In a way they did. Europe outsourced their defense to the US, energy to Russia and manufacturing to China, now getting <censored> by all three, rather predictably.
We also outsourced our social media. That has to change - it's literally not safe.
There is a lot of witless verbiage about the "town square", but precious little acknowledgement of the obvious fact that every town has its OWN square, and that's the point.
For the last decade my feeds have been polluted by "content" about Brexit and Trump, almost all of which has been noise/distraction/propaganda. I'm sick to the back teeth of it, and it's time to make it stop.
I truly believe the Fediverse is a viable solution. I've found Lemmy to be an extremely viable alternative to Reddit. The fediverse, more than any other centralized solution, seems equipped to avoid the hellish pitfalls that profit-motive behemoths seemingly must sink into.
There is no monetization, corporate decisions, manipulative algorithms; just self-hosted open source instances as far as the eye can see. Certainly there are rough edges and a perceptible decrease in dopamine from using them, but surely that's worth toughing out as they shape up if it means stopping the unfathomable destruction of society that we're experiencing in real time from big tech?
In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky makes a powerful argument that independent, citizen owned media is of critical importance if we're to pull society to a better, more collaborative place. It doesn't get more 'citizen owned' than a web of interconnected self-hosted servers.
I agree. As well as the technical merits, it seems to me to be a better match for natural human interaction. Your point about citizen-owned media is well made - in the US we seem to be seeing the near-total collapse of integrity in commercial media - on the one hand it is dismaying to watch, on the other it is as clear a call to arms as we could wish for.
It's been good to see Bluesky up its video game in response to the TikTok nonsense. I'd like to think that the Fediverse could evolve to meet the expectations of people fleeing Facebook, Twitter & co, but it's not there yet. Those of us who are highly motivated (and I am, after recent events!) will make do, but I think it needs to be easier in order to get the critical mass required.
I'm not sure if I'm more disappointed in you acting like "rest of the world" means europe only, or by you thinking europe is a unified identical blob. My country of france neither delegated its defense to the US nor its energy to Russia, for exemple.
Actually wanted to highlight France as one country which correctly identified the threat of US going batshit crazy soon after WW2 and positioned accordingly, but didn't want to go into nuance on this particular thread. Now that it's flagged, we can agree in peace.
> France as one country which correctly identified the threat of US going batshit crazy soon after WW2
This was equal part pragmatic foreign policy and a desire by the French elite to hold onto their colonies, an institution strongly opposed by the United States since around WWI.
