I'm cleaning out my gmail folders this weekend, and went deep into the archive to 2011, when I got my invite to Google Music.
It's funny, because I just (November) moved all of my music out of cloud and back to local-only. Amazon was the last straw, when I tried to play purchased music, and was forced to listen to it on shuffle with other songs not of my choosing.
Anyway... there was a time when Google (ahem, Youtube) Music was set to be a game-changer. Imagine if enshittification wasn't a thing.
Remember when the Intenet made you optimistic? That's why I think these posts gut me so much. Because it doesn't do that anymore.
Anyway off to continue doom scrolling.
"The internet will bring us all together! It will democratize truth and information!" Was the manta of the 2000s.
20 years later and the exact opposite happened.
to be fair i would say that the internet largely has made information significantly more democratic & accessible. truth, not so much...
although i definitely do count the fact that you need to know how to spot & deal with misinformation and especially disinformation and differentiate it from valid information in order to safely use the internet, as a very big accessibility problem currently. Most people aren't growing up learning that on their own, and it's certainly not well taught.