The Internet Was Sold To Us As A Place For Small Voices And Small Business, Then Sold To Billionaires

I remember in the 1990’s how any alternatives to corporate rule over everything seemed to disappear with the demise of the Soviet Union. And in that moment, we looked around us to see exactly what that meant. But we soon became lost in a sea of bigger and more extreme things to buy. Bigger sodas, bigger bags of chips, more extreme flavors, more caffeine, louder movies, bigger screens, better graphics on video games. It was an explosion of excess that for a time stopped us from contemplating our situation, so inundated were we with choices. Ultimately meaningless but nevertheless attention-consuming choices. It was hard to complain when we were being given so much, too much, decadent excess. What it lacked in quality it more than made up for in quantity. It wasn’t heaven, but it sure beat poverty. The least of us were walking around in sneakers that the people who made them could never afford.

Maybe if they were our neighbors we would have realized that the people who were making our shoes were going barefoot. Maybe we would have realized the people growing our food were going hungry. But we never saw them, and our media never showed them to us. The video of poor people toiling in factories just didn’t fit the busy new style of editing or the emerging computer special effects.