Taking back the internet

Most of the people who created the internet were cuddly nerds who valued free speech, and created this new digital system to promote freedom and give everyone a fair shot to be heard, start their own business, etc. For a while, it was wonderful. The internet was wide open: full of intriguing ideas, excellent blogs, a broad range of possibilities, and high-quality content.

Then, greedy jerks posing as ethical businessmen bought these small internet startups for a fortune.

Bill Gates was not one of the aforementioned cuddly nerds. He was an outcast who partnered with a cuddly, creative, genius nerd named Paul Allen. Paul Allen, sadly, passed away a few years ago from cancer. He was a true philanthropist who quietly gave his money, time, and ideas to his local community. The wrong partner died.

See, the cuddly, creative, genius nerds are not—and were never—in it for the money. This is why I loved the internet for years. It gave the little guy, like me, power. It was so creative and fun.

Eventually, some of the greedy jerks and outcasts, like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg (who essentially stole someone else’s idea and pretended it was his own), and Jeff Bezos, started to overtake the internet from the hands of the cuddly nerds. Bezos, for example, was an outcast who capitalized on some of their ideas because he is a good businessman, was born into quite a bit of money, and had a lot of connections. This is also the case for Bill Gates and Zuckerberg. None of these guys are, however, terribly creative.

The founders of Wikipedia also contained a cuddly, creative nerd, who quit when he noticed the original mission was becoming corrupted.

Have you ever met a person who marches to the beat of their own drummer, who just knew how to do stuff, and did a lot of stuff? Who, upon first meeting, you may have assumed was just a weirdo, but upon further review, became like an onion that you loved to unpeel, because each layer seemed more interesting than the last? Who was rather an odd dresser, even a bit mentally scattered, maybe not the greatest at relationships or social interaction, but never for a lack of sincerity? A person who might be described as a sort of “mad scientist” character, who never quite fit in the mainstream? Like that guy in Back To the Future, who used to play “Jim” on the show Taxi ? The guy who made a lot of cool stuff because he loved to create cool stuff?

Jack Dorsey was actually one of those cuddly nerd guys. But everyone around him saw that he was an easy target, didn’t care for confrontation, and was easily conned. I think he was lost in his own creation and didn’t know how to get out. He ended up being manipulated into things that he maybe didn’t agree with. Of course he allowed this to happen, but was ill-prepared for the tactics used in the corporate world and unaware of his own blind spots. Dorsey left Twitter last year, and publicly apologized to everyone on Twitter for what Twitter has become, and his part in allowing it. He also apologized for going along with the Trump Twitter ban.

During this time, he was, apparently, working with another one of the cuddly, creative nerds who didn’t sell to a scumbag. This cuddly nerd is Elon Musk. Together they snatched Twitter out from under the noses of a bunch of whiny scumbags, and they succeeded. These cuddly, creative nerds are the smart ones who created the systems that have been corrupted by greedy, uncreative, bullies and misfits. That is why when Musk and Dorsey got together behind everyone’s backs, they very easily snatched Twitter right back.

The good guys who created the bulk of the internet, who sold their creations, are now wealthy and very disturbed by what’s happened to their creations, especially as it relates to government collusion. These cuddly, creative nerds were always hackers. They despise big government. They hate to be told what to do and how to do it: it is personal for them. Now that they realize their creations are owned by an elitist sphere of corrupt bullies, they don’t like it. This time around, however, they have the advantage of being older, wiser, and richer than they were when they were first manipulated and bought out. They have also felt the sting of betrayal; and nothing drives a hacker more than the possibility of proving the betrayer / bully wrong.

So, the initial founders of some of the most beloved websites, apps, and digital tools are fighting back. But quietly, as introverts tend to do. They are strategic, smart and patient. They are also quite creative with regard to the way in which they enjoy watching the bully squirm. Nothing sadistic, but always clever. They possess a rather cuddly, yet ruthlessly-precise, wit. (The wit was always the appeal, for me, of the original internet.) They also know their enemy far better than their enemy knows them. They know the enemy is, at its heart, a greedy parasite, always feeding off of a host, because they (Bezos, Gates, Zuckerburg, etc.) were never good at creating systems in the first place—only good at profiting off of the creativity of others. So they get lazy; they get cocky; they get sloppy.

The cuddly, creative nerds, do share one thing in common with the bully. They both have a blind spot. While the cuddly nerd may struggle with social cues and appear to be a bit of a bull in a China shop as they engage with other humans, the bully will forget to hide his nefarious motives, and with enthusiasm (also like a bull in a China shop), will obliviously reveal his secrets, in service to the rush of his ego. The cuddly, creative nerds are already creating systems to exploit this.

I read that the partner who left Wikipedia is quietly starting a new online encyclopedia that can never be corrupted. How? I have no clue. But I believe in these cuddly nerds.

I also heard that Jack Dorsey is creating an entirely new sort of parallel internet, decentralized, called “Web5”. The name is meant to mock the idea of Web2 and Web3, and something else about the bully, but the bully is too busy gloating in its power to notice. Apparently Web5 will based solely on Bitcoin, so it too, can never be corrupted.