this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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Microblog Memes
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20 years ago was 2006.
I do not recall any tech resistance by the masses. In fact a couple years later there were people camping out overnight waiting for the release of the latest gadgets like the iphone.
Ffw to today…those same masses dgaf about their lives being tracked and monetized today; in fact, many are active and willing sycophants pushing being social media personalities as careers while using that personality to shit on higher education and intelligence.
I do agree that the limited tech community capable of independent thought and action are against the surveillance corporate state we’re headed into, but the rest are doing their best to hurry and profit off it while the dumpster fire flames get closer and closer to them.
In 2006, cell phones were cool, smart phones like PalmOS and Blackberry devices existed but they were for nerds and/or businessmen who just could not wait to get back to the office to send an email. iPods were huge, it was the glory days of DVD, youtube launched that year, Facebook is where the cool kids were, you didn't need an invitation to get a Gmail account anymore. You could buy more than just books on Amazon now. It was...possible to say things were getting better. It was easy to see a future of increasing convenience and capability.
Looking back I'm not sure where the tipping point was.
I think the tipping point was in the early 2010s when all of a sudden everyone and everything hitched their wagons to Facebook. Facebook as SSO, Facebook messenger instead of email or SMS, Facebook marketplace dethroning Craig’s List, etc. Once people from elderly relatives to local business centralized all of their online identity into Facebook, it was over. To this day, Facebook is still the only way to see info for community events and small businesses (and instagram is the platform Facebook used to sequester musicians and artists).
It didn’t have to be Facebook, of course, but there needed to be a networked service that people trusted enough to give it every thing. Remember check-ins? People would post their location at restaurants, jobs, theaters, and shops. Public profiles that listed jobs, homes, family members and relationships, pets, children’s photos, and hobbies all under real names (I remember when Facebook started the purge of pseudonyms and aliases).
I deleted my Facebook account over a decade ago and people panicked and warned me that it was a bad idea. The craziest thing someone said to me was that it would make me un-hire-able since there’d be nothing for people to snoop to see if I was a good fit. The only “bad” thing that happened is that I lost contact with some old acquaintances, but that’s just life.
Regardless of all the other tech stuff in the past 20 years, I think that convincing people that it was okay to let a company like Facebook exist will the explicit goal to transparently harvest personal data was what opened the floodgates. Facebook (and other social media) demonstrated that people will willingly exchange privacy for digital errata. Once governments and corporations saw that, the future wrote itself.
The tech resistance slowly faded away with the first smartphones released after the iPhone I would say and really took off after the release of the iPhone 3GS. Think back to the boomers who complained about young people staring at their phones all day, now they do that themselves.