a long time ago I worked at an event production company, we bought a plastic card (think credit cards) full color printer to print client logos on NFC cards, and I had to test them, so I printed McLovin’s driver licence on a card, and I still keep it on my wallet.
my mom was a teacher at the school I went to from kindergarten to secondary school (it’s normal that some schools offer all grades together where I’m from) and I can confirm this. My classmates could get out of doing whatever, while I was always taken to my mom. College was the first time I felt a bit of independence and it was rough.
Tron: Legacy was my first 3D movie. At the beginning of the movie I was like “huh, this 3D thing is absolutely not worth it” then, the guy goes into the grid and everything turns 3D and I thought about the people that watched The Wizard of Oz in cinemas for the first time, and how cool it must have felt to see a movie turn into color. That’s how I felt.
I don’t want to sound like a pessimist but the Internet has never been the open grass field that the OP paint. Everytime you connect to the Internet, you’re connecting to a server that some entity is providing, through a connection that another entity has set up. Even this Lemmy instance is paid by somebody’s pocket. Servers and network infrastructure have always represented cost to providers. Maybe in times of olde when AOL and others offered services attached to their core service, we had services that were directly paid by the fee we paid for the connection. The owner of this Lemmy instance don’t see a dime of what you pay you ISP.
I know this is not at the core of this discussion, but if content is something that entities find valuable and somehow, the owner of this instance can directly receive monetary incentive from me to keep posting these inadequate long texts, by all means, I’m happy to be part of training data. I type this while I’m bored as hell and need my upvote-provided dopamine hit. I will be the grass on the field.