@oceane you're sort of right in that social media is the worst part of it, and obviously this was mostly hyperbolic, but I think a lot about (Hammerbacher?) "the best minds of my generation are trying to get people to click on ads" - we're facing multiple existential crises and a lot.of bright people are building stuff that actively makes things worse.
@voxpopsicle Hi, it's obviously possible to spam on any nethead protocol, be it Gemini or IRC, but not to automatically outsource ads through a third-party provider.
It's even a known fact that RSS feeds are broken because they don't let contents providers commodify… err, track their readers, or insert “personalized” ads.
So if you hate the web, welcome aboard, but you aren't talking about the internet, IMHO.
@oceane fair - i'll take that distinction. the web, or what it has become, anyway. the internet as tech infrastructure doesn't really cause any problems.
@voxpopsicle I'm sorry, in case I wasn't clear enough, I meant “the internet” as a nethead, social infrastructure; I don't want to split hairs here, but the web is just, socially speaking, and speaking as a sociology student, the worst part of the internet. I'm not installing software, updating my computer, reading news, chatting, writing documents on the web. Computing our data locally has been stolen from us, but speaking as an Emacs user I only seldom need an internet connection, at all. Most of the time, it's indeed a waste of time.
@voxpopsicle I really don't want to come out as pedantic, because it would be a failure of communication. I want to tell you that computers are actually more socially disrupting, enlightening that Gutenberg's printer, and that the left ought to reintegrate a radical criticism of technology, by calling out the web, if we want to prevail. The web needs a constant internet connection, is scarcely interoperable, and forces almost one interface per website on its users. I'm not even discussing its enabling and normalization of mass surveillance, for it is largery responsible of the surveillance dystopia we're heading to; it's crap from the top to the bottom.
