From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the Internet

Who, for example, would create a demoscene program or anything like that but for the coolness and the desire to show off?

I’m sure you meant no harm, but think you can do better than giving into simplistic base rate fallacy thinking, especially as you are also factually wrong: arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs. In fact, two of them were started by Harvard college dropouts and one of them by Stanford PhDs. The big tech companies I can think of that were started by MBAs (eBay, grubhub, intuit, Bloomberg) are arguably much less harmful, though two of them became quasi-monopolies.

The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming).

For example, in this instance the fall of the web to commercial interests is more or less inevitable if you look at the basics, regardless of conspiracies (people getting paid produce more & better quality stuff than people making a hobby of it). But if you look at the execution of that dynamic there are always going to be small highly motivated groups of people trying to achieve specific goals on the sly.

It is unusual for any individual cabal to be powerful enough to control a situation.

In a basketball game who wins may vary but you know balls will go through hoops because that's what the rule set of the game incentivizes.

Investors want returns so number must go up. Eventually companies and their executives exhaust the basic honest core business so they have to start scraping for more revenue growth. Eventually this leads to the familiar process of enshittification where the company flips the script and sells the customers as the product and nickel and dimes people. This eventually ruins the product but number must still go up, so who else can pay? Criminals, scammers, government propagandists, political influence operations, intelligence agencies, militaries, etc.

We get what I just described for the same reason basketball makes balls go through hoops.

Why does number have to go up? Because you want to retire. Your pension funds and banks and such hire financial experts to invest. Those experts invest in things that make number go up because that's their job.

That's why this is hard. You are a player. We are all both hurt by the system and benefit by the system. It feeds us and protects us and enslaves us. Everything is paradoxes and feedback loops. When you get a job you want things like benefits and union wages, but when you go shopping you pick the cheapest product which means you want to break unions.

Conspiracism is a cop out from trying to understand this. It's easier to just pick a single scapegoat (often a make believe one) and blame them.

I'm not saying all the people in all the links you posted are great people, just that they're not the architect of this. There is no architect. The game was designed by the mad blind idiot gods of complexity and evolution.

I've had the thesis for a long time that humans are not actually intelligent. We are merely clever. A clever organism can deploy local intelligence to maximize its outcome in a game. A truly intelligent organism would understand the game and become the architect. We might not have the cognitive capacity for this. Maybe ASI can, or can help us.

Maybe that's why the aliens aren't talking to us. Anyone capable of star travel is the latter. They take a look and think "interesting fauna down there but nothing intelligent yet. They only try to win games."

Unfortunately, FOSS maintainers pretty much everywhere have been drowning for years. First it was "security researchers" meat-proxying dependabot or people looking to gamify their Github stats by filing spam merge requests for typos in readmes, and now it's "security researchers" running one of the usual AI agent suspects and flooding projects with reports of varying kinds of quality.

For me, the passion is pretty much gone. It's slop everywhere.

> The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.

Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet.

I think that's right, but I also think the OP had a point as well: in some ways, the negative effects of technology, in addition to being pushed by fat corporations, are also an emergent effect of the technology itself that goes beyond intention. Examples:

* Google probably didn't have a master plan to push SEO slop, but it came about anyway because it's in human nature to game the system.

* If someone creates one product to become more efficient, it's likely that another person will also do so, even if the net result is negative due to the prisoner's dilemma. (Bug finding vs Bug exploitation).

Etc. You can think of many examples, but how much in tech creates arms race scenarios that we MUST play out to stay afloat? How many people use LLMs just to keep up with their peers who use them?

That creates an emergent phenomena of creating problems not necessarily planned, even though a lot of the impetus to create the arms-race scenarios WERE intented by the rich.

That's not exactly how it was. I recommend reading "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years

I actually know a guy whose job it is to empty septic tanks, and he LOVES telling people super gross stories and leaning into his capabilities as someone to not be bothered by what he deals with on a daily basis. Watch that old show "Dirty Jobs" for lots of other people that think similarly.

Nobody wants to serve someone else's profits for nothing in return. That wrinkle kills a lot of FOSS motivation, when Micro$oft snaps up your project and starts raking in millions without a cent going to you. That's obviously unfair, and one things humans are very good at is telling when something isn't fair.

My overall point is, when controlling for baseline maslow, and ensuring there's no unfair labor exploitation, in a situation where we need plumbers, someone will be attracted to the vacuum of need, because humans love being needed, and love doing useful work.

Genuinely curious.

Considering you have posted > 75 comments to HN in the last 24 hours, I would agree you are a karmabot!