This article in WaPo by Brian Merchant makes some very good points about how tech has changed over the years and mostly not for the better.
In the 1990s, the internet was so interesting and fresh and fun. There were a lot of crazy things that happened and most of it was driven by real people.
Fast forward to the 2020s and the internet as it was is gone and replaced by the semi-walled gardens of content and information hosted by big tech companies. To me, the attention economy is just boring and vapid. Sure, some fun things happen from time to time on the big platforms, but it just feels artificial and algorithm driven instead of heuristic.
The populist tone in the article has some justification but it’s unclear to me how much of the problem is tech and how much is market structure (e.g., monopoly) driven by feckless enforcement of antitrust in the tech sector (as well as in the US economy overall). I’d rather see big tech challenged by robust enforcement of the law first. The other government solutions mentioned might also be helpful, but let’s start with the laws on the books.