>>454462Lol you bought the narratives and the ideology. You don't understand computers at all. I grew up around computer scientists and people who know their shit, and they could tell you that any machine can be controlled, and any security can be circumvented. You're always in an information war, and who has data centers and armies of agents to scour the internet? Ordinary users have jobs and cannot overcome an information war "in the field" against a determined and organized opponent. It just so happens that your typical Extremely Online person is not interesting to the feds, and the free flow of information was useful to an extent, so it was allowed. They're okay with you downloading MP3s on Napster or whatever, but when push comes to shove, if it's on the internet, it can be traced and at the least the government will know what was accessed and by whom. A whole lot of people learned that the hard way when they got busted for various internet crimes. The idea that you were going to hack the planet and the government was just too stupid to figure it out is a conceit of ideologues, not the real state of affairs.
Now the internet could be used in some ways against the regime - it's much more difficult to forcibly suppress information so that only "correct" ideas are expressed. China managed to make it happen, and the US does it now and controls most internet discussions so thoroughly it surprised even me. But the idea that the internet was "free", that the government simply couldn't control the thing DARPA created, is nonsense if you think about it for five minutes. The one thing people did have is that they held their own computers, and sometimes their own servers, and the government is not omniscient and can't hijack any computer anywhere utterly. Any request for a website, any file transferred over the internet though, the government's going to find that, and can control transmissions to a pretty large extent.
So many of these narratives about "free" internet or tech monopolists are purely focused on political narratives, literal feels > reals, when that's not really what the feds were interested in. The control of internet narratives and echo chambers is not central to the enclosure of the internet, and the use of those tactics to control discourse is a fairly new development undertaken by political campaigns. You'd have to be Extremely Online to confuse internet echo chambers for the real world and what people actually think. You do understand that for normies, they figured out a while ago that the internet was controlled to a large extent, and that they have to be careful about what they say and do online?
The internet was "enclosed" because the major servers and nerve centers were all controlled by institutions rather than the imagined smol internet user. There have been some advancements in how well governments can sort through all that information, but back in the 90s the NSA et al were very aware of how they could monitor the internet. They were only working on how to do so more efficiently. (If you ever heard of Bill Binney, he was working for the NSA to do exactly this around that time… neocons being the dumbshits that they are, they shit on him and did an incompetent job, but that is a level of incompetence it took a Bush to accomplish. I can also tell you that Bill Clinton was particularly paranoid about policing the internet as much as he could, and he wasn't as stupid as the neocons, and eventually the neocons figured out this newfangled internet thing.)
>>454463Hardware is never free, until it's made free. There's a problem of taking the "information universe" idea literally, believing that the universe fundamentally is information and the physical world is a representation of some digital data. For a while, the software was (relatively) free, and to a large extent the software is still free if you can get around malware. Even here though, computers are devices that are built for command and control. That's a large reason why the DARPA net exists, to exercise command and control even in a total war situation.
>>454471I was around since the old days of the 90s. I'd say it's about the same on "openness", but large institutions are far more effective at internet propaganda, and learned how to flood the internet so it seems like everything is an echo chamber. The rise of social media is really the failure of humanity to understand why social media is shit, and a sign of the masses' stupefication. It's still possible to build a library, the way the free exchange of information is intended. No force is stopping you from setting up a server and putting up a library, and in some ways it is easier to set up things like a wiki. The real source of the "enclosure" of the internet isn't the internet itself, but the way people have been educated since the 1990s. I'm old enough to remember the sharp turn in American education around 1994, and I'm not surprised that people are stupider than ever and terrified of literally everything in the world, after what I saw growing up. People could in theory make use of the internet despite the regime tightening the noose, though if dissent ever reached a critical mass, the internet could be shut down. The internet will not be shut down though, because while the internet can spread dissent, it can also be used to spread consent and compliance - the internet echo chambers are effective at molding public opinion and creating the appearance that certain regime policies are completely normal and have a mass bass, since digital shit can be reproduced very rapidly. I doubt, outside of local closures, the regime will have much reason to shut down the internet in the long term. It's protocol to shut down the internet in preparation of some military action, but all the dissent material you share online can be funneled into some agent's computer, if the agent picks up the scent that someone is a dissenter. It's like the palantir, you don't know who else could be watching and by getting in a dissenter echo chamber, you're inviting the feds for absolutely free. But regime-compliant internet propaganda and raising support for the regime through online, that's so valuable that it's worth the risk of dissent material being spread and not policed.