For the web it was once "it can go either incredibly great or unbelievably bad"

[Towgunner]

Now that internet censorship is going full bore the question I once pondered has sadly been definitively answered. If the GOP got smart they would have adopted a free web policy. Whether they decide to do that going forward or not may not make any difference now that the major tech giants have made their final moves. Too little to late. But, rolling the clock back only a little bit, we were once in a situation where I would have said it can go either way. Either we have a relatively free web, which would engender a much freer society and the sort of political outcomes we'd prefer to see or the web will be highly regulated and controlled by a small elite that would control all of the information. A free web would have given us a renaissance, because, it makes centralized authority and, with emphasis, propaganda very difficult, perhaps impossible and certainly impractical. That's a great thing. The web is a very individual thing. Each individual personally configures their web experience accordingly. We all could be living in our respective digital enclaves and given the extreme divisions and discord going on right now that would be a good thing. On the other hand, the web can also be easily centralized and if it is, than "they" pretty much have you from A - Z. And if they have you from A-Z than they can program you in ways that the analog media couldn't even imagine. This condition is an authoritarians ultimate wet dream.

Hope? Well, I doubt the now democrat controlled legislature will decide to break the tech giants up, even though this needs to desperately happen. So, that's not at all inspiring. However, tech is a rapidly evolving industry and because much of it is open source alternatives to platforms like twitter, facebook and youtube will inevitably come about, a la, Gab, BitChute etc. The actions against Parlor are another thing entirely and simply altogether frightening.

 

[surfdog]

I now consider anything on the internet as a honeypot and will be striving to pull away from big tech. The only places I go now are here, /pol, zh. 3 sites? I've been banned from every other place.

 

[Dr Mantis Toboggan]

I have confidence that the GOP will bravely stand up for traditional American values, now that they no longer have the power to do anything about it.

 

[Pelagius]

Now that internet censorship is going full bore the question I once pondered has sadly been definitively answered. If the GOP got smart they would have adopted a free web policy. Whether they decide to do that going forward or not may not make any difference now that the major tech giants have ...

The world wide web was never going to be truly 'free', we only need look at history of advanced technology in ancient civilisations to see a predictive framework.

There is no advantage to having a truly free internet for those in power. What there is an advantage in, is financing the creation of apps that 'appear to be dissenting' but are in fact an open platform that allows government agencies to run automated profiling software to gain insights into populations, triggers, user behaviour, user details, crowd sentiment and much much more - all of which go into the planning for rolling out bad news on a sunny day.

And people need to be careful of this right now, because patriots are leaving main stream social media to create alt-tech accounts which makes their online activity easy to run digital finger-printing on should freedom of speech become rapidly criminalised.

Case in point, the 'father of the web' Tim Berners Lee wants to 'remake the internet', the idea is that people will own their own secure 'pods' of sensitive information that will be a single-sign on for every user. But if it's simply more 1's and 0's that the government will either overtly or covertly control eventually and I suppose if you control the pod, you control all of the users online activity.

As for hope, I hold out little hope for the internet as we know it and I hold out even less hope for privacy as we know it. World governments have been after encryption for a long time, and under the guise of a wave of dangerous anti-vaxx christian extremists driven by a Biden administration I can see a future in which they begin to 'try' to criminalise the use of encryption as they have before and this time the consequences will be devastating for us and comical for future generations- remember, you will own nothing and you will be happy.

Where my hope lies now is actually in seeing if people will push back against social isolation and atomization and finally begin rebuilding real communities and the people of the West will begin reconnecting with their ancestors and placing roots into the ground. No more comrades that are a 4 hour flight away or time spent as a loner pursuing women - but instead old values that will, if utilised properly create a real push back that cannot be taken offline so easily.

That or we all eventually fall into soviet style obedience, rat each other out, kill the dissenters, tow the party line and the west comes to a brutal end.

 

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Even the Soviet Union ended eventually -because evil systems inevitably promote crippling corruption and incompetence, and because most of the Soviet Union's citizens simply "checked out" and participated to the least extent possible short of having a gun pointed at their face.

For an illustration, just look at the horrific mess that Venezuela is. Someday, someone (whether domestic or not) is just going to walk into that country and restore it to normalcy, just like the Vietnamese walked unopposed into post-Khmer Cambodia.

Evil systems always become full of rot and collapse from within.

 

[Towgunner]

Even the Soviet Union ended eventually -because evil systems inevitably promote crippling corruption and incompetence, and because most of the Soviet Union's citizens simply "checked out" and participated to the least extent possible short of having a gun pointed at their face.

For an illustration, just look at the horrific mess that Venezuela is. Someday, someone (whether domestic or not) is just going to walk into that country and restore it to normalcy, just like the Vietnamese walked unopposed into post-Khmer Cambodia.

Evil systems always become full of rot and collapse from within.

I completely agree with this and would say the the decomposition process you speak of is well on is way here in the US. If I can sum up my feelings for the future it would be this - unsustainable. Meaning our system is on an unsustainable path. Consider, the monetary system. Printing money ad infinitum leads inevitably to currency debasement and inflation. Ray Dalio from Bridgewater Associates thinks the days of the USD as the global reserve currency are quickly coming to an end. But its not just the empirical. If you look at the relationship between men and women...that's unsustainable too and for a variety of reason we're all familiar with. One of the many reasons is how women have to take men down in order for them to move up. And that, of course, stifles merit or even just simple competency. Making your system less competent is not a long term winning strategy. The whole woke takeover of academia is unsustainable for similar reasons. Gone are the days of getting tenure or becoming a department head due to competence, rather, people are selected for their intersectional points. And what is intersectionality than an inversion of merit itself. Meanwhile in a Chinese elementary school their doing advanced mathematics.