Internet Philosophy: How can we apply the "spirit of the web" to restructuring society?

Someone like addx, ND, or even hiddenpuma75 could probably sit down and analyze this...

But hey, that’s just life—it’s a constant grind, so you just have to find a way to make it work, my friend.

That said, let’s be clear: the internet HAS improved all our lives in at least twenty-three different free ways...

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Okay, fine, there’s no arguing that part...

What *is* debatable is the sheer scale of wealth that a handful of individuals and tech giants like Microsoft have sucked out of society for their own gain... effectively gutting entire industries and upending countless families in the process. And on top of that, they seem to go out of their way to dodge the taxes that should actually be going back into the public coffers.

At this point, your "old school" wealthy capitalists from the traditional sectors look like paupers compared to these "internet billionaires."

Honestly, I think anyone else who has a thing for numbers and data would be absolutely floored by these figures, especially since I was completely clueless about them myself...

If I’ve managed to grasp the core message of this book, it boils down to this...

Now, I realize I might be oversimplifying things here—it’s a bit of a blunt instrument approach, I know.

While we’re all busy having fun, learning, surfing the web, and sharing our lives through photos and constant digital footprints, every single click we make is being harvested for advertising data. This process creates a tiny class of ultra-wealthy elites while simultaneously dismantling traditional industries and upending countless families and livelihoods.

The irony is almost poetic...

The founders of Google actually detested advertising so much that they originally banned any ads from appearing on their homepage.
Fast forward to today, and they have become arguably the most powerful advertising machine in human history.

The real issue is that most of us are essentially working for free for companies like Google and Facebook. In doing so, we are fueling an incredibly narrow circle of massive wealth, all while inadvertently destroying real-world jobs and destabilizing families and communities.

Take Google, for example: despite boasting a market cap of around $400 billion, they only employ about 46,000 people.
Compare that to an industrial giant like General Motors; even with a much smaller market cap of roughly $55 billion, they support a workforce of 200,000 people.

So, when you look at the numbers, Google generates nearly seven times the profit of General Motors while employing significantly fewer workers.

This massive imbalance in capital concentration threatens the very stability of the global economy, our nations, and our social fabric. Massive entities like Apple and Google continue to amass staggering profits and hoard capital abroad rather than paying the taxes that should be reinvested back into the US and our local communities.

Some pretty wild statistics here

1. Roughly 90% of Wikipedia contributors and editors are men 😲

(It’s actually quite fascinating from an anthropological, psychological, and even sociological standpoint 😛

The author claims this explains why the site is dominated by entries on Pokémon and adult film stars, but if you ask me, 🤣

2. A study from a major medical institute found that 9 out of 10 health-related entries on Wikipedia are actually INCORRECT 😲

3. So, essentially, the Wikipedia paradigm is just the worldview of a young white male with a slightly eccentric personality

🤣

YouTube is quite possibly the greatest feudal lord we've ever seen.😲

While Sigmund and mravac88 might hold a grudge against the church for collecting its tithes, YouTube takes a massive 45% cut from the profits of musicians, video producers, and publishers—essentially taxing the "peasants," or rather, the creators—just because they operate on their digital territory.

And let’s not forget that land belongs to all of us, much like how computers and technology "belong" to everyone today.

The reality is, there is plenty of money out there.
The issue is that it isn't distributed fairly, and the internet is actually making that wealth gap widen at an exponential rate...

It's pretty obvious we need to figure out a way to distribute the great resources of this planet more evenly and intelligently.

To borrow a sentiment from Gandhi:

der is inaf for pipl niiiid
bat der is not inaf for pipl griiiid

Or, as originally written:

(there is enough for people need,
but there is not enough for people greed)

The internet is ultimately a business where the winner takes it all...
that's the takeaway from the book The Internet Is Not The Answer.

It isn't just something you see online. 🙂

I used to participate in an international forum, and it was quite fascinating to read people's firsthand experiences there. One particular retired American I followed spent his entire career at a major publishing house. He described the whole thing as one massive, interconnected machine—publishing, film, television... everything is linked and operates with a single goal: profit. Everything is planned years in advance. For instance, they’ll pick a book—it could even be mediocre, which doesn't matter to them—and then launch a massive campaign to artificially push it to the top of the bestseller lists. Eventually, a movie adaptation follows, then a sequel to the book, then a sequel to the film, and so on.

This might be a tangent, but I found it intriguing. That same American explained one way bribery works here in the States. Suppose an industry wants to build a plant that pollutes the environment; they might pay off a politician or a senator to push the decision through by having that official release a biography (which, of course, was ghostwritten). The polluting corporation then buys up all the copies of that biography, providing the politician with a perfectly legal payment into their account. The books are then partially donated to libraries across the country before being recycled. After all, who is actually going to buy a politician's autobiography? 😁