The web was established with the best of intentions. The basic idea was that if everyone could share their thoughts and ideas with the world, the best ones would be vetted and float to the top. The bad ones would be ignored and pushed to the bottom.
But human nature has a tendency to corrupt the best of intentions. Unfortunately when it comes to the web, the best ideas are not the ones floating to the top, but the loudest. In addition, large corporations use manipulative tactics to maximize audiences for advertisements and data collection. Social media sites turn a blind eye to bad behavior on their platforms because toxicity breeds engagement, and that keeps users glued to their devices. It’s a perfect storm of the worst humanity has to offer.
The ideals of the web have failed, and the users are to blame. We gave away our thoughts and ideas to corporations who became fat and greedy, gorging themselves on the content that we shared for free. But even that wasn’t enough food them, as they started taking all kinds of data from us, compiling it into massive databases and selling it out advertisers for massive profits.
To understand how we got here, you have to understand how things used to be, so let me tell you a story…
The web was established with the best of intentions.
I’m afraid this is… an overly flattering view of things. Personally I’m not well-read on all the technical specifics, so I don’t want to stick my neck out with an assertion that might be corrected by someone who knows more, and instead I’ll just leave it at this: to me it’s worth noting the role of the U.S. military.
To set up an online presence, you didn’t even need to give your real name. Nobody gave their real name. We all went by handles and other fictitious names. We were told - by teachers, parents, and other authority figures - not to give out personal information over the internet because you never knew for sure who you were talking to. So by and large, we didn’t.
Yeah, that’s something that’s definitely changed for the worse among kids online today.
I think you’re conflating the WWW with ARPANET and the Internet that succeeded it. The latter is indeed a product of the USA’s military-industrial complex, but I always thought the World Wide Web was more a partial implementation of Project Xanadu than anything with direct military applicatons.