censorship doesn't need to be a problem

i know the title is a little clickbait-y but it was the best i could come up with.

i just saw a video about a guy ranting about how the internet has changed and how censorship has slowly been becoming more of a problem on the internet. and i tend to agree with that sentiment.

here's the thing: i may have not been old enough to see the golden age of the internet at an age when i could fully appreciate it but that doesn't mean i haven't been using the internet my whole life. i was born with an iPod touch in my hands watching EvanTubeHD and whatever classic cartoons my dad could find on youtube because my parents refused to pay for cable television (and still do). and with a lifetime of internet usage under my belt, i can say with resolute certainty, that the internet has definitely changed, has definitely become much more censored, and is definitely not a good thing in most cases.

the internet is great for communication and absorbing information, however over the thirty years it has existed and the, like, almost twenty since it became used by every single person on earth (thank you, apple), i believe it's a leading cause of increased isolation, scarily-low levels of media literacy, and information restriction.

but this blog is about censorship so lets just talk about that and worry about the other two things i mentioned later.

the cool thing about the internet is that nobody owns it. well, allegedly nobody owns it. nobody owns the technology that is the internet, but what we use on the internet is absolutely owned and controlled. generally speaking, the services that are used the most on the internet are owned by either google or facebook (or meta. whatever). those services are facebook, google search engine, youtube, instagram, etc. there are some that aren't owned by these companies, like tiktok, but that's really just a drop in the great google ocean.

what do you use to search all those stupid questions you may have? google. what do you use to connect with your family members or connect with local groups in your community? facebook. what do you use to watch videos? youtube. what do you use to text your friends? very likely it's whatsapp.

the reason this is an issue is because, if one company owns all the services that is used by everyone, then that company holds all the power. so if a piece of information that company doesn't like starts to make the rounds among the user-base, they have the ability to remove it. who woulda thought a monopolistic conglomerate that controls all the information we see could be a bad thing?

in the never-ending pursuit on convenience, we have sold out our collective consciousness to two tech companies. tech companies that, while maybe at one point just wanted to make cool things for people to use, have become the defacto rulers of the internet, henceforth the defacto rulers of our information and communication. the generation before us couldn't be bothered to get a library card, pay the late-fees on a book or DVD rental, and god forbid they paid for their accounts on a website, so they went to the crossroads and sold their emails to the devil, and made the internet a cesspool of ads, malware, pornography, and screaming animals begging for money and attention, and every user is forced to watch. the internet is literally hell.

So what's the solution, then?

changing the way we use the internet isn't that hard. it's getting others to do the same that's difficult.

like i said: nobody owns the internet. while google is the defacto ruler, they only became that because everyone chose to use that search engine and the products that company pushes out.

so the solution is to, literally, just not use them. make the internet DIY. make a neocities and start a blog or something. host your own videos. we have been psychologically clicker-trained to think that anything these companies do is either incredibly hard or incredibly expensive. i have done the research and i can tell you it's not. hosting a website is, like, what? twelve bucks a month? that's less than a netflix subscription for christ's sake.

and why do the things we do on the internet have to be on the internet? you can go to a library for information and entertainment. you can make real friends with real people in the real world. you can make a zine and spread your gospel that way. fuckin, engage with the world around instead of watching the flashing neon shadows in your plastic cave.

i know a lot of what i'm saying can basically be summed up in "phone bad book good", but even that sentence carries some weight. how many people were saying they wanted to stop using smartphones in 2015? actually think about that. now think about how much people have been saying that in the past two years. yeah.

that's all i got. see ya