cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/24952361
At the same time, the “World Wide Web,” composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.
It’s hard to be more European than the Web!
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Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?
I agree and appreciate the article a tonne.
And I think it is more to the point, and less naive, than might seem after the first reading. The issue is the reliance on Google (sorry, Alphabet), Facebook (sorry, Meta), Twitter (sorry, X), Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Thinking we need European Google or Microsoft to solve is a failure of imagination. We (largely) have the technology to do it differently. What we lack is the will to do it differently.
We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the “success culture.” Those examples, and there are many more, prove the opposite. Europeans like success. But they often don’t consider “winning against the whole society” as one. Instead, they tend to consider success a collective endeavour. Success is when your work is recognized long after you are gone, when it benefits every citizen. Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!
Simplistic (Europe and USA are non-homogenous), but this simplicity is needed to build a positive myth. And a positive myth might need a region, a culture, and institutions willing to stand for it - however universal it is.
Almost everything Big Tech does could be solved with a protocol and diverse server providers. Prove me wrong.
(I mean, what Big Tech does for its presumed users, “the common people”…)
