@cwicseolfor @hakfoo @futurebird @lnlyisol There was also the politics of it.
For a long time, Silicon Valley positioned itself as being the enlightened, socially-conscious, pro-freedom, pro-consumer alternative disrupting established cartels and vested interests.
Instead of believing what the old media barons tell you about the War in Iraq and Saddam's WMDs, our platforms let anyone be a publisher!
Instead of the RIAA's boy bands and lip syncing pop idols, we allow talented independent artists to be heard!
Instead of IBM, and later Microsoft, having a monopoly, buy our products instead! Think different! Don't be evil! It just works!
And then once everyone was locked into the walled gardens, the enshittification began.
Now.
What we really should have collectively been insisting on was a genuinely enlightened, socially-conscious, pro-freedom, pro-consumer alternative.
Member-owned, community-run non-profits. Creating open source software, based on open standards and protocols.
Where you own, and are free to repair, and are free to tweak or upgrade, your hardware. Which comes pre-installed with open source software from member-owned non-profits.
The Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation model works for encyclopaedias. So let's do that for search too.
And let's not leave the design of tech to just the computer science majors and MBAs. Let's get some social science and humanities folks in that design process too.
We can still do it.
But we need to start by recognising that tech, and who owns it, and who designs it, and who makes decisions about it, is a political issue.
We, the people, need to make those decisions. Not just the billionaire VCs and CEOs.
#OpenSource #FOSS #enshittification #Fediverse #OpenStandards #Linux #Wikimedia #deGoogle #Google #Meta #Facebook #Apple #Microsoft
