This is a bit optimistic. It’s amazing that the tools exits to create a better, more open internet. However, the biggest barrier is convincing people to use them.

Personally, I’ve found that convincing the average user of just how much they are being taken advantage of by big tech is much harder than it should be. People are addicted to the convenience that lured them into these proprietary platforms in the first place. Humans tend to choose easier options over healthier options.

We should continue to carry the flag of open source, decentralization, and privacy-respecting platforms. However, we should be prepared that people will look at it an go… “Nah, that sounds hard. I’ll let them sell my data to save a few clicks.”

Yanis Varoufakis views Big tech as digital landlords in his book 'Technofeudalism" . He argues that they extract rents from owning the digital space as landlords did in the Middle ages while monetising our attention. They are not capitalists in the sense that they don’t sell goods and services for profit but rather control the environment where others buy and sell.

It’s an interesting take on where we are and how dystopian big tech has turned out to be.

I hope I’m wrong, but this seems very naive. Just as an example, we just had a report released here in Denmark this week, that stated that AI could replace 100000 civil servants. Denmark is a small country of only 6 million citizens.

Who will run the servers for those AI services? Probably Microsoft or Amazon or some other tech giant.

The truth is the tech Giants are getting bigger and more powerful, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, TSMC.
These companies are all bigger and more powerful than they were a decade ago.

And just because we can run Linux, and have found a sliver of freedom there, doesn’t really help in the big picture of modern technology.
When your government chooses to use proprietary solutions, there is little that is done to prevent it. It shouldn’t of course be necessary, the politicians should be smart enough to know dependency on proprietary systems is costly even dangerous in the long run. But lobbyist always manage to shoot down open source initiatives.
So here we are, chugging along to ever more dependency on and power to big tech, as individuals and companies and in public services.

I use Qwant search, I used to use AOSP (Android Open Source Project) for my phone, and I use Linux. But that doesn’t prevent big tech to take more power. The current and next big play is AI, and all the above companies are fighting to dominate that within their fields, and no small player has a chance anymore. Because the cost of entry is in the billions.

EU is taking up the fight, and is regulating all these companies, with the exception of TSMC which AFAIK hasn’t been shown to play dirty (yet).
Hopefully governments across the world, will cooperate to put a lid on the amount of power a single company can attain.

I would love for this headline to be correct, but it seems far more likely that it is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. /Drcox

Like Elon Musk, the richest man ever who is best friends with the president?

Insane take.

Who knows one day we’ll see Youtube finally crumble

I was a little confused by the tone of this one. I scrolled back up and realised it was written by Signal’s Meredith Whittaker, and it made a bit more sense.

So the autocrats will disband the technocracy? This is watching rich people have a slap fight with billions of dollars and think to yourself, “Ah yes this is good policy.”