[troughway]

>The author eventually puts some thought into it and subsequently adopts a public stance matching what was privately true all along—revealing how little they value the things they said they did.

I wouldn't chalk this up to irony just yet, but the lack of benevolent gatekeepers has allowed this to happen. And it will happen time and time again and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You've had a good run in your basement using something that the suits didn't pay much attention to, because they couldn't connect at the time how this seemingly boring machine called the computer could lead to money. But rest assured, your hard work has demonstrated it to them and has brought them over.

Slowly but surely you should make amends with some utopian idea of a decentralized, apolitical, and not-under-control-of-some-state web. Anything less than that is being delusional.

A free society has so many enemies from inside and outside who wish to force their hand upon everyone, that it's best to stay out of the way of the herd unless you believe getting trampled over is worth it.

When we were "battling" for net neutrality last time (or was it two times ago?) there was a good meme image floating around that showed a handful of different "packages" of websites you could have access to:

https://qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-...

But if you really look, this has already started to happen. Netflix once had a decent library of movies, and then everyone caught up to them and now it's Netflix, Amazon, Hulu/Disney, HBO, and the list keeps growing.

Spotify, Apple, Google Music. Eventually this exclusivity card will be played by them in a much greater scale. At which point, the necessity of most people having to _ration_ what web they want to see will inevitably resemble having those packages up there.

So in closing, you're out-financed, out manned, and to make things worse, you've got so-called "leftists"/"liberals" as front line soldiers working free of charge (Mark Zuckerberg was right - they're not just dumb fucks, they're _gullible_ dumb fucks) for these corporations to further erode your chances of having any semblance of a decent internet.

As Morgan Freeman so eloquently put it in The Dark Knight: "Good luck."