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The world's dankest, sweatiest Reddit shitpostingest, tryhard Mr. 2015 Ifunny.com himself...
Geez, Second Thought, I'm
♪ Title Music ♪
We're looking at how capitalism ruined the World Wide Web.
Even though it was capitalism that
I WOULD ask him to stop trying to be knowledgeable as well, but then,
well, I wouldn't have as much material, would I?
Just about everyone has a problem with the Internet.
We all use this necessary service for a million different things,
and for many of us we've even gotten to the point where we spend more time online.
Ugh...Yeah, he starts off with his usual rambling that goes nowhere.
I swear, if brevity were a survival skill, he'd be the first of us to go!
So we'll just skip it.
He also regurgitates the myth of how the Internet formed,
which has only a grain of truth to it, but I've covered that extensively already, too, so we'll skip that as well.
But just to give you an indication:
The Internet couldn't have existed without the public sector.
Not just because that's how history played out.
But because the private sector literally wouldn't have done it.
As I covered, the private sector was
And the protocols they were developing were
If we'd gone with the protocols developed by Xerox, Novell, or any of the others,
we'd have universal encryption. Email spam wouldn't be a thing.
We wouldn't even have run out of addresses and made everyone go over to IPv6.
The reason they went with the shittier government protocol—
which didn't even use the full seven-layer OSI model—
is because the FCC wouldn't allow privately-developed protocols
to be used over the national packet-switching network.
Which, by the way, was only government-based because government forced out companies
like Western Union and RCA who were making it themselves, and making it
Like Telenet, a private network that had to fight the regulatory battle tooth and nail,
costing them millions and meaning they couldn't make profit for
By the way,
Again, we see this from statists all the time:
They use
and then say there's no way the private sector
Do they come
So anyway,
From the very first day the Internet was privatized, it was under a market oligopoly.
To this day, only six companies handle the physical infrastructure of the Internet.
Those "six companies" are the baby-Bells,
the
In fact, if cable companies hadn't become ISPs, they would have
At any rate, he doesn't know what he's talking about.
For the longest time, ISPs were dial-up companies, and anyone could set up their own ISP.
For awhile, I went with a local ISP called VNet, a small local outfit.
Later on, I partnered up with a friend to get our own ISP going.
There was
What changed all of this was the advent of broadband.
Dial-up was limited to 56kbps, and the Internet was moving on.
So your only option for anything faster was something like a T1 or an ISDN line from your local telco,
which was too expensive for the average person.
It wasn't until DSL came along that always-on broadband could come to the home.
So
And every time someone tried to compete, local and state governments
Cable companies were able to do it because they'd already run cable to people's homes,
and they were using the same cable that was providing cable TV.
Of course, those cable companies also enjoy local monopoly power,
with competition prohibited by local and state governments.
To this day, most places in the US have a choice of only two ISPs:
Their local telco, and their local cable provider.
That's changing with the advent of 5G from cell phone companies,
but it'll be awhile before a significant number of homes will have access to 5G Internet.
So,
Unsurprisingly, then, one third of Americans don't have broadband access.
Yeah, and isn't that interesting?
Because
was that we
They just
Of course, they
so once again, the free market—which
Do you now see the
that people like Second Thought have to resort to?
With Internet access opening up with demand in the mid-'90s, a flood of websites popped up to populate the web.
And
Exactly what Second Thought
People started
and connecting everyone together in a worldwide network of information, all hyperlinked together.
All government did to make this happen is
Now watch him try and say this is a
This led to the infamous dot-com bubble.
Ha! Yep! He's gonna blame the free market for the bubble, and not Federal Reserve policy.
But I've gone over and over and over again how this happens,
and it's kind of idiotic to blame the specific market it happens in.
Whether it's web companies, or S&Ls, or housing companies,
it's just a matter of whatever's the most successful at the time.
Of course
I've mentioned this before, but I'm linking to Steven Horwitz's Parable of the Broken Traffic Lights.
The basic idea is, every single traffic light turns green at the same time.
Which means the cars pile into the intersection and collide or at least stop and get gridlocked.
Don't blame the drivers for this. They were following the signals.
A green light is supposed to mean red lights the other way, stopping the traffic and allowing them to move through.
It's not their fault that it didn't.
So it's not because the drivers became greedy or impatient
or "irrationally exuberant" or whatever you want to attribute to them.
They were making the best decision they could based on what the signals were telling them.
And also, don't blame the area where there's the biggest backups.
It's just because that's where the most traffic happened to be at the time.
The blame belongs with the people who screwed up the traffic lights.
In this analogy, the drivers are businesses in the economy,
and driving the act of investment into long-term projects with the promise of a return on that investment.
The gridlock is the recession.
And the people managing the traffic lights is the Federal Reserve,
or whatever the country's central banking authority is.
By making interest rates artificially low and injecting cheap credit into financial markets,
they make it
when there just isn't demand for them.
It wasn't people making websites that caused the bust.
The bust
If the Internet hadn't come along at that time, it would have been something else.
But, again, Second Thought needs to find
so he's off to the races again!
And from the fact that it's called a bubble
and not the dot-com massive success/best event of the century, maybe ever...
But it
The websites that had proper business models, like Amazon and eBay,
thrived and are still going strong!
A few companies had figured out that, in order to make money on something that could just as easily be free,
they would have to monetize activity.
Yeah, because
TV shows weren't interrupted every 10 minutes or so with 3-4 minutes of ads.
Radio stations weren't at all playing ads between songs or anything.
No, it's only
In a system where profit is driven by rent and data,
the competition is over who can occupy more of the Internet's infinite space.
Every click is monetized. Every minute on each website is counted.
And everything users do is kept track of to sell to the highest bidders.
Riiiight. And the free market was doing
Browsers didn't at all put a stop to popups and third-party tracking cookies.
Absolutely no one made browser extensions capable of blocking ads.
Browsers never put in containers and sandboxes to stop one website from seeing what you were doing on others.
And absolutely no one made a service called LBRY
where nothing like that happens and all creators are instantly monetized and no one shadow-banned!
Yeah, the government didn't
Noooo, please look
and ignore the
Surveillance is not just the norm. It's more fundamental than that.
It's the very fabric of the profitable Internet.
The thing is, he's not even going to
Government, for
Since people started communicating more on the Internet and less with traditional methods,
government started putting the screws on websites to collect the information as well.
Want proof? Just look at what happens whenever one of them wants to implement strong, end-to-end encryption.
Facebook—now Meta—tried to do that with its messenger app.
What happened? The government
They pulled in Mark Zuckerberg and everyone else they could think of into a
to intimidate them into reversing course, in the guise of protecting children and stopping terrorists, of course.
The social media companies were
Government basically said, if you do that, we'll treat you like criminals.
And they bullied them into submission.
It's a place where unelected, all-powerful authority thrives.
Like in a business, the most profit hungry and wealthy have decision-making power over everyone else.
Every decision about how to moderate a website like YouTube or Twitter
isn't made through a process of collaborative deliberation and decision,
with a set of rules defined by and periodically reviewed by a democratic body.
That should be obvious by now.
The CEO and board of directors just do whatever they think will please advertisers and investors.
As idiotic as it was to make this statement before the Twitter Files,
it's
We now have
have been done at the insistence of the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House.
We've even seen how Twitter and Facebook initially pushed back and resisted these attempts,
only for government to step it up and bully them into submission.
All of which, by the way, is a
Oh, and another thing:
The market's technique for dealing with issues like this is competition,
where new companies can form and do things differently.
But what happened when, say, Parler tried to do exactly that?
We saw it happen in a matter of HOURS: Both publicly and in secret,
the government pressured domain registrars, Amazon Web Services,
and other providers to take it offline.
A crackdown that Second Thought later in this video
Again, the free market
It's being stopped by
In practice, when it comes to political content specifically,
this usually means tolerating white supremacist reactionary content.
Oh, shut the fuck up.
And I'm painfully aware of these things as a YouTuber myself.
At any given time, a channel like this could just disappear.
Funny how, when one
It's someone like Mr. Dapperton.
And I had videos
And I also have statistical proof of shadow-banning.
You seem to be doing all right.
Your video has over 250,000 views and you have 1.4 million subscribers.
You even got to swear in the first 15 seconds! The rest of us get dinged for that!
And, of course, your video is sponsored by Amazon,
one of the companies
You even
Instead of waiting for Comcast or AT&T to put down cables where it's profitable,
local governments have built their own publicly-managed networks.
Hahaha! Coulda made money betting on that one!
After complaining about the monopoly power that
his solution is for the
He does
And he complains about private companies spying on us?
What the
A public office, year after year, for example,
could have the mission to extend Internet service to more and more people.
Yeah, 'cause
It
The roads in remote areas are
You can
Come look at my road sometime!
I'd love to
making the road narrower and narrower with each paving.
Yeah, you can actually scrape off the grass on the side and see that it used to be about eight inches wider on each side!
The only reason it gets repaved
Now, go see where our Governor Roy Cooper lives and see how nice the roads
You entitled fuck.
We see this all the time from socialists:
They whine about how they're oh-so-oppressed, when if anything, they're petit bourgeois,
claiming the victimhood that
You make me sick.
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