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Ever the optimist, I see...
~bartender, do you have any sort of "reality drink" for my friend?
I have long given up on the idea that people remain ignorant by anything but their own will. It is still called the "information highway", after all. And if you choose to remain ignorant with such an abundance of information at your fingertips, then you cannot keep claiming ignorance as a way to escape your own responsibility to educate yourself and seek a way out of a crappy situation.
Of course by 'you' I mean them! Actually I mean everybody.
Look again, everybody is aware of how the so-called "algorithms" cause addiction, and yet they choose to get hooked. What governs the current web seems to me to be little more than sheer bad taste, and, as I already said, some kind of masochism.
Indeed, I have come to realize that people who flock to the big activity hubs, like people who like to frequent big social gatherings and like to party, are people who actually like the state of affairs, the kind of passions that tend to result in injury and malady.
Yes, I have some contempt for the human race, how can one not, seeing what they have done to an otherwise beautiful planet?
I am an excessively optimist person, yes. That said, I think there might also be some differences in the sample backing your experience and mine.
Yes, the older people, who saw the web grow, most often know what poison they're picking (and while I condemn said choices, more power to them); the younger folks instead, from my experience, don't have any idea of what's going on outside their algorithmical bubble.
You've seen those "algorithms" pop up and can see the parting lines between them and the rest of the world, but anybody born in, say, the 2000s probably was too young to remember or was already born in the monopolies. When all your life you've seen shadows, how can you know that you're in a subset of a bigger world?
You cannot search something you have no idea exists.
Even adult developers sometime conflate GitHub (monopolistic service) with Git itself (the actual thing being offered on said service), so something more nuanced must me going on.
Ploum (Lionel Dricot), in his latest english writing (note that it's mostly about a different subject), had a paragraph to say about this:
There’s a generational divide here. Brilliant coders now on the market or in the free software space have never known a world without Google, Facebook and Github. Their definition of software is "something running in the browser". Even email is, for them, a synonym for the proprietary messaging system called "Gmail" or "Outlook". They contribute to FLOSS on Github while chatting on Slack or Discord, sharing specifications on Google Drive and advertising their project on Twitter/X. They also often have an iPhone and a Mac because "shiny". They cannot imagine an alternative world where monopolies would not be everywhere. They feel that having nice Github and Linkedin profiles where they work for free is the only hope they have to escape unemployment. Who can blame them? They cannot imagine a world without monopolies. They don’t search, they Google, they don’t shop online, they go on Amazon, they don’t read a book but a Kindle, they don’t take a coffee but a Starbucks
https://ploum.net/2024-07-01-opensource_sustainability.html
gemini://ploum.net/2024-07-01-opensource_sustainability.gmi
I really think that a lot of young people don't even know that they have a choice. I'm not sure if that's naivety, optimism or something else altogether.