Stochastic parrots have taken over the web. Burning the planet as they scrape and abuse the open web to collect, store, and categorize all content. So that they in turn can lock access to it behind their corporate walls. The end goal is easy to see. Access to information will cost, and the quality of the information will depend on how much you’re willing to pay.

It’s fierce competition right now, one where everyone in the game is loosing astronomical amounts of money. All the while clinging to the hope is that those few still standing at the end will win big. They will control access to information. All information!

Everyone will have to pay!

At least, that’s their hope.

It may seem futile to publish anything on the open web in these circumstances. The content will be scraped to feed the probabilistic automata. Your site will be bombarded with abuse from shady bots with constantly changing IP addresses, making them hard to block with fail2ban and other similar defences. All to feed and further the agenda of a few super rich oligarcs with hopes of controlling the worlds access to information.

Still, our best chance at keeping information open and accessible is to do just that; Making the information and content accessible to humans – directly on the open web. No paywalls, no gatekeepers!

And no, your discords, substacks and mediums does not count as the open web. Your corporate “social media” certainly does not!

We will need to rebuild some of the infrastructure we’ve come to rely on. It will take time, but the good news is that a lot has already been done. While the world was enamoured with the latest viral trends, and sucking up to the wealth and glamour of the ad-tech giants, people who care about the free web and decentralization of power has kept on building and improving alternatives to those of the centralized, corporate web.

And part of that work is publishing on the free and open web. To keep information open and accessible to all. In defiance of the shady oligarcs who wants to capture and control access to it.