Egregoros

Interesting effortpost dropped about institutional level internet censorship calling it the "closure of the internet". It's very tl;dr but it goes into detail what many of the top social media sites did from 2015-22, and breaks it down into two phases, the post Trump/Brexit era of 15-19, and the COVID lockdown era of 2020-22.

Also it tellingly mentions that it never ended, Twitter just dialed back and everyone else has the infrastructure in place.

Of course there are also people who will deny with a smile that this actually happened.

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet

@sendpaws most people don't really know what the word "enclosure" is who probably should. it's exactly what the tech sector has been slowly being drug through post-dot com boom.

there's a book "technofeudalism" about it--amazon et all quietly becoming inescapable commons places (every photographer must be on instagram or doesn't exist, every product must be on amazon or doesn't exist) despite not being subject to commons-esque social regulation (amazon does what it wants and is backed by DOD money, making it relatively immune to boycotts)

i think open communication proved to be too powerful for nation states and its been a really protracted fight to revoke it without causing An Event. (i liken it to a game where controllers are trying to maximize the size of a shape without ever touching the death triangle; a shape that causes you to lose, but there is no way to know that you have found it, as intersecting it causes whoever does so to die.)