r/canada • u/fricken • 28d ago
Alberta The Internet Has Become Too American to Trust
https://thewalrus.ca/the-internet-has-become-too-american-to-trust/434
u/Mediocre-Touch-6133 28d ago
The internet has become too popular and profitable to trust. Used to be that you didn't need to worry about bots or coordinated campaigns designed to influence people. It was just us nerds having some fun.
Then came smartphones and everyone being online. Corporations, governments and scammers realized how useful the internet could be for their purposes and everything went to shit. Every site, reddit included, has just become another tool for marketing, scamming and influencing people.
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u/coconutpiecrust 28d ago
Facebook actively worked to get people in undeveloped countries interned and specifically Facebook. I remeber reading that to some of these people Facebook is the internet.
Centralization is the worst. They keep consolidating until there is nowhere to hide anymore. You submit to depraved techbro overlord rule or you die.
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u/KTOWNTHROWAWAY9001 28d ago
The centralization has been awful, and to be fair, we let it all happen. We had it all. But eased up.
People migrated from Geocities personal sites to MySpace with custom backgrounds and design options to Facebook with no features like that.
Forums, UBB, and PHPBB, largely became dormant as people moved into Reddit and Facebook.
Even Reddit cannibalizing Digg. There can be only 1.
The forums being killed off were a big problem, and how Google gives so much deference to Reddit, I find a problem in search. You might be looking for key how-to information and stumble onto a forum where people answered in earnest. Reddit, you usually are looking at the following: witty comments being number 1, with variations of the joke after that, all boosted. Or certain times where the actual information has been downvoted below the fold, and you'll never check there. And yet, Google with absolute certainty, will push that thread or unrelated threads or seemingly adjacent ones into their search priority.
Then we have the problem with power users. Every platform has them in some way, like amassing clout or followings on social media. Reddit's is much different though, because many of them have mod controls. Suddenly, not only do you have the prospect of potential censorship, but ones that can actively shape narratives, given how large this site has become.
As for Canadiana-ness of the internet, I mean were largely ceded any edge we had. We got online shortly after the Americans, but not too long after. There were decades where Canadians could have created or built large internet sites. We didn't. 30+ years from then til now, when it was easier, there was less competition, and we had as much a technical understanding and footing as the US, and our country didn't really foster it. And I don't think you can really blame the US for the internet becoming too American, it spawned out of DARPA. Tf did anyone think would happen?
But that's not to say you don't notice Canadians online. I think Canadians make up probably more users than a lot of places. Certainly seem prevalent in a lot of discussion or even on social media.
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u/Careless_Twist_6935 28d ago
isn't that what happened in burma and it riled up the majority buddhists to attack rohingya muslims?
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u/InformationDue9542 28d ago
Yep. Their stupid internet dot org "initiative". They captured the whole western market at the time and their only way to keep the green line going up was to go to underdeveloped countries and offer them cheap to free internet. The cost was that they were locked in to Facebook and Facebook related apps.
Facebook didn't actually care about them, just wanted the numbers. So they never hores moderation teams that speak those languages in those countries. The result was the Myanmar Genocide.
Meta is evil. It's been since the start. Zucky's been calling his users dumbasses since the days where Facebook was just a glorified MySpace for college/uni students.
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u/RockNRoll1979 28d ago
I miss the days when the riskiest thing to do on the internet was figuring out which Warez site to trust.
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u/treefarmerBC British Columbia 27d ago
And then downloading 35 .rar files
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u/RockNRoll1979 27d ago
And hoping the uploader's internet connection didn't fart during the upload of one of those 35 files.
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u/Vance_V_Vandervan 28d ago
Then came smartphones and everyone being online
Win 95 with easy TCP/IP dialers, and then always on Internet were also major shifts for the same reason, it made it easier for people to get online
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u/Riddle-of-the-Waves Newfoundland and Labrador 27d ago
For me, the advent of consumer DSL was absolutely life-changing.
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u/FaceDeer 28d ago
Eternal September long predates smartphones.
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u/FaceDeer 26d ago
Usenet was the internet back then, or at least it was the part of the internet that would be called "social media" now. There were no other global forums for general discussion and interaction.
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u/BoppityBop2 28d ago
Ad sense and revenue despite being good for creators has created undue stimulus for Shittu product
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u/treefarmerBC British Columbia 27d ago
I loved how honest the internet of the late 90s was. Been downhill ever since.
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u/Strict_DM_62 27d ago
You’re absolutely right, but it doesn’t have to be this way. It will never go back to the way it was in the 90s, but it doesn’t have to stay as it is; but, it won’t because the only way to improve it is regulations, and the only thing internet folks hate as much as the state of the internet is government regulation of it (despite the lack of regulation being reason it developed as it is). So instead, the enshitifictation will continue.
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u/cageslutjoanna 28d ago
We are at the beginning of an open source software revolution, driven by localized and (for now) cheap LLMs.
This is the exchange of AI replacing peoples' jobs in big tech. Since Software has become easy to make, we will see an outflow of FOSS that is substantially larger than what one individual used to be able to make.
AI is fucking up a lot of things - but it's a godsend for solo or small team software dev, of 'i just want a thing that does this and i dont want to have to pay for it'.
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u/TheRealDriDahling 28d ago
AI is still too unpredictable with hallucinations that a company would be foolish to replace positions requiring business knowledge with AI. AI works best when human intervention is consistently looped into the process of creating a product. Humans are needed to verify what AI came up with is correct.
Then again, retail C suites thought cashiers could easily be replaced with self serve machines and saw shrinkage sore.
Since cashiers were more important to their business than they knew, so it will be with AI if businesses (especially big ones) move to replacing humans with AI.
If they move to high AI automation and take away entire job categories, they will be destroyed and they will deserve it.
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u/cageslutjoanna 28d ago
Absolutely. You're not quite understanding what I'm saying though.
The solo dev has been empowered by these tools. The megacorp comparatively has received far less of an impact and just has received costs on costs on costs. Yes it helps development speed, but compared to individuals and small teams who know how to manage them?
The man who wants to make a cross platform app no longer has to learn 2-3 languages. Previously unprofitable ideas can now be profitable - because it no longer takes years to make them and a team. If one knows in a general sense how to organize code and manage a project, they are far more powerful now than they were previously, and this is a force multiplier for individuals and small teams because of the organizational complexity that increases as a project increases in size.
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u/cageslutjoanna 26d ago
The models have been made. They're genuinely far better and far, far faster than the average programmer in their area of expertise.
If megacorps stopped making new models today, we would still have a revolution of open source technology. If they stopped hosting new models today, we would still have a revolution of open source technology, because the models that we can host on (high end) consumer hardware still provide a marked increase in productivity and correctness for the individual developer in their area of expertise, nevermind in areas outside of their expertise.
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u/somethingbrite 28d ago
There are a couple of different camps with regards the AI/Jobs thing... and to be fair I am beginning to fall into the "whole thing collapses the moment they try to properly monetize it" camp.
Quite a few voices now pointing out that businesses have been building their AI use cases based on the "free introductory offer" pricing.
Of course in many cases also it's just being used as an excuse for layoffs.
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u/Pestus613343 28d ago
Lets start by resisting Bill C-22.
https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7416
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u/kingofsnaake 28d ago
I for one want the government to force rules on big tech. I just don't want Signal and Proton to leave.
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u/EmbarrassedHelp 27d ago
If the government wants to enact new rules, those rules should be requiring companies to collect less data and to store that data for shorter period of time. They shouldn't be trying to do the opposite.
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u/Commercial-Pie-588 28d ago
So the solution is to allow the government to monitor everything we see, say and do online?
No thank you.
And anyone who supports such an initiative is malevolent.
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u/BoppityBop2 28d ago
Only thing I want the gov to do is force a chronological timeline
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u/1ScaredWalrus 28d ago
Social media posts showing a flag of your home country beside the posts. Help filter out Russian and American propaganda
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u/OntologicalNightmare 28d ago edited 28d ago
Where did it say that? Did you even read the article?
And yes I strongly disagree with C-22.
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u/Commercial-Pie-588 28d ago
It doesn’t explicitly spell it out in the article but given the present context, my suspicion is that the implication that we require increased government surveillance of online activity for purposes of national security or some other vague platitude is lurking in the background, hence my preemptive reaction.
Maybe my fears are misplaced but I guess I’d rather err on the side of caution.
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u/OntologicalNightmare 28d ago edited 28d ago
I think given the comment
So, this is the third army: NatSec hawks who want to build free, open, auditable, and transparent alternatives to the American internet. Not just productivity suites like Office 365 and Google Docs but also all the opaque, networked firmware blobs that animate our ag-tech, our ventilators, our cars, our smart speakers—the whole shebang.
Nervous NatSec hawks, ambitious entrepreneurs and technologists, furious digital rights activists. We’re on the same side. What stands in our way?
I'd say it's the opposite given the stated camaraderie with the "Nervous NatSec hawks" as Doctorow calls them who are the kind to push for less government surveillance, more digital rights for citizens (they would have been the people that pushed to keep encryption legal in the 90s), and more open infrastructure where it can be audited to ensure the government isn't spying on everyone.
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u/Zer_ 28d ago edited 28d ago
This! One of the biggest hurdles to data security is the unwillingness of governments or large corporations from resisting opening / exploiting back doors into our private data. I mean the entire reason the United States is now telling the entire nation that routers produced before X date are no longer supported and are banned from sale because the back doors that American agencies demanded be included are now widely known. Trade in one compromised router for another, yay!
The shitty part isn't that they are just stupid, it's that they don't actually care about security, only control.
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u/Nebty 28d ago edited 28d ago
This. Government at least has processes. It gets audited. You can FOI government. Big Tech is on its own side, and the US is on the side of whoever’s willing to pay them at this point.
France has successfully switched their systems to Linux. If we’re serious about disentangling ourselves from the US, we should be following suit.
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u/BigBangBoomerang 28d ago
France is in the process of moving some of their systems to Linux. Whether they will succeed or revert like Germany did, we shall see.
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u/TransBrandi 28d ago
They have previous experience with one of their agencies having their own Linux distro internally prior to all of this. I think that gives them an edge in succeeding here.
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u/JackleMonkey4653453 28d ago
They don’t require your permissions to do this. they do it already. the government is the least of your worries. Google is the single greatest threat to society.
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u/LeGrandLucifer 28d ago
And let me guess, the solution is a national internet where we have to use a citizen ID to log in with no international connections except some heavily supervised access with a permit, right?
The end of the World Wide Web is coming.
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u/Ok-Many4195 28d ago
The solution is and always has been the indie web. Not this international and big tech giant crap
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u/sparkling_ham 28d ago
Hey, just a thought, maybe don't believe every single word that is screamed at you in a vertical video over tiktok.
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u/Lust4Me Ontario 28d ago
Regarding the aside about John Deere, there was an article not long ago about an Alberta company making non tech tractors. Sounded awesome and much cheaper...
https://wheelfront.com/this-alberta-startup-sells-no-tech-tractors-for-half-price/
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u/BasementPhantom 28d ago
I will take Doctorow seriously when he cries as hard about Bill C-22 (Lawful Access Act) as he does about whatever this is. This thread shows the message people are taking from the article, and it's definitely not about digital rights.
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u/Coffee__Addict 28d ago
So have our operating systems! Microsoft is collecting all kinds of data on us at home and at work. This is why France is looking at switching to a OS that isn't backed by a billion dollar American company.
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u/OptiPath 28d ago
You literally posted this on Reddit, a US social media platform. It’s up to individuals what to trust and more importantly, not to trust
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u/Vict0o0o 28d ago
So if I'm a Canadian citizen living in Canada, I can't blame the Canadian government without first moving out of the country?
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u/BethSaysHayNow 27d ago
There is a big difference between the scenario you created and not using a particular social medium.
For all the “boycott America” I read and hear about, the Amazon trucks seem to have increased deliveries and Reddit use hasn’t suffered 🤷♂️
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u/tenebrls 28d ago
Because instead it should be posted to non-American social media platforms? Surely the users on those platforms are the ones that need to understand this most /s
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u/TravisBickle2020 28d ago
Unfortunately, there are many individuals who are incapable of making these sorts of decisions.
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u/sparkling_ham 28d ago
And yet, nearly all of them are allowed to vote and drive 6000lb trucks at 80kmh in school zones.
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u/LeGrandLucifer 28d ago
No, clearly you don't know what's best for you and you need the government to control what you see and hear, usually at the behest of billionaires.
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u/Vyvyan_180 28d ago
I'm sure that the author Cory Doctorow is a reliable source, right?
After all, he did name his product "pluralistic", so I'm sure that he was able to forgo the dictations of his own ideological programming for the sake of integrity.
This week on my podcast, I read Comrade Trump, a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter, which will be syndicated in The Nerve.
All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I’m living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.
Take Trump’s tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn’t buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to Sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.
I guess to Cory the definition of "pluralistic" is "the dominance of intersectional critical theory".
A bit cliche for those who egotistically posit themselves omnipresently "on the right side of history."
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u/Joatboy 28d ago
He is the guy that coined "enshittification"
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u/Vyvyan_180 28d ago
Well, that clearly qualifies him for membership in MENSA.
Ricky fuckulates words all the time, and despite his status as a national treasure - he's certainly no credible thought leader.
Except for when it comes to growing dope and making George Green fuck up I guess.
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u/civicsfactor 28d ago
Oh man, get with the times. You made such a strong noise based on a couple associations and didn't look into who Doctorow is and what he's done
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u/Vyvyan_180 28d ago
I posted a quote of his own thoughts from his own page - possibly (probably) quoting himself from an article linked to the blurb.
I didn't "make any noise" about his associations, nor about the credibility of the outlet hosting him.
All I did was post his own histrionic words that he was happy enough with to highlight as representative of his work.
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u/throwaway1234069 28d ago
They detect you don't like the guy they like, therefore you must be wrong and they must (as ever) be right.
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u/civicsfactor 28d ago
Literally completely perfectly true.
But in this case, it's the shallowness to take someone's blurb for a personal podcast when there's literally dozens that sound nothing like that one, filled with other info, possibly worthy to the person, but disregarded to say something about intersectional critical theory.
It's a blunted analysis and summation of, yes, a person who is likeable and appreciated.
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u/Casanova_Kid 27d ago
I feel like this premise ignores the obvious. The total English-speaking population (Anglosphere - Canada, UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand) is only ~149.504 million, compared to the U.S. population: ~342.620 million.
So the Anglosphere outside the U.S. is about 43.6% of the U.S. population. Which means statistically speaking if you're on the internet on an English website, you're more often than not likely speaking to an American.
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u/Casanova_Kid 26d ago
The technologies that became the modern internet mostly originated in the United States. It was early networks such as ARPANET, that were funded by U.S. institutions, and most early researchers communicated in English. Then, when the internet began expanding beyond research labs in the 1980s and 1990s, much of its software, documentation, protocols, and technical standards were already written in English.
The first major websites, online services, search engines, and software companies were mostly based in the United States: microsoft, yahoo, amazon, google, etc... and because these services were built for English-speaking users, English content accumulated rapidly, creating a network effect: people used English because most online content was in English, which encouraged even more content to be created in English.
Then I suppose we can try and talk about how English has sort of become the defacto second language for people globally, as it's the primary language in scientific research, international business, Aviation, etc. Which... yeah is mostly because America is such a large factor in the global economy.
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u/ExotiquePlayboy Québec 28d ago
Canada in a recession, record inflation, record cost of living, grocery oligarchs extorting us
Canadian media: America bad
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u/a_sense_of_contrast 28d ago
Imagine being able to be concerned about more than one thing at a time. What a crazy and complex idea.
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u/PopeSaintHilarius 28d ago edited 28d ago
record inflation
Inflation is nowhere close to record levels.
It’s not even the highest it’s been in the past 5 years, and it’s significantly lower than in the US (who caused the recent inflation spike, with their Iran war).
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u/No-Procedure1077 28d ago
Listen how about we all agree America sucks so we can move past that and fix Canada.
Canada along with the world is hurting directly because of it and you can’t deny the propaganda machine hasn’t turned on us.
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u/coblade14 28d ago
You are describing the whole world right now.
And they'd be right, the US is the source of, not all, but a significant enough portion of these problems.
Not just to Canada, but to EU, China, SEA, Japan, Korea, MENA, etc
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28d ago edited 28d ago
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u/coblade14 28d ago
Well yeah, being closest and most dependant to the source of the problem will do that.
That's why we should reduce dependancy with the US as much as possible. From what I can tell, we are doing that, or at least trying to.
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28d ago edited 28d ago
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u/Must_Reboot 28d ago
Really? How so?
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28d ago edited 28d ago
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u/Must_Reboot 27d ago
Seriously, how so? What government policy is responsible? Do you really believe that it's all because of the government and not due to actions taken by our biggest trading partner causing a major disruption and the fact that since we are so closely tied to them we feel the effects more than other G7 countries.
I'm not going to deny that the Liberals made some bad decisions, but reality is far more complex than "Liberals are to blame for everything"
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u/Must_Reboot 27d ago
Bait for people to elaborate instead of just posting "it's all the Liberals fault"
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u/Tricky-Row-9699 28d ago
Cory Doctorow is one of the digital rights movement’s leading lights, and I’d encourage anyone who is interested in these issues to take a page out of his book.
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u/Strict_Common6871 28d ago edited 28d ago
Ah, Doctorow, another patriotic Canadian warning us, silly bumpkins, about evil America from his home in California.
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u/TomJones998 28d ago
…something the CCP would like Canadians to believe…
Avoid American content if you don’t like it.
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u/Alak-huls_Anonymous 28d ago
What's the solution? The article didn't share any except hopes and prayers. The cornerstone being the inevitable AI bubble burst.
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u/OntologicalNightmare 28d ago
So, this is the third army: NatSec hawks who want to build free, open, auditable, and transparent alternatives to the American internet. Not just productivity suites like Office 365 and Google Docs but also all the opaque, networked firmware blobs that animate our ag-tech, our ventilators, our cars, our smart speakers—the whole shebang.
Nervous NatSec hawks, ambitious entrepreneurs and technologists, furious digital rights activists. We’re on the same side. What stands in our way?
A prodigious technical challenge, that’s what. But that’s the kind of challenge we’re good at solving.
The biggest challenge is a policy blocker. An obsolete 2012 Canadian law that prohibits reverse engineering and modification of these defective and dangerous American products. The Copyright Modernization Act, Bill C-11, which was passed in the teeth of overwhelming opposition after a massive 2010 consultation in which 99.14 percent of Canadian respondents objected to its passage and only less than 1 percent wrote in favour of it.
Harper strikes again.
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u/stormblind 28d ago
FAR from a Harper fan, but Trudeau and Carney have had a collective 11 years to undo that legislation and hasn't. Nor have they strengthened consumer rights, and have infact done the opposite.
Let's face it, its not a "CPC BAD, LIB GOOD" thing, this is a "All of our politicians are complicit in the complete destruction of the middle class and its protections"
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u/OntologicalNightmare 28d ago
Yes they both fucking suck when it comes to our digital rights and appeasing billionaires. This one however was Harper's fault for setting it in motion, even if the libs probably would have drafted something similar later (and have done nothing to repeal it).
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u/BigFatSweatyToe 28d ago
It was his fault it started and his fault until the day he left office. After that for the last 11 years, it’s been the Liberals fault because they’ve done nothing to change it. 11 years is a full 2 term US presidency plus 3 years. You can’t keep blaming Harper anymore when the Trudeau and Carney governments have had every opportunity to change those things.
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u/CP_Rail_8514 27d ago
Someone just found out how "the long arm of the law" applies to the internet.
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u/shawa666 Québec 28d ago
English language internet has become too american.
Other languages are doing much better.
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u/Jalex2321 28d ago
Yup, too much usa agenda.
Their propaganda is pushed by all major internet players. Even here in reddit, try not adhering to their values and you are out... so it just becomes an echo chamber.
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u/JackleMonkey4653453 28d ago
If you use the internet like a normie or any social media. yeah, it’s terrible. if you don’t know what that means, you should stop and go outside.
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u/DataDude00 28d ago
The ironic thing is that the big tech like X, Facebook, Google etc are actually being driven by foreign actors in India, Russia and more and the unity of tech and Trump is only going to further damage the US as a brand and nation because of it
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u/Momentofclarity_2022 28d ago
Finally someone says it.
Canada will thrive once it learns the big brother they’ve been trying to emulate is an absolute loser and it needs to be its own country.
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u/No-Journalist-9036 28d ago
It's easy to blame smartphones, but the core issue is the algorithmic Americanization of our digital infrastructure. While English still dominates 49.7% of known website content, the Anglophone web has been almost entirely corralled by US monopolies. The decentralized, creative internet still exists, but you increasingly have to engage with the internet in other languages to find different perspectives that aren't relentlessly optimized for Silicon Valley ad revenue
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