Comment by jorvi

Very tangential but you should check out the old game “Hacker BS Replay”.

It’s basically about how in 2012, with the original internet overrun by spam, porn and malware, all the large corporations and governments got together and created a new, tightly-controlled clean internet. Basically how modern Apple & Disneyland would envision the internet. On this internet you cannot choose your software, host your own homepage or have your own e-mail server. Everyone is linked to a government ID.

We’re not that far off:

- SaaS

- Gmail blocking self-hosted mailservers

- hosting your own site becoming increasingly cumbersome, and before that MySpace and then Meta gobbled up the idea of a home page a la GeoCities.

- Secure Boot (if Microsoft locked it down and Apple locked theirs, we would have been screwed before ARM).

- Government ID-controlled access is already commonplace in Korea and China, where for example gaming is limited per day.

In the Hacker game, as a response to the new corporate internet, hackers started using the infrastructure of the old internet (“old copper lines”) and set something up called the SwitchNet, with bridges to the new internet.