Technology

It's not winnable. The same politicians continuously reintroduce the same bad ideas and governments are increasingly authoritarian and decreasingly care about the opinions of constituents. Companies participating in fascism voluntarily censor and collect unnecessary identifying information to share with governments and advertisers because it benefits the share holders. Investors throw money at business models that depend on creating new markets for rent-seeking, leading to users sending their private data to more and more cloud services. Other companies without malicious intentions are pressured by the flood of bot traffic and content to collect verifiable user identification or use user-hostile services like Cloudflare or Recaptcha.

In the old days we had large numbers of people believing that being online meant using AOL, Compuserve, or whatever walled-garden type of "portal" they were lured into using. But we could mostly rely on tech-aware people like computer programmers to know better. Not any more. Today it's a more diverse group that knows better, but a less cohesive and politically influential one, and it makes up a much smaller fraction of net users.

People became convinced social media equates to cigarettes somehow and they ate that distraction up so they didn't have to confront how their quality of life collapsing is the real reason they are miserable.

It has been lost.

A lot of "fight for the internet" types were just mad that they couldn't say slurs on Twitter, well they can now, so they don't care anymore