I’m an unfortunate captive of the oligopoly of the internet industry in the USA. In many places, you have 2-3 choices of internet, and all of them suck ass. I’m in this situation. All internet providers in my area have a 1-1.5 terabyte data cap. So when I download Call of Duty for 250 gb and it fails and has to update or reinstall, I’ve wasted 500 gb, and have now reached 50% of my data cap in just 1 day. There are crazy fees, for example, Cox Cable says:
If you go over, we’ll automatically add 50 gigabytes of data for $10 to your next bill. That’s enough for about 15 hours of streaming HD video. If you use that 50 gigabytes, we automatically add another 50 gigabytes for $10 and so on until you reach our $100 limit of data overage charges or until your next usage cycle begins.
So your $90 a month internet can easily become $190 a month, which is fuckin criminal, like that is so scummy and asinine how that can even be legal. But it is perfectly legal. The FCC is also looking into these data caps but now that we have a new anti-federal government president elect… This is probably toast… Nothing will change now that most federal agencies are about to be deleted.
From a technology standpoint too, nothing is really getting better
Comcast is still using Coax instead of Fiber Optic and desperately trying to convince people that somehow, someway coax can be just as good. Do with that info what you will, I have no opinions on it. There was a Federal program started recently to expand rural internet access, which will probably be gutted in 2025 leaving many without suitable internet again. Fiber Optic is fast, but still, not new technology, and doesn’t solve a critical issue… It doesn’t matter if you have 2 Gigabit internet if no one in the world is uploading even half that fast. A single download on Steam is like 450 Mbps, Epic Games launcher is horrifically slow. I get like 120 Mbps max when downloading Fortnite updates even with 1500 Mbps internet hard wired to my router with top tier hardware
It’s just sad to think about the future of internet in the USA, and knowing we’ll be imprisoned by these data caps for the foreseeable future.
It’s hard to know what the right move is in this post-truth world as we all have our biases and legitimate reasons for thinking the way that we do. I remember around the turn of the millennium thinking that the rise of the internet would herald in an new era of enlightenment where access to information would increase the intelligence of literally everyone. Boy, was I wrong. Turns out the Information Age should have been called the Disinformation Age.
I think the rise of Trump is a reaction to a broken system that has become too corrupt and too big to sustain itself. It might not be all bad in the long term, but right now it feels like the world is falling apart. If you look at all systems (particularly biological) they tend to eventually decentralise to function more effectively. The lungs, liver, heart, kidneys, stomach all function independently from each other yet work together to benefit the whole, trading off excess resources for things that they lack yet need. Evolution created this system from what was a primordial soup of waring organisms, viruses, cells, bacteria, etc. Perhaps humanity is on the cusp of that transition into a more coherent functioning planetary system. Countries should use the resources they have and trade the excess for things that they don’t have but need, much like the organs in the body do. Perhaps America needs to decentralise and has gotten too big to function effectively. I don’t know, but these are the kind of things I think about now and again.
There’s a lot about the way the world works that makes little sense so something has got to change. Take a simple example like prawns caught off the west coast of Scotland. How can it be more efficient to send them to China to get packaged before returning again to be consumed? Utter madness! But that’s the centralised system of exploitation. It’s cheaper, but neither effective nor healthy.
Take the banking crisis where money was thrown at the banks to bail them out. What a dumb idea that achieved absolutely nothing. It was like sticking a band aid on a gunshot wound. It stopped the bleeding for a while, but didn’t fix the problem. Then you look at Iceland who did the complete opposite to everyone else and let their banks fail. The bankers ended up in jail like they rightly should have done and now their economy is booming.
I don’t know where I’m going with all this, I kind of fell down a rabbit hole of hoping that there’s a light at the end of the dark tunnel we all seemingly find ourselves in.