I blame content creators. The minute PewDiePie made a million, it was game over. There should’ve been a unified front from the start to reject the PewDiePie model. We didn’t see it for what it really was. The internet was always going to get taken over by profit-driven motives. The only way to stop that would’ve been making the internet a hostile place for people chasing profits.

Think about the timeline. Profit focus leads to ads and data collection. That leads to political groups using that data to run research and push propaganda. Corporations are gonna do what they do. Blame isn’t a light switch—it’s a pie chart. And if we don’t start naming the villain, we’re going to lose the next space too. Whatever space we think is ours. We have to stay sharp when the profit seekers show up, even if it’s just some cool comic book guy trying to sell a few books. They all end up in the same place.

Any space created by hackers and nerds should create a new religion of sorts with principals and values to prevent another take over of whatever space they create in the future.

I was just thinking how much we’ve lost. Each generation grows up with this stuff being normalized by people saying “it’s fine just skip it”. But the early days of the internet was so much different compared to the people today.