The internet has made a 180 degree turn from what it was at its beginning. That’s not a good thing. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
The net result of these perverse incentives is an Internet that is increasingly toxic and untrustworthy.
Perverse incentives are funny things. Even though we know they’re harming us, we can’t stop pursuing them because the refusal harms us, too, as we’re excluded from the system.
Perverse incentives have come to dominate our lives, but slowly enough that we now accept this immiseration as “the way it is” / normal / inescapable. Let’s start with the Internet, which dominates our lives in two ways: 1) as the infrastructure that enables the entire digital realm we depend on for the majority of our transactions and processes, and 2) the engrenages / gearing of our zeitgeist: how we communicate, gather information, learn and amuse / entertain ourselves.
One advantage of being active in the early days of the Internet is we experienced a completely different World Wide Web than those who have only experienced the current version dominated by perverse incentives.
In its initial incarnation, the Web was not ruled by algorithms extracting wealth by collecting and selling every bit of information from our activity online. To post content, you needed a domain name / DNS and a host for your website. Search engines (Google) tracked incoming and outgoing links between sites, and assigned a page rank based on the number and quality of the incoming links to your site.
Webernettt has feetsball highlights on Tube!