Reminder: “We still early”, “There are many alternatives” etc.
The United States is my country and America is my nation, but the Internet is my culture, and watching this happen and living through it was and is agonizing. There have been countless laments of the decline of intellectual discourse on the Internet. Some attribute it to the natural monopolies and economies of scale of Web 2.0, some to the expansion of the Internet beyond overwhelmingly Western intelligent and often technical users, to normal people and non-Westerners, and some to the inferiority of younger generations. Almost none of them point to the successful society-wide campaign to censor and police the Internet covering all major platforms and the means to find things outside of them. Few seem to even realize this happened. That the closure of the Internet happened and its approximate scope should be common knowledge, and there needs to be a convenient name and narrative for it so that it sticks in people’s heads. Censorship, suppression, and heavy-handed political manipulation and moderation are the norm today, and many seem to have forgotten that it was ever otherwise.