this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they’ll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It’s the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won’t do anything to stop it.

  • V0ldek@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    Well I was aware of Google Fiber for years now, but the other three are indeed a surprise.

    Especially Facebook? Like what the fuck do you need that for? Your business is entirely Instagram ads?

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      years ago facebook got extremely into owning the channel in multiple ways (for the reasons outlined in that post). the FreeBasics program, Libra, etc. all kinds of shit

      because if you own the channel, you can charge others any amount you want for access, while giving yourself special treatment “having different internal cost structures between business units” (cf. amazon, as doctorow’s written in recent years)