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The wild thing about the tech oligarchs is that if they stopped offering their services tomorrow, most of us would be at a loss for maybe a week, then replace them with the dozens of other, smaller alternatives that they keep beating down below the fold.

They're nothing like the robber barons, who could *materially fuck you up* just by like, losing a shipment on their railroad or forgetting to ship you steel or cutting you off from oil.

These people bottle and sell the air like it's gold.

John

This, like a great deal of material differences between this era and the last time we saw this kind of rise of fascism, is why I don't think we can game out how this is going to go.

You can't *do anything* with a broken search engine that looks for information on an internet that is 90% hallucinated "AI" content. A social media network is nothing if it doesn't have any actual *users* to pay it or attract advertisers.

Everything that big tech does at scale so they can dominate markets can be done in much smaller scales for not that much more money. Look at Mastodon! Each instance is mostly run by normal people who occasionally raise some money for server fees. You don't need Xitter or FB-level infrastructure to have vibrant online communities and social networking.

No matter how you slice it, web tech is not steel or food or clothing or medicine. It's just fucking ad-supported entertainment without overhead

Basically, it's interactive reality television where we provide the programming.

As a friend said to me: "Social media makes actors of us all".

My point here is that all the folks hyperventilating about "the oligarchs" are literally their product, and if they stopped being their product (it's easy) those oligarchs would...disappear.

Knocking out the monopolists in the early 1900s was a lot more difficult, because they controlled material goods that you couldn't get elsewhere, but you needed.

@johnzajac it's almost as if we had some kind of interoperable web before a bunch of rich assholes waved shiney things in our faces.

@johnzajac thanks for posting this thread. I've been thinking similarly for a bit, that there's some hope all these technopathologies could dissipate as quickly as they appeared

@johnzajac While I think this is a great point, it's also worth mentioning that Tesla and SpaceX are where Musk's fortune lies. He has zero financial dependence on Xitter.

@johnzajac or, in the case of #Mastodon, not ad supported. Not surveillance supported. Not snoop supported. Not grift supported.

User and volunteer supported.

Voluntarily.

I think that's better.

@simon_brooke

Federated everything is the future of tech.

Literally everything.

@simon_brooke @johnzajac I still think people should get paid to moderate and administer servers.

not tipping your moderator who has to put up with the worst things on the web is pretty rude.

@johnzajac I bet we will even need smaller sizes.

Given that the climate is going to.push back I would expect machines to go down.

So you either invest loads of money to High Availability, failover and so on.

Or have something small enough to pick up and move elsewhere quickly.

That this can work could be seen here when Taliban seized .af TLD.