This is copied and pasted from another forum, but, I'd like to start off with it.
Here's a timeline of the beginning of the death of retro internet until now:
2004: DARPA's Lifelog project was "cancelled." Facebook came into being soon after.
2004-2012: NSA picked up DARPA's project under the "Total Informational Awareness" project.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/whos-watching-the-nsa-watchers.html
2012: Smith-Mundt Modernization Act gives the U.S. government full legal authority to use propaganda against its own populace. Undoing rules put into place after Operation Mockingbird's discovery and the Church Committee.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/whos-watching-the-nsa-watchers.html
2012-2016: Shittons of DARPA/NSA contracts were given to Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc..
2016: Leaked memos dating back to 2016 (found in 2018) of Google's Selfish Ledger project.
https://invidio.us/watch?v=LUSZfEBTwRc
2016: Google released a bunch of neural-linguistic machine learning programs in 2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translation
2017: deepfake leaks start to become released.
2018: confirmed that for decades now, Reddit/Youtube/etc. vote and view counts are fake and completely manipulated.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
In short, the U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.
/end copypasta
I want to fight back against this, and I think the perfect way to do so is to find and collate old retro internet. Make a hand-made giant directory of webrings each with a simple list of sites. No search engines. That way the common user can actually search through their information the way they want and not the way AI wants you to. Just, in general, it feels like retro internet is the perfect way to combat this, maybe.