@glyph Did you quote post something?

[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.

[jalefkowit@vmst.io]

@glyph Every revolution contains within it the seed of a new oppression. How that seed grows depends on whether it is weeded or watered

[puskar@macaw.social]

@glyph your second intuition is the correct one. We managed to come into computing during its toddlerhood. This is the same as early autos, radios, televisions, etc. You had to have specific domain knowledge to be able to make these devices do what you want. My kids only know computers as appliances, different from any other only in capability/flexibility.

[jwgoerlich@infosec.exchange]

@glyph I feel this in my bones. We’re letting something precious slip through our fingers.

[jwgoerlich@infosec.exchange]

@jalefkowit @glyph QoTD

[jameswidman@mastodon.social]

@astraluma @tedmielczarek @glyph alternate timeline where everyone bought amiga-compatible PCs

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph so, I don't think your theory is even remotely historically accurate, and it is an incredibly depressing outlook. I wasn't going to comment because I don't know where to even begin with it and in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter anyway if we agree on it, but you seem confused by people's reactions to it.

[owen@mastodon.transneptune.net]

@glyph I hold in my left hand the essay _The Californian Ideology_, about the birth of Silicon Valley.

I hold in my right hand Jordan Peele's and Bradley Whitford's note-perfect depiction of the successful white hippie in _Get Out_ in all his self-assured and liberated power to casually oppress.

[burnoutqueen@todon.nl]

@glyph we can make a revolution ourselves 😂

[gaditb@icosahedron.website]

@glyph Hmm.

I, while agreeing with most of this (and getting good thoughts from all of it regardless), think I disagree pretty strongly (and hopefully generatively?) with a small detail of how you expressed it:

I think possibly more than "... a few technical innovations briefly conferred ...", it was "... a few SOCIAL innovations* happened to develop/were inadvertantly allowed to locally-flourish, that briefly (in the societal niche they happened to grow with around a few technical innovations) conferred ..."

(* not to say social innovations as in definitely-entirely-novel or unprecedented or not-elsewhere or whatever, just, new-to-those-people-at-that-time. new-in-that-context.)

[owen@mastodon.transneptune.net]

@glyph Not only must we reclaim agency, we must build it anew, and help others build it for themselves.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@aeva I'd be interested in the historical inaccuracy, specifically, if you could comment on that part, since I'm not a historian and I'm not trying to make any novel historical claims; I'm trying to describe an emotional orientation to the same facts. if that orientation is depressing to you (or to anyone) I would definitely encourage you to discard it. but if I'm wrong about the timeline I would like to stop being wrong

[paninid@mastodon.world]

@glyph @aeva 🔥

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@paninid @glyph thank you for reminding me to switch my replies to followers only 🙄

[gaditb@icosahedron.website]

@glyph (I guess maybe pushing back on the "technical innovations" bit of it might be a bit of a path towards building back the utopianism you're trying to move away from -- in the "the ideas are powerfulstrong" way or in a "it wasn't a utopian setting but such-and-such was an objective-universal Better Way To Act" or stuff like that --

but hopefully it can coherently be kept down to a "social innovations, like technical innovations, also shape experiences and capabilities granted, and are worth putting into history on equal footing". Like, I think the social innovations weren't any more utopian than the technical ones -- just that, in that context, they were also conferring power in certain ways in their own right.
And if trying to build back that power to try to build a similar experience for the next generation, we should also look around for social innovations in addition to technical innovations, as blocks that might be able to confer things to the people/communities.)

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@the_blackwell_ninja I, too, have been to a talk by @pluralistic :)

[flyingsaceur@ioc.exchange]

@glyph we as individuals can build consumer electronics like that of twenty years ago but cheaper and more reliable. We are discussing this in a social media state of nature of twenty years ago as individuals. We are making our first baby steps into a spread spectrum regional wireless network of thirty years ago as individuals

Remember thirty years ago when we could create an operating system from then years prior as individuals

All it takes is a willingness to learn and to log the hours