TW: vibes, doomerism, speculation, no sources
unfortunately going with the liberal definition of GFW. We're getting the version the average american was told China has. In the last few years, social networks have been making significant strides away from openness (Twitter, reddit most notably), others were never open (facebook, instagram, etc.), one big player is on the chopping block (tiktok). I'm not sure how crypto-bros tie into all of this, but Trump's truth social was founded by them, and they seem to have bought a shitton of candidates on both sides. Net neutrality is probably on the chopping block as well. I could totally see lemmy, hexbear, mastadon, other random small social media sites, being inaccessible without a VPN sometimes in the next 4 years. News websites that report accurately on upcoming concentration camps in Texas might become geoblocked in your state in some way.
I'm not sure what, but I think something is around the corner. I haven't seen much post-election conversation on this category of topic.
I think we're already there, functionally, but rather than a single great wall it is a cartel of smaller, privately controlled barriers directed to appeal to a collection of capital formations with similar interests. most people use the same big services running the same or similar algorithms to find each other, to communicate, and understand the world or anesthetize themselves through entertainment products. all of this is inundated with advertising and mediated by marketing campaigns to instruct us what exists and obscure / induce a forgetting of what does not exist for the casual user.
just as the libraries and archives have always existed for the truly curious party, so too will repositories and communities on the fringes of the internet. but they will be invisible and unknown to the average scroller scrolling on the app and giving a heart on the things that induce them to feel what they like.
why hide or block something when you can put highly profitable all you can eat burger and goon caves everywhere to obscure it beyond the power of memory to recall its existence?