The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

I don't think I can change your mind but functionally I have a much better expetience and in many cases a simpler experience than in the past. Lots of lessons were learned and continue to be learned. I mean,popularity aside forums,IRC,Skype (use it everyday!) and all the old tech is mostly still there. In many ways isn't less more? Would you prefer forums with millions of active users or IRC channels with 100K+ active users? I think the internet is big enough and diverse enough to satisfy most people. But the trendy and popular stuff isn't meant for people who like the older internet much like SMS wasn't meant for people who love pagers and email wasn't meant to satisfy people that like to write paper mail,so long as there are enough enthusiasts of a tech it will live on but the future will continue to look a lot less like the past. For me after not using IRC for quite a while I used Matrix and it looked so much and so little like IRC,I think it's a good example of how more internet users means more things that satisfy more groups. One size fits all doesn't scale.

I do this for almost everything not just products. Reddit is a useful place to find real humans discussing something on the internet, but also at a simple beginner friendly level. Usually there are more specialized forums (esp for something like espresso) but they require excessive time or expertise to understand. On the other hand if you want a deep discussion reddit can be hit or miss.

It's not colonialism if you can opt-out of it. Which, for most of the nations of the world, you can.

Don't get me wrong. We've been manipulated by advertising since the 1850s. The Hidden Persuaders, written in 1957, detailed the ways advertising can manipulate our subconscious to make us do things beyond our control. 'Big Ad' has been a core component of American radio and television since its introduction to the US. When the internet arrived in the '90s, so did a raft of businesses floated solely by ad dollars. Google improved the game with more personalized ads, but this was really just a form of direct marketing, which had existed for a half century.

But most of the things we consume, we do because we are consumers, in a consumer society. We have not been captured by a foreign power and forced to work for nearly nothing, with our lands pilfered for goods to power a foreign nation. We are not 'unsalaried slaves'. We are willfully accepting the trade of services for our attention and our dollars - the same way we did with newspapers, and radio and television programs. We have been selling our attention for cheap for a century and a half, buying whatever crap someone feels like printing.

In most nations today, we have the complete freedom to pay for and use the internet without advertising or restriction. You can pay for an internet connection, pay for e-mail, send and receive files, communicate, etc, all without ever being sold a diet pill, told to vote for a candidate, or having your data changed out to something more profitable. And you can do all of this with the security of a first-world military power.

The global internet is still the most powerful, affordable, un-controlled communications tool in the world. You can talk about empire all you want, but really the only oppressive forces are governments against their own people. Yes, many governments have chilling effects on the rights of their people to have free speech - but those are limits imposed within their borders, and not to the internet as a whole. We still have an internet of creation, and we can still use it to change the world (evidenced by how many nations are rightly afraid of its power to allow people to freely communicate!) The only thing that has left is our imagination, but luckily, no one can take that away from us.

True there are niche blogs for enthusiast hobbyist interests, but sometimes I need to find a good . Reddit’s got better info than most non-reddit google results.

> the Internet promised to be a democratising place to be turned to in the flight from the inequalities of the analogue world.

Okay, maybe that didn't work out so well

> It was presented to us a field in which to find freedoms, boundless creation

Mostly yes. People are instagraming, tiktoking, youtubing, blogging, open-sourcing, unity-unrealing, more people are creating more things than ever before.

> communication that transcended frontiers

Totally true. I talk to friends all over the world. Participate on HN, discourse, discord, slack, email, facebook, etc and it's all free. Some of it sponsored but much of it just plain free, run by volunteers.

> and free education for all.

Pretty much true. What can't I learn about for free online? Pick nearly any topic and there are youtube channels, blog posts, articles, etc all for free on how to do pretty much anything.