The internet was built for connection – how did it go so wrong?

Link: The internet was built for connection – how did it go so wrong? by Richard Seymour. Published Wed 06 Oct 2021.

The “failure” of the modern internet is sometimes blamed on the hippy values that survived in the Well and in hacker communities on the US West Coast during the 1980s. The computer scientist Moshe Vardi argues that the hippy belief in sharing, the idea that “information wants to be free”, not only created an information commons but also produced a “tragedy of the commons” in which individual users exploit communal resources for their own purposes.