Probably. We ended up with a completely different internet than the one we still thought should be possible in 2004.
For a brief period of time, the internet genuinely subverted the corporate beetle-men and the gatekeepers who've always owned the "official" or real world. You could send an email to a well-known, accomplished person and there was a 75 percent you'd hear back. There really was a culture of punk equality... of course, we were quite harsh to people who used the platform to say stupid things (and, since I was young, I said stupid things a lot), because that's requisite if you want to stay relatively meritocratic. The internet was smaller in the 1990s and there were far fewer ways to make money from it, but it was legitimately subversive.
We've lost that, though. Twitter used to be a way for nobodies to gain a degree of influence. Now it's the opposite--instead, it measures and ratifies our lack of influence, because every time you apply for a job, the bosses know that you're no threat if mistreated--the fact that you only have 3,000 followers, as opposed to 100,000, proves that.
The internet and the web didn't fix capitalism; instead, to the detriment of all of us, it ended up looking like capitalism. The technology grew up too fast; our moribund economic system hadn't died yet (and still hasn't). This was bad enough, but if capitalism is still around when we see AGI (granted, I don't think that'll actually happen for at least a hundred years) we are properly and irreversibly facefucked.
For a brief period of time, the internet genuinely subverted the corporate beetle-men and the gatekeepers who've always owned the "official" or real world. You could send an email to a well-known, accomplished person and there was a 75 percent you'd hear back. There really was a culture of punk equality... of course, we were quite harsh to people who used the platform to say stupid things (and, since I was young, I said stupid things a lot), because that's requisite if you want to stay relatively meritocratic. The internet was smaller in the 1990s and there were far fewer ways to make money from it, but it was legitimately subversive.
We've lost that, though. Twitter used to be a way for nobodies to gain a degree of influence. Now it's the opposite--instead, it measures and ratifies our lack of influence, because every time you apply for a job, the bosses know that you're no threat if mistreated--the fact that you only have 3,000 followers, as opposed to 100,000, proves that.
The internet and the web didn't fix capitalism; instead, to the detriment of all of us, it ended up looking like capitalism. The technology grew up too fast; our moribund economic system hadn't died yet (and still hasn't). This was bad enough, but if capitalism is still around when we see AGI (granted, I don't think that'll actually happen for at least a hundred years) we are properly and irreversibly facefucked.