Internet monopolies tend to have very short shelf-lives.
Facebook is powerful for one and only one reason. Its where everyone is…. today. If you have an activist or political message and you want to reach people, you have to go to Facebook. That’s why Facebook is powerful …. today.
Yet, this is a very fragile situation. Because Facebook becomes about as powerful as MySpace the second everyone leaves. And, if Facebook is seen as a platform that censors the information that reaches a person, then that just adds to the willingness of Facebook’s consumers to go somewhere else.
I’m already seeing data that among the very important (to advertisers, but also to political-minded people) demographics of the younger people, high-school and college age, that they no longer view Facebook as the place to be. They are now favoring SnapChat and Instagram.
A part of this is natural, because few teenagers want to be where their parents are. Facebook tries to fight to make everyone use real names (to the benefit of their datamining for advertisers), and what teenager wants to have their parents able to find their internet page and watch everything they post and say? And, its generally ‘not-cool’ to a teenager to use the platforms of their parents. Just the fact that they hear their parents talking about Facebook will make most teenagers want to be somewhere else.
And the perception that Facebook is not only monitoring what you do (which they’ve always done) but is now censoring what you see will only accelerate these trends.
Just because Facebook is powerful today, that does not mean that Facebook will be powerful tomorrow. And a lot of that is just the natural trends and movements of the Internet.
BTW, if Russia and China wanted to do something useful, emphasizing open and censorship free platforms available to all would be a thing to do. A Russian or Chinese competitor to YouTube where one can find the videos that increasingly are censored from YouTube could be powerful. But the problem is that neither Russia nor China’s leaders want such a thing for their own people to access. And such a tool would need a strong, long-time commitment to freedom and being censorship free to be powerful, which is exactly what the leaders of Russia and China would never want.
“And such a tool would need a strong, long-time commitment to freedom and being censorship free to be powerful, which is exactly what the leaders of Russia and China would never want.”
We’ve learned that boring sermon for 70 years in the ‘free World’. Did you sleep for ten years?
While I tend to cheer almost everything the Russian government does, especially in terms of foreign policy, their Internet approach has been nothing short of backwards. They went after Telegram and the like, using the old “terrorists use it” excuse to crack down on encryption and privacy. They forbade VPN because you know, “terrorists use it”. They’ve sadly been no different than the West in this matter.
I never really believed in idea of internet opening “free speech”. There was short period perhaps in 1990’s and early 2000’s relatively with quasi freedom but that too was smoke. MS NSA-key, Microsoft dominance (horrible software corporation), Apple (even more horrible OS crap as Linus called it), Google etc, FB . The fact they have blocked and intimidated Linux based pc systems is well known fact because it was too secure for Deep State. Internet is spy, crap, malware and it’s core is pure Pentagon.
The problem is, the Linux community can’t get it’s head out of it’s ass. Linux is a wonderful thing, but in order to achieve mass adoption, developers need to actually have incentive to put their stuff on there. Or you know, have a streamlined way of making their stuff on Linux, not for Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Gentoo, SuSE, Slackware, Redhat, CentOS, Fedora etc. There still is, to this day, no unified method of getting software onto Linux… it’s just pathetic in my opinion, that this problem has not been solved yet. There are many, many more such problems in the way of mainstream adoption, but nobody seems to be even willing to consider these problems a priority, or a problem for that matter. Some neckbeards are quite content with the way things are now.
I am convinced that at this point, we need to brainwash Linus into thinking that this problem is his greatest priority and lock him into a basement with a terminal. He managed to create git in 2 weeks, I’d love to see how long it takes him to crack this nut. Preferably this should happen before the infamous bus incident occurs.
NATO Prepares For War With Russia As If Inevitable
Since the conflict in Ukraine, Western military leaders are operating under the assumption that an armed conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia will eventually happen. Signs of tension are everywhere.
Official Washington is so obsessed with the hyped Russia-gate allegations that it isn’t picking up on dire warnings from Russia that continued U.S. military interference in Syria won’t be tolerated, as Gilbert Doctorow notes.
Internet monopolies tend to have very short shelf-lives.
Facebook is powerful for one and only one reason. Its where everyone is…. today. If you have an activist or political message and you want to reach people, you have to go to Facebook. That’s why Facebook is powerful …. today.
Yet, this is a very fragile situation. Because Facebook becomes about as powerful as MySpace the second everyone leaves. And, if Facebook is seen as a platform that censors the information that reaches a person, then that just adds to the willingness of Facebook’s consumers to go somewhere else.
I’m already seeing data that among the very important (to advertisers, but also to political-minded people) demographics of the younger people, high-school and college age, that they no longer view Facebook as the place to be. They are now favoring SnapChat and Instagram.
A part of this is natural, because few teenagers want to be where their parents are. Facebook tries to fight to make everyone use real names (to the benefit of their datamining for advertisers), and what teenager wants to have their parents able to find their internet page and watch everything they post and say? And, its generally ‘not-cool’ to a teenager to use the platforms of their parents. Just the fact that they hear their parents talking about Facebook will make most teenagers want to be somewhere else.
And the perception that Facebook is not only monitoring what you do (which they’ve always done) but is now censoring what you see will only accelerate these trends.
Just because Facebook is powerful today, that does not mean that Facebook will be powerful tomorrow. And a lot of that is just the natural trends and movements of the Internet.
BTW, if Russia and China wanted to do something useful, emphasizing open and censorship free platforms available to all would be a thing to do. A Russian or Chinese competitor to YouTube where one can find the videos that increasingly are censored from YouTube could be powerful. But the problem is that neither Russia nor China’s leaders want such a thing for their own people to access. And such a tool would need a strong, long-time commitment to freedom and being censorship free to be powerful, which is exactly what the leaders of Russia and China would never want.
“And such a tool would need a strong, long-time commitment to freedom and being censorship free to be powerful, which is exactly what the leaders of Russia and China would never want.”
We’ve learned that boring sermon for 70 years in the ‘free World’. Did you sleep for ten years?
While I tend to cheer almost everything the Russian government does, especially in terms of foreign policy, their Internet approach has been nothing short of backwards. They went after Telegram and the like, using the old “terrorists use it” excuse to crack down on encryption and privacy. They forbade VPN because you know, “terrorists use it”. They’ve sadly been no different than the West in this matter.
I never really believed in idea of internet opening “free speech”. There was short period perhaps in 1990’s and early 2000’s relatively with quasi freedom but that too was smoke. MS NSA-key, Microsoft dominance (horrible software corporation), Apple (even more horrible OS crap as Linus called it), Google etc, FB . The fact they have blocked and intimidated Linux based pc systems is well known fact because it was too secure for Deep State. Internet is spy, crap, malware and it’s core is pure Pentagon.
The problem is, the Linux community can’t get it’s head out of it’s ass. Linux is a wonderful thing, but in order to achieve mass adoption, developers need to actually have incentive to put their stuff on there. Or you know, have a streamlined way of making their stuff on Linux, not for Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Gentoo, SuSE, Slackware, Redhat, CentOS, Fedora etc. There still is, to this day, no unified method of getting software onto Linux… it’s just pathetic in my opinion, that this problem has not been solved yet. There are many, many more such problems in the way of mainstream adoption, but nobody seems to be even willing to consider these problems a priority, or a problem for that matter. Some neckbeards are quite content with the way things are now.
I am convinced that at this point, we need to brainwash Linus into thinking that this problem is his greatest priority and lock him into a basement with a terminal. He managed to create git in 2 weeks, I’d love to see how long it takes him to crack this nut. Preferably this should happen before the infamous bus incident occurs.
NATO Prepares For War With Russia As If Inevitable
Since the conflict in Ukraine, Western military leaders are operating under the assumption that an armed conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia will eventually happen. Signs of tension are everywhere.
https://www.worldcrunch.com/world-affairs/nato-prepares-for-war-with-russia-as-if-inevitable
A Deaf Ear to Dire Russian Warnings
Official Washington is so obsessed with the hyped Russia-gate allegations that it isn’t picking up on dire warnings from Russia that continued U.S. military interference in Syria won’t be tolerated, as Gilbert Doctorow notes.
By Gilbert Doctorow
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/09/a-deaf-ear-to-dire-russian-warnings/#comment-290439