> ...so I think the era of the unregulated internet is sadly coming to a close. We really have nobody to blame but ourselves.
You had me until there. Who financed the utopian bullshit? We need to regress on this until we can find the culprit and watchlist those (types of) sources of funding.
As founders you can refuse (or be highly critical of) funding by e.g. Saudi Arabia or Russian billionaires. As an early engineer, you can choose not to work for shady outfits.
By "ourselves" I mean the tech community as a whole, both engineers and entrepreneurs. The people who financed these problematic platforms bear a lot of the responsibility, of course. But I think we engineers must also accept some of the blame. Many of the best and brightest of my generation devoted their talents to building these things and without those efforts these platforms wouldn't exist.
You can always say that if you don't build it then someone else will but in my opinion that's a cop-out. You can't simultaneously claim that engineering talent is valuable and technology is powerful and that we have no responsibility for the things we build.
You had me until there. Who financed the utopian bullshit? We need to regress on this until we can find the culprit and watchlist those (types of) sources of funding.
As founders you can refuse (or be highly critical of) funding by e.g. Saudi Arabia or Russian billionaires. As an early engineer, you can choose not to work for shady outfits.
It all comes down to following the money.