@glyph Did you quote post something?

[kingrat@sfba.social]

@glyph I haven't been able to get in since yesterday. I figure me asking for support isn't going to help because it's so widespread.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@kingrat Glad to hear it's not just me. A bit surprised that the news hasn't picked up on it yet (that I have seen), since they tend to notice these systemwide IT fuckups

[palendae@linuxlab.sh]

@glyph I’ve had similar thoughts.

I grew up with and bought into the excitement over just how easily and how much knowledge was being shared. The innovations promised to expand so many horizons.

Then, those same innovations were molded into perhaps the most effective tools of capitalists to date. It *feels* like the wheel was jerked, especially with the launch of ChatGPT, but it’s been happening the whole while.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@glyph One very small microcosm of that, perhaps. Social media owners looking at Arab Spring and going "oops, how do we make sure that never happens again anywhere in the world?"

[baconandcoconut@freeradical.zone]

@glyph I like to think about it as an alternate future that we veered off the path of. Like we had this idea that computing was going to empower the masses, democratize access to information and power over the discourse. We didn't quite get it, but we tried a lot of times. I still have hope for our timeline.

[matt@toot.cafe]

@glyph I'm reminded of something I noticed while reading Steven Levy's _Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_ (I wrote the full title because the second part is relevant here). Even by the time the book was being written in 1983, the revolution was clearly fleeting.

[baconandcoconut@freeradical.zone]

@glyph A thing that I take lot of encouragement from is knowing that for every famous moment of change and famous change maker (eg Rosa Parks) there were dozens, if not hundreds of earlier attempts that paved the way for the one time it was successful. I don't need people to visit the house I was born in in 50 years or ask me for advice on unrelated stuff. I am completely happy to be part of one of the hundred earlier attempts that paves the way.

[matt@toot.cafe]

@glyph I mean, the last chapter of part 2 (Hardware Hackers, about the Homebrew Computer Club, the beginning of Apple, etc.), is called "Secrets", and basically covers the shift from Homebrew to the new companies doing more or less business as usual. Same vibe with the ending of part 3 (Game Hackers, about Sierra, Broderbund, etc.), where, I think, Doug Carlson (Broderbund) is quoted saying something like, "I don't care if he gets rich, as long as I get richer."

[matt@toot.cafe]

@glyph Of course, Steven Levy couldn't have sold a book with a downer ending, so after covering Richard Stallman as "the last true hacker" all alone at the MIT AI lab, he wraps the book up with an optimistic ending about many more future generations of hackers or somesuch.

[pepverbsnouns@mastodon.art]

@glyph The accurate description makes more sense when you consider that the first computers as we know them were designed for business use, and ended up in the home as a profit avenue and a means of conditioning people to get used to them

Also the modularity of the original PCs were due to the limits of manufacturing and not for user convenience. If they could have locked down computers back then the way they are now, they would have.

TL;DR: Democratization of computing is a bug, not a feature

[alcinnz@floss.social]

@glyph To me it looks like worker-power shone through when it took serious skill to overcome computing's shortcomings. Which was a poor strategy that couldn't last.

Since then it looks like capital doubled-down on financializing tech.

[steltenpower@social.edu.nl]

@glyph follow @spiralganglion yet?

[luis_in_brief@social.coop]

@glyph 🫂 ✊🏽

[luis_in_brief@social.coop]

@glyph also, we can draw hope from how far we came, from such flawed beginnings. We can do it again, and hopefully learn from some of the lessons too.

[astraluma@tacobelllabs.net]

@tedmielczarek @glyph I would have bet someone else would have won the home computer, then.

[the_blackwell_ninja@mastodon.online]

@glyph What did this was the DMCA enabling a predatory "felony contempt of business model" approach to technology from the likes of Meta. Computing technology is inherently democratizing because an individual can program it to do anything. Don't like the way something works? Fix it and release the fix to the masses. The problem is that now companies get to sue people and force them to stop fixing things.

[manmachine@mastodon.world]

@glyph Reminds me strongly of that famous Hunter S. Thompson quote:

“There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back”

[the_blackwell_ninja@mastodon.online]

@glyph The quintessential example is Zuckerberg writing a tool to migrate people off of MySpace, and onto Facebook, then turning around and using the DCMA to make it illegal for anybody to do the same to Facebook.

[gyrosgeier@hachyderm.io]

@glyph the ladder is being pulled up.

[blackcoat@kind.social]

@glyph There's an intersting book called "waht the dormouse said" about how the counter culture of the 60s became the internet people, and one of the things that I think it missed is how their parents participation in unions gave them the feeling of standing on equal footing with capital.