this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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The internet.
And no I don't mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.
We now live and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our active, conscious knowledge. And it's all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather..."free".
It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.
Yup, I increasingly pay for things to not be a part of that system anymore, Proton, Kagi, B2 Cloud storage, Standard Notes, Ars Technica, The Atlantic, NYTimes, The Akron Beacon Journal, Feedly, Last.fm, Todoist, Telegram, Privacy while donating to things like KDE, Dark Reader, Lemmy, the EFF, Sunshine, the RuneScape wiki (and that's just Internet related stuff).
I'm grateful that things were free as a kid, because I had no money to pay for them, and I think that is something these services should account for. However, now that I'm an adult, I think there's an obligation to make sure the things I use and want to exist receive funding (and don't need to turn to selling my data).