What do you see as the future ~20 years from now?
I mention this because so far, the future seems to involve more DRM and paywalls, less neutrality, more megabytes of poorly-written crappy Javascript. And if you let that line of thinking get to you, you just feel like tossing your iPad in the trash and going hiking. At least then, you don't have to read all those dumb Alex Jones forwards from your crazy aunt.
But it doesn't have to be that way. The re-decentralization movement is slowly gaining mindshare. What happens in 2040 depends 100% on how we act now. The great utopian sharing mindspace that we wrote about endlessly in Mondo 2000 (or Computer Lib / Machine Dreams) can still happen if we want.
I think it's easy to lose site of the fact that the "old" internet is still there, there's just so many new layers of people and layers of things on top of it that it's hard to remember that you can still setup a /~bane/ website pretty trivially...lots of other services could still exist but nobody wants to foot the bill.
I think one of the best representations of the old internet is how the demoscene operates. Free, volunteer, information rich, a bit quirky and communal.
Decentralization can only happen by meeting some prerequisites that we as a society are not even comfortable talking about.
I don’t want this and insist it’s not coming from defeatism. I say it because I desperately want to change it. I just have yet to be presented with a way out that makes a lick of sense.
I come from the advertising industry. The mindless assertion that private industry can be trusted in moral pursuit is breaking our society, and the modern web browser has accelerated that.
Decentralization is not a path. It’s a goal. There are two general paths:
One is through public regulation of the corporations that broke the internet in the first place and approach something resembling economic justice, making room in the public consciousness for decentralization to proliferate.
The other path, a shorter path, is to consider the internet as a public plaza. Equal access, free speech, defended by democracy instead of by capitalists. The public provides an ethical base set of internet services and regulates hiring and privacy practices in such a way that citizens can use these to pursue their livelihoods. Decentralization can proliferate from these spaces of unmitigated discussion, which are not reliant on the ruthless advertising economy.
These are each still well outside the realm of the public’s imagination, because people simply have no clue about the advertising regime that governs their lives.