted today - utilities, infrastructure etc. - would follow the exact same pattern if they were not strictly regulated when privately owned.
If we find (parts of} the Internet to be a public good worth having, perhaps that should be the answer. And no, I didn’t think this through, but looking at both the prevalence of open source in the scaffolding that keeps “the Internet” up and running and the frankly abysmal rate of giving back from commercial entities (barring perhaps the politically motivated committees seeking control of roadmaps), I can’t help but think that we had a chance after the dot om bubble burst and we royally blew it.
Just imagine, an Internet built on universities and libraries nodes, much uglier, sure, but with built-in privacy controls and no unwanted ads in sight. I like to think Wikipedia would still be here, but Facebook would have been this weird niche pervy site that Harvard grads kinda vaguely reminisce about at their 20 year reunion. We’d all be shooting the shit on 50+ forums instead of here, but it would be just as fun.
On second thought just ignore me, that ship has sailed long ago. But maybe donate a few bucks here and there to your favourite open source tools if you can afford it. It might not turn the tide, but every little bit helps.
Sorry for the wall of text, guess I’m just getting a bit nostalgic.
Ah, the good old all natural days… In the middle ages the infant mortality rate was 30% for babies up to 1 year, but hey, at least they lived to the ripe old age of 50.