The old internet died and we watched and did nothing
I&#x27;m more worried about technological and legal chokeholds on free expression like GDPR, whose main effect was to nag users with a popup about cookies on every major website.<p>To me, it feels like the original possibility of inventing something, posting it online and earning a passive income is all but dead today. Too many hurdles now must be overcome. You pretty much have to learn a programming language, containerization, the various layers of HTML&#x2F;Javascript&#x2F;CSS deployment, amoral stuff like SEO and bribing influencers, to even have a chance at making more than $10 per month.<p>When I think of every major innovation in web dev since 2000, almost all of it has gone the opposite direction from how I would have done it. Instead of autoscaling distributed servers, programming languages and databases, we ended up with &quot;bare hands&quot; tools like Kubernetes, async-await and sharding on proprietary monopolies like AWS locked into physical regions. My description of what&#x27;s wrong is fuzzy at best, but I feel it deep down, that this trend away from computer science to application has all but halted progress.<p>I could write at length (seriously dozens&#x2F;hundreds of pages) about better ways of doing all of this. I already have to some degree. But nobody cares, and nobody listens to me since I never built anything that made any appreciable money. So what&#x27;s the point? There isn&#x27;t one. That&#x27;s the internet today. Late-stage capitalism, pretty people, and divisive political discourse. Dystopia.