the days of usenet, irc, the web...even email (w PGP)...were amazing. centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet.
— jack⚡️ (@jack) April 2, 2022
I realize I'm partially to blame, and regret it.
When I read this tweet by Jack Dorsey I felt old. Yesterday I also realized that in a couple of weeks we will get the final version of Ubuntu 22.04 (i.e. April 2022): I started using it with version 05.04 (i.e. April 2005), so do the maths and you’ll see how old I could feel. These kind of epiphanies are like opening that old box you forgot about finding a walkman or ipod (or the Ubuntu installation disc!). At the same time I felt somehow happy because I found myself in that tweet and I always find myself in Ubuntu <3 (weird to say but I can smell all the sweat it required me to make it work the way I wanted to).
I can’t think of myself as a pioneer of the internet or social networks or anything like that (I didn’t do anything!), but I surely think I’m enjoying this journey from the very beginning. I often think about my early days online and yes I agree, those days were amazing…for a brief moment I also enjoyed the centralization era of the network (long story short: the days where we moved from using a nickname to our real life names). That was the end of the previous era and nobody saw that coming - or at least I didn’t - and today I feel a bit guilty about that. I feel I’m part of this involution that changed a cool thing into a data market, the freedom to do what we wanted and how we wanted (i.e. “it’s not a crime to share a song over the internet, I own the CD, it’s like borrowing it to someone else”) into the subscriptions’ slavery, the big chance to anonymously exchange ideas into the show-off paradise…and I’m sure I couldn’t do anything about it, but I would really like to know how this world could’ve been if we didn’t accept a centralized, censored, and profit oriented internet. It really looks like we lost the keys here.