While Generation Z might be the first to grow up surrounded by the Internet as we know it, the generation that was born in the 1990s came of age in the early 2000s (including Nikhil and Sindhu) along with the Internet. We started social media with Myspace and Orkut before we had Facebook, we had Yahoo Mail accounts (!!!) before we moved to Gmail, and Dailymotion and Justin.tv were just as legitimate as YouTube. The Internet seemed to have limitless potential back then, and all of it was seen through a Utopian lens. 

10+ years after the Big Four companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple - entered our lives and stayed there, the Internet looks very different. Scandals with Internet companies are happening on a near-daily basis, like Google's recent data leak of Google Plus user information, Amazon strong-arming its sellers, WhatsApp's circulation of fake news having violent consequences, and Facebook's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, 2018, causing us to question our relationship with these companies, and by extension, the Internet at large. 

So where do we go from here? Nikhil and Sindhu attempt to find out.

We discuss:

• The shift in public opinion around Sheryl Sandberg
  
• How Myanmar misused Facebook
  
• Ethan Zuckerman's piece on the Internet's ad-based model
  
• Tim Wu's books 'The Attention Merchants' and 'The Curse of Bigness'
  
• Social Cooling and its consequences
  
• Shoshana Zuboff's book 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'
  
• China's social credit system
  
• The Gizmodo journalist who tried cutting the Big Five out of her life
  
• Stanford and Silicon Valley (The Ringer)
  
• The Mastermind by Evan Ratliff
  
  

Music Credits:

Music from https://filmmusic.io:
"HipHop vs. Jazz Vol 1" by Sascha Ende (https://www.sascha-ende.de)
Licence: CC BY + (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

"Overheat" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

"Too Cool" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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