Category: InternetCategory: Internet

This from Jésabel DC at Config 2026 (this quote at the 1:08 mark):

“Technology wasn’t better in the early 2000s because designers were more ethical or more thoughtful. It was better because they hadn’t yet be handed the business model that rewarded trapping the user.”

She says “in the early 2000s the internet was a place you visited,” and then you went on with your day. I like to say that I just want to visit the internet, I don’t want to live there.

I was asked recently on a podcast interview what I’m running from in regards to social media, and I’m not sure I gave the best answer but I’m still thinking about it (which is why we appear on podcasts and face questions we’ve never been asked before in real time).

But I guess I’m running from one thing – the idea the social media is neutral, when it’s in fact user-hostile, designed and built by people with multiple vacation homes ensuring I spend hours everyday scrolling, engaging, and filling my head with every last drop of drama, turmoil, atrocity, and outrage.

That’s what I’m running from, I suppose. As Jésabel DC says, I am running from “the business model that (rewards) trapping the user.”

If you bought movies in the UK on your Sony Playstation, some of those movies will soon be deleted from your account.

“Sony said that affected customers will lose the ability to stream titles including Outrage: Way of the Yakuza, Paddington, Paddington 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, Rambo 3, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas “due to our content licensing agreements.” As of September, Sony will remove any affected titles that UK users bought from their PlayStation library, per the notice.”

Oh, and the Sony Playstation is going to stop making game discs in 2028, meaning you’ll buy all your games… digitally.

There’s a rumor that Bandcamp cut “most of the remaining engineers,” prompting some folks to download their purchased music just in case the site goes dark (the site as been sold twice in the last few years, I think).

The digital goods economy is fragile. In the never ending quest of convenience, we’ve paid for things and let someone else store them, whether digital music, movies, or even our websites on sites like Squarespace.

Like Morpheus said in The Matrix, “They are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys.”

He was talking about Agents that prevented people from escaping, but that seems like an apt comparison. Are you gonna buy CDs again? Blue Rays? Host your own website? Manage your own email list?! Are you really going to escape this system?

I said “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer” back in 2024 and it’s just becoming more true by the day. The allure of all this centralization was convenience and reach. Then, after all these years of handing over our entertainment and audience to the corporations we end up owning nothing.

Start today. Download your data. Make back ups, both locally and in the cloud. Own your work. Build a website and host it with someone you trust. Host your videos. Buy a record (or a digital download) direct from the band.

Or, put all your work into the hands of corporations who will wipe out everything you’ve worked on (sites like MTVNews, Spinner.com, folks who amassed legions of fans on social media etc) with a press of a button.

If you lose access to your Gmail account, then what? That’s why I say your email is important enough to pay for, because if things go sideways, good luck reaching any for help!

I’ve been using Fastmail since 2014. I ditched Google Workspace in early 2025.

If you’d like to have less Google in your life, get on one of these calls. They’re not webinars. They’re not step by step walk throughs. These are for people scared, uneasy, afraid to tackle this sort of things alone!

• Monday, June 15th at 9:00AM EDT → https://luma.com/qebt5cj9
  
• Friday, June 19th at 11:00AM EDT → https://luma.com/1k3gnx6a

Someone on a recent Escape Pod Zoom call shared a perfect example of how social media isn’t a great way to organize an event.

They told us how an organization was promoting an event entirely through Facebook. Now, this person is a valued part of this community, but they’re not on social media, so they had no idea it was happening!

They only found out via text from someone else, and when they showed up, organizers and members hugged them and said, “Oh, thank goodness we didn’t know that you were going to make it!”

This is why you don’t center your community around social media, because even the people that follow you aren’t guaranteed to see every update. Consider than in 2026, a growing number of people aren’t even on social media anymore.

So get phone numbers, get an email addresses, heck, get mailing addresses; it’s time to get away from trusting the social media algorithms, and get back to connecting directly with your people.

I joined some Dark Forests recently. A common theme in two of them was, “do we really want to do this?” In a bigger one, it was… well, more. More noise, more notifications, more threads, more… just, always more.

During a recent conversation, someone said they haven’t installed a new app in forever.

In the early days of the internet, it was a place I wanted to visit, but I didn’t want to live there.

Are we done?