We traded the open technology of RSS for Twitter and now we will pay the price of the anonymous corporate agents telling us what words we can read.
We traded the World Wide Web and HTML for Facebook, and now you have to use your real name and they alone can decide who gets to see your words — unless you pay them for access to your own followers!
We traded FTP for Instagram, and now you can’t show a woman’s breast (see #freethenipple).
Ideas matter, words matter, and freedom of speech does not exist in a corporate setting by definition — and that’s OK. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can run their services how they like, and their interests are largely driven by revenue from sponsors based on growth.
Disneyland is an idealized version of our lives, without dirt, smoking, hipster beards, and the homeless — and we pay a C-note each to go there for the day. We opt into Disneyland, but none of us live there every day.
And that’s the key. We live in these services every day of our lives.
Our lives are mitigated by Twitter and Facebook every day, and as this continues, our lives will feel like Disneyland: perfectly sanitized with an underlying tension that something isn’t right.
La comparaison est particulièrement pertinente.