I appreciate the apology. I have zero expectation on my opinion affecting anything in the world. I'd still like to express it. I don't know the internet is a fairly important thing to me. Being able to freely access anything I wanted really helped me get through a lot of things. I never would have learned a good chunk of the things I know now without it and it's a tool that goes vastly unappreciated by a large majority of the people that rely on it every day. At the same time, large companies slowly take over and lock away large pieces of it or provide it through a narrow lense of whatever they see fit. It makes me sad. So much of the future I used to envision when I was young seems to have been usurped by people who don't understand technology beyond a means to make money. The amount of money spent each day towards nothing more than making more money using technology is fucking ridiculous. Just imagine a world that could be if that money was spent bettering humanity. This decision was not made to better humanity, it detrimented a good number of people working on a huge number of things to benefit a closed group of people beholden to stakeholders.
Every day I read comments, articles and opinion pieces making excuses for companies, entities and individuals stifling innovation for profit and closed environments. The spirit allowing all this technology and innovation to be created seems to be gone and replaced with the same culture of acceptance and worship you find in religions. Technology is supposed to be about benefitting humanity as a whole not private companies.
I don't give a shit how much money a compay has spent on research or investing in whatever. Any company that is large enough to have that kind of impact on the world has only gotten there from money contributed by billions of people around the world. If a company is big enough to have the same kind of influence, or more, on the world as a government they are no different. This world is shifting to some kind of corporate power structure. The largest companies in the world have more power and influence than many nations. These are not private individuals. Whether we like it or not, technology companies, food producers, weapons manufacturers, drug companies, media companies and any other companies that have enough money to buy governments are now the monarchs of this world. Accepting their control over the technology that allows us the small freedoms we have left means we fully accept our new fate as serfs in our modern technolgical oligarchy.
Fuck that. The only freedoms I've had in life come from the internet. The freedom to learn anything I want to communicate anything with anyone I want.
Computers in general. They provide an equalizing power the likes of which have never been seen in history. Every day companies find new ways to lock down or abstract away this technology in the name of security.
If someone doesn't disagree future generations may not know the freedom that comes with being able to host their own platform for data exchange or running code through a compiler and watching something they created come to life. This is something the common man has not had access to throughout most of history. Knowledge, freedom of expression and access to creative tools, were things reserved for the wealthy or those in power. This is a small window in history when commoners have access to the same technology and power of expression as the rich. They are slowly taking this away and no one will notice until it's gone and we're right back where we've been though the rest of history.