(LB) very end, reposting here
Thanks for sharing one of the most authentic threads I've read in a while anon. I was never an imageboard fag before 2017, but in general can agree with your observations about content on the internet, and suspicions about who is driving this train. My early days were Usenet newsgroups, circa 1994 when the only net access I had was at the company where I worked. This was a major major source of red pilling in the early days. With the advent of the 'organic' (early) internet, those groups seemed to fall by the wayside. But I didstinctly remember up until around 2004, there was a sense of boundless energy. Especially during the search engine wars. Anything you wanted to know about, boom it was there. Such an astonishing feeling that the entire world's knowledge base was at ones' fingertips.
But many things changed after that, as we all know, in large part to Life Log / Facebook, Google, and the rest. But as you allude, it was not just consolidation of sources, or the 'maturing' of the internet. I beleive it was something distinctly more insidious. Did you ever get the feeling your searches and interstests were being funneled into a narrow window of results? Even on a chan board, how do you know everyone can read everyone else's posts? Whether or not we are at the mercy of an AI, or just some vast social experiment running by Darpa, your description of the hot air balloo full of nothing seems exaclty right.
I once got online and followed an interesting story about a guy in australia who was building his own cruise missile. It was some clearnet DIY forum with a nerd angle like R/C, can't remember exactly. But the guy had sourced and posted all his plans, and was chronicling the build of a fucking cruise missile, including the programming and test flights. Eventually he got his stuff impounded by authorities…but does anyone beleive that today an escapade like that could even exist? The search engine wouldn't even return the results for one thing. Or the forum wouldn't be accessible, or if you did find it, would have selectively blocked information. Or, you'd be afraid to click that shit, nigga. These days we don't just suspect being tracked and catalogued, WE KNOW. These days we are bounced around the endless echo chamber, and as you suggest, I'm convinced that some portion of videos and content we see are just deep fakes anyway. There was just an article last week about an AI that can deep-fake brand new Frank Sinatra songs that sound just like the real thing.
I'll leave with this, which is that it is my sincere beleif that ICANN was basically the death of the internet. We just didn't know it yet. At the risk of sounding extreme, I think we would all be better off in the end functioning on ip adresseses only, without the URL. I guess it would be a huge dark web headache trying to exist that way, and keeping your own list of sites, but so far I have not heard of a better alternative. The internet as we know it is dying, which is to say, it died at least 15 years ago and we are just now figuring it out.
Thanks for your post, anon.