A technology is never inherently good or bad, it merely has potential. It's about the human intents behind the application of those technologies.

For a while the Internet truly was a beautiful utopia, in many ways. It was a huge shift in our history, and yet so very human. It was pure, used for reaching out and taking in, sharing, connecting. A shared soul, or brain if you'd prefer. Then some other entities started establishing their presence, and they didn't like that. They'd rather subvert those key purposes with their own, applying their resources and influence to mold the net, and with it, the people connected to it. They were quite capable and discreet, such that our collective cognition didn't even notice all the novel ways it was being twisted.

But it doesn't matter, because the Internet still is all those beautiful things it once was, and it can be so many more. Just look at this very random thread we're on. A handful of people, from who knows where, each with their own crazy histories, each their own thoughts. Here, by chance or destiny, exchanging those brainwaves. That will never change. And that's where the true potential of the Internet lies. Just like others used the Internet to do unprecedented things, we will too. As we have before.

Hoping is never wrong.

Oh, but it did. It also made us lonelier, but not by our choice.

Surveillance capitalism is also how states (and other entities) control the population in contemporary times.

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales;
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification;
3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history;
4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy;
5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth;
6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy;
7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty;
8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

Agree, trolls sowing division among society are unquestionably everywhere, operating in countless way, some more direct, some more veiled. But why is it always russian trolls? Don't you think that others have the motive and tools required to influence societal behavior in a way that aligns with their interests? And don't you see how the very dismissing of opinions differing to one's own as trolls is in itself keeping us separated?