Because it’s not “failing”, the Internet is fragmenting off into large factions. Step 1 has been capitalism commodifying information, resulting in most information taking one of two forms: siloed off into private databases or SEO sites designed to fish people into siloed off sites. Step 2 is now taking the form of political factions as the world becomes multi-polar again (China, USA and Russia, essentially). Large super powers push their domination in the form of information and each claiming they’re right so you don’t need to worry about all that other stuff.
The concept of the Internet being global is dead. The concept of the Internet being content created by regular people for regular people is dead. Search engines are just showing us this with their results. Which is why sites like duckduckgo aren’t even enough at this point. We are, in effect, just entering a “dark age” of the Internet, where we can expect whole sections to simply not be accessible to us anymore.
To build an entirely new search engine, with broad indexing and showing us real results again that are relevant, you’d need massive amounts of capital. You can’t get that capital from private investment because there’s no profit in doing this. You can’t get that from public funds because it’s not in the interest of governments to go against their chosen hegemony. You’d have to grass-roots the effort, which would be a very precarious endeavor that, even if it launched (which would be a miracle), it would be difficult to maintain. Even models like Wikimedia aren’t actually sustainable. Wikipedia ultimately curtails to the Western world, as it’s moderators and editors largely make up the same hegemonic viewpoint. And Wikimedia doesn’t have to do indexing of the entire web, which, at minimum, requires substantially more compute power than they currently use.
EDIT: It’s also worth mentioning at this point that a project to “fix the Internet” is probably low on the list of things to “fix” right now. So any leftists taking on the challenge should be aware that they’re spending gobs of resources and time on something that only the upper-tier of individuals care about in this world. Time and money would be better spent towards humanitarian aid as people get displaced due to climate change. Or in funding revolutions for areas of the world that are ready for it. By no means am I suggesting we should do a Google rewrite. I’m simply pointing out that everything we should have predicted capitalism doing to information is coming to pass and while things are shitty, they’ll definitely get shittier and we shouldn’t be surprised. Nor should we really care much, IMO. Because the core issue is just the contradictions within capitalism manifesting themselves into the Internet. Trying to fix the Internet is working backwards and, frankly, will probably be a fruitless endeavor. We Marxian-read leftists should know better.
Because it’s not “failing”, the Internet is fragmenting off into large factions. Step 1 has been capitalism commodifying information, resulting in most information taking one of two forms: siloed off into private databases or SEO sites designed to fish people into siloed off sites. Step 2 is now taking the form of political factions as the world becomes multi-polar again (China, USA and Russia, essentially). Large super powers push their domination in the form of information and each claiming they’re right so you don’t need to worry about all that other stuff.
The concept of the Internet being global is dead. The concept of the Internet being content created by regular people for regular people is dead. Search engines are just showing us this with their results. Which is why sites like duckduckgo aren’t even enough at this point. We are, in effect, just entering a “dark age” of the Internet, where we can expect whole sections to simply not be accessible to us anymore.
To build an entirely new search engine, with broad indexing and showing us real results again that are relevant, you’d need massive amounts of capital. You can’t get that capital from private investment because there’s no profit in doing this. You can’t get that from public funds because it’s not in the interest of governments to go against their chosen hegemony. You’d have to grass-roots the effort, which would be a very precarious endeavor that, even if it launched (which would be a miracle), it would be difficult to maintain. Even models like Wikimedia aren’t actually sustainable. Wikipedia ultimately curtails to the Western world, as it’s moderators and editors largely make up the same hegemonic viewpoint. And Wikimedia doesn’t have to do indexing of the entire web, which, at minimum, requires substantially more compute power than they currently use.
EDIT: It’s also worth mentioning at this point that a project to “fix the Internet” is probably low on the list of things to “fix” right now. So any leftists taking on the challenge should be aware that they’re spending gobs of resources and time on something that only the upper-tier of individuals care about in this world. Time and money would be better spent towards humanitarian aid as people get displaced due to climate change. Or in funding revolutions for areas of the world that are ready for it. By no means am I suggesting we should do a Google rewrite. I’m simply pointing out that everything we should have predicted capitalism doing to information is coming to pass and while things are shitty, they’ll definitely get shittier and we shouldn’t be surprised. Nor should we really care much, IMO. Because the core issue is just the contradictions within capitalism manifesting themselves into the Internet. Trying to fix the Internet is working backwards and, frankly, will probably be a fruitless endeavor. We Marxian-read leftists should know better.