social media

Writing my first article on #Linkedin on this topic is probably not the wisest start to a prolific blogging career, but since the start of this year the outsourcing of free-speech censorship has niggled at me. Im of that generation which actually knows the world without the internet. I was in my teens when we still had archie and gopher and IRC was actually where people “hung out”. The WWW was just taking off and Sabeer Bhatia hadn’t even started hotmail (it was to be a few years that he betrayed us netizens by selling out to Microsoft). The internet was supposed to be free, self regulated and everything that the real world was not. It had rules and decency and was policed by idealistic geeks who had a code. Cut to 2020 the internet is a spammy, creepy place, where slick teenage billionaires in business suits now apparently tells us what to think, how to vote and we have effectively stopped using our brains.