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"A Vast Enshitification of Everything" - Cory doctorow, Cloudworld 2025

Anybody old enough to remember the net in its first years knows what the "old" internet was like. You asked for information and got it, quickly. If somebody got a piece of spam, the site sending it was removed. People played within the rules, or rather best practices - as there really were no rules, just a comm0on understanding that we can't wreck things or this thing we loved wouild not useful to anybody, least of all ourselves.

IRC is an example or something that came out of nowhere, written by one guy that took over great parts of the net; then it went a little sour and I remember Tom Evans telling me "World War Three will be fought on IRC". It's probably more fair to say IRC was replaced by the WWW which some might argue a web browser is just an IRC client on steroids; possibly one could substitute Usenet for this as well. UYou tuber Serial Port has a good history of IRC. Those who fondly remember the terrorist teen Bill Wisner from Berkeley and the anarchy net might be amused by this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UbKenFipjo.

Cory Doctorow, speaking at Cloudworld in 2025 pointed out the enshitification of everything was not caused by evil people or a technolo9gy or government change, it came about from policy. Policies can be reversed. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo



It's time to hack molecules, not code.

One unintended consequence of the world our forefathers left us with is the medical system is impeding the growth of the network and we're not much past the 1970s really. All we've added is kitten gifs. TCP is to blame and the medical system, as always, rushed in to bayonet the wounded. This explains the most recent problem with the network and why the medical system is the part we have to fix.

We changed the world and gave it free ubiquitous global communications and information in less than a decade. Now we must turn our attention to healing the sick, now that we can talk to them all at once.

First, let's examine the nature of the problem.





"I hope you're sitting down: Journalism doesn't exist anymore. It hasn't for at least ten years now. The closest thing we have to journalism now is agenda-driven propaganda dressed up as "objective, hard-hitting news." Yes, this includes your favorite muckraking work over at Mother Jones or whatever. Journalism died a pretty sad death, and yeah, we're all kind of bummed about it." - Nicholas Pell



Were the truckers used as unwitting pawns of the US petrochemical/military industrial complex?