<i>In Sunde's opinion, people focus too much on what might happen, instead of what is happening. He often gets questions about how a digitally bleak future could look like, but the truth is that we're living it: "Everything has gone wrong. That's the thing, it's not about what will happen in the future it's about what's going on right now. We've centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who's basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn't elected by anyone. Trump is basically in control over this data that Zuckerberg has, so I think we're already there. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I don't think there's a way for us to stop it." One of the most important things to realize is that the problem isn't a technological one. "The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."</i>
"companies will always have to put their financial gains first"<p>Though there is a ton of evidence for this, I've always disliked this type of statement. A company does not have a mind of it's own, and therefore has no concept of self-interest. It is the people at the company who are making the decisions. It's why there is a backlash when companies don't behave the way their customers expect them to.<p>In the end, it all does come down to people and the cultural influence. For the past 50 years, we've culturally been dragged into a big business, security, get rich mindset which has driven aspirations at the cost of our freedoms, environment, and general social good.<p>I personally don't believe the Zuckerberg is 'evil'. Though the news feed has issues, his overarching goal is admirable. I believe that Facebook now understands the political difficulties the news feed creates, but if Facebook were truly a dictatorship, they wouldn't be spreading multiple oposing propaganda, would they? Zuck would have picked the candidate he liked, and promoted that person. Facebook didn't do that, they let the people decide what they wanted to see.
For one, we've lost these services to capitalism, because it's difficult for any alternative to operate in a capitalistic society. How many are going to work on the open source alternative and still make enough to live comfortably? Decentralized services are difficult to design to be usable and operate reliably. We can't underestimate the amount of resources that goes into software development.<p>Which is why I appreciate when a startup like WhatsApp spent so much effort on end-to-end encryption with little to no financial incentive..
I think we can still have free internet, in the lagrange points between the giants, if we propell them against one another in fierce clashes - to try users to migrate from one walled in garde to another.
There will always be little pockets of freedom for a short period in new markets emerging.
There will always be open source where companys have no real interest to maintain near public infrastructure. I think one way to get open source to win, is to have it as a way for companys to discard liability. If the plattform you hosdt is open source, why should you be responsible if somebody else uses it to fling viruses into the world. But to win against companys in user space, that is near impossible.