The Internet's Maximum Era Approaches?

In the '90s-era cartoon Phantom 2040 Rebecca Madison's object was the launch of the "Maximum Era"--the replacement of the ecosystem that had evolved on Earth over billions of years, now tottering on the brink of collapse, with an artificially designed ecosystem that would serve only the purposes of her corporation Maximum Inc. as she saw them.

It was, of course, a piece of apocalyptic villainy. (To put it mildly, very little of humanity was likely to survive the transformation, hence Maximum Inc. having its plans for a refuge in which the rich and powerful would be able to ride out the process.)

Considering what is becoming of the Internet we got--all too predictably--I again and again think of Big Tech as taking us toward the equivalent of that show's Maximum Era where our online life is concerned. In place of the Internet that had earlier evolved, with far from perfect freedom but still a relative lack of centralized control compared with what we had seen in other media, we are seeing a handful of interests turn the web into something much more restricted, with far less room for anything not serving their specific purposes. The platforms of Big Tech will remain and continue to act as gateways to the outlets of Big Media, the virtual storefronts of Big Business and so forth will remain. However, the small operators they previously tolerated outside the spaces they control, while not eliminated, will be so marginalized that they will have no reason to carry on with what they are doing, and by and large pass from the scene (or be irrelevant even if they don't), all as anything and everything that goes on here is ever-more minutely surveilled and controlled.

It seems worth remembering, too, that many of those who see this as a desirable state are also taking a lot of trouble to create literal, physical, Maximum Inc.-ish refuges where the rich and powerful (or to be more precise, their rich and powerful selves, that's as far as their solidarity with each other goes) would be able to ride out the destruction of much, much more than the old Internet.

The show got that much right at least--because in the real world, sadly, superheroes can't be counted upon to rescue humanity from villainy in the last act of the drama.