The metaphor falls flat in some regards though. Gentification is usually resulting in pricing out a large part of the population, while the internet is used by more people then ever.
I guess the truth lies somewhere between corporate gentrification and the eternal September metaphor.
People who are unwilling to be part of the kind of surveillance that users of the big tech companies are (they’re paying with their personal information for services rather than money), are effectively “priced out” though. Most of my friends use Facebook and the like and I’m effectively cut out of a lot of our online interaction because I (and a few others) refuse.
Hmm, true. I didn’t consider privacy costs. But the metaphor becomes a bit hard to explain if you also need to explain that you consider the costs not as monetary but in terms of privacy.
I read a passage in the article, “how the internet could be and can still be” and it reminded me of the protocol Gemini. Gemini is a smaller network, similar to http, and was actually supposed to be the main protocol for how the internet functioned, but then http came in and now we have ads, spyware, etc. Basically, and this sounds boring, I know, but the internet was supposed to be read-only, since Gemini network doesn’t have videos or anything along those lines. There are LOTS of Gemini-based browsers that demonstrate the Gemini network. It’s pretty cool.
Gopher predated the http web, Gemini is a much newer “hipster” version of Gopher. Neat little toy project though :)
Yeah Gemini is awesome.
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