Some French motherfucker in 1998-2006 catalogued and converted the whole corpus of The Cantigas de Santa Maria to MIDI. These songs are one of the only large collections we have of medieval European music pre-polyphony (i.e. there are no harmonies beyond a drone) and now they’re available for anyone’s silly computer to render in basic waveforms across the world.
You can literally take this shit and render it in the Fire Emblem 8 or Pokemon or whatever soundfont and it rules.
I grew up in a small town. For many years, the internet was the only place I could be openly bisexual and an atheist. It’s also how I learned a lot about game design and programming, how I got access to a large variety of Marxist works, how I got into contact and empathized with groups like Muslims and trans people I’d been raised to hate, and how I was able to understand my own autism by coming into contact with other autistic people who were given the chance to speak about their own experiences.
Without the internet, I probably would have been creatively stunted, unable to accept multiple aspects of myself, been appallingly bigoted in many ways, and still thought that capitalism is when freedom and communism is 1984 starvation gulags. I have never heard a good explanation from anyone as to why that would be the better version of myself.
Honestly, same. we are both autism creatures cut from the same cloth.
the internet is a huge equalizer and allows anyone to share ideas. It has huge potential for class conciousness and radicalization, which is why the government and oligarchs have been dead set on controlling it and killing off anything outside of their walled gardens. Its why elon musk purchased twitter and continues funneling money into it at large expense. this forum (and lemmy as a concept) is a huge form of resistance against these forces.
We should also view the fediverse as a battlefield / struggle over terrain between liberals/capitalists and communists. It has at least the possibility to turn the english-language part of the internet into a proletarian rather than capitalist-controlled space, and we should not give them an inch.
government and oligarchs have been dead set on controlling it and killing off anything outside of their walled gardens
They will not succeed. Twitter got a lot less appealing after Musk bought it. Whenever the internet is used as a weapon by capitalists it backfires and renders the internet less useful than before to the capitalist. Frictionless communication finds its equilibrium outside of private property and outside of capitalist ideology.
woke 1.0
web 1.0
letting the capitalists into the internet was a mistake
Facts. The worst part about the internet is how those (the booj and their intelligence agencies) who control centralized platforms can use it for ideological manipulation. MK Ultra as a service.
It was capitalist from the get-go. That said, capitalism even being capable of creating something like the internet is incredible in exactly the way going to the moon is. The internet is also one of those technologies that will help in going beyond capitalism thanks to open source software and (in effect) barrier free communication. It’s an internationalist technology. No use in moralising against the internet.
from what ive heard, the infrastructure was going to be publicly owned but corporate interests lobbied against it which led to private ISPs.
The internet started out as information infrastructure in the US in order to beat the USSR and other competing powers, the aim was to centralise military data.
It’s good the internet exists, but it went too far
Everyone talking about the accessible internet and I really just wanted to say you could be listening to medieval chiptunes.
making it accessible to boomers was a mistake. 21st century UI design was a mistake.
I am sorry but I have to be that guy: the World Wide Web (that thing that is commonly and falsy equated with “the internet”) was literally invented by a boomer
provisional rule proving exception on tbl until and unless his politics align with the far right
i can get behind www being a mistake too but that still wasn’t all that accessible to the people who ruin the world because of shit they read online
The earlier Web (and general computer UI) design was primarily built by boomers lmao
yeah but it wasn’t accessible to qanon facebook grandpas
No, making things accessible is great. Exclusion is stupid.
“accessibility” that obfuscates what is going on is bad. it keeps most users ignorant. vulnerable to scams, unable to fix simple problems etc.
People can learn and with the internet they’re able to learn things that would otherwise be completely out of reach. I think anything that obfuscates can’t be termed accessibility. The internet doesn’t keep users ignorant. It does the very opposite. I would agree about there being issues inherent to making things accessible, but to me these are puerile disorders anyone can grow out of. Once that happens the benefits far outweigh the negative aspects. What is the greatest conveyor of critique against the tech industry? The internet. This whole thing self-corrects. What is most true about the internet is it having a profound effect on anyone who uses it, and that is a hard reality to deal with.
they explicitly don’t learn because of how products and interfaces are designed.
the same stuff that allows a toddler to use an ipad is what hides everything from the casual user, things that might spark curiosity to dig any deeper.
That’s an issue of burger icons and so forth, not one of access.
that’s cool and all but the internet really was a mistake.
