@glyph Did you quote post something?

[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

[flyingsaceur@ioc.exchange]

Aside: if I wanted to destroy the willingness to learn and to log the hours, I could do worse than “ai first”

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@flyingsaceur I do want to quibble with the end there: you need the money for the equipment and the money for the spare time to log those hours. which in the global north is not a huge deal even across a surprisingly big chunk of the income spectrum, but elsewhere it is still pretty far out of reach

[triplefox@pounced-on.me]

@glyph I appreciate the thread. Historians usually speak of "confluences of factors" in major revolutions, and I believe the computing space is one such case. It's simultaneously true that exertion of power defines the top-level narratives of industry, and at multiple points along the timeline, considerable windows of opportunity opened up.

The pattern is not unique to this era: the European mathematicians, scientists and inventors of the early modern are all characterized by being supported by a noble, then pissing off said noble and having to flee to a different country. Their work was getting interrupted by politics and duels and miscellaneous "brutish and savage" stuff all the time. In the long run view of it, we still ended up with the Enlightenment's science culture, because the opportunities kept showing up and being taken.

N. Taleb's "anti-fragility" thesis also has something to say about this - the idea of gain through disorder as a defining feature of many systems. We end up with pieces of computing that hang around forever. We never know for sure which parts are going to do that.

Fully accepting the antifragile thesis means living in preparation for crises in tech and building mostly-redundant wheel reinventions of all parts of the stack in hopes of staving off the next apocalypse. What we had fairly recently was a period where redundancy was pooh-poohed and you could not find anything but a hobbyist demographic that took it seriously, and that's the literal thing enabling the power in this case - the "why use it if the existing one is better" inertia of path-dependency on the tightly controlled standards of tech cartels and monopolies. I believe the sense of despair in replies comes from the shock of genuinely awakening to that - if you build a career in tech, your identity is likely to build a defensive ignorance of such as long as you're getting paid.

But I also don't see it as an insurmountable challenge. We have some cool indie hardware and some degree of compatibility with the old stuff. There is an aspect of "everyone shows up for the same journey at the same time, so you're not alone" to these things.

[flyingsaceur@ioc.exchange]

@glyph good point. The willingness to learn and to log the hours requires free time, at least some sort of hardware, and the ability to find and recognize good training material

I wonder what a guerilla OLPC would look like with today’s piracy and AliExpress though

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph the wheels are gonna fall off enronvidia any day now... any day now... maybe D:

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph having wandered away for a few hours, and coming back to this I'm remembering an observation that I think meshes well with what you're saying: the dot com bubble put a lot of money into improbable everything-websites that made a lot of us go "wow the internet is amazing!" but they were the kinds of things that require a massive burning money pile as fuel (deviantart was the specific example) and are not an inevitable natural emergent consequence of the internet's structure

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph more broadly that discussion was about how hard it is to perfectly clone and replace silos like deviantart and twitter without a money pile, because you run into scalability and moderation problems really fast.

so I feel the question looking forward is less how do we keep personal computers as a tool of liberation going so much as how do we liberate the internet from capital and build suitable alternatives to things we loved about the internet that aren't already low cost to replace

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph obviously keeping personal computers an open platform is important and there's very real threats to that, but that at least has a set of complex pressures and incentives to limp along

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph I think another thing is, the history of personal computing and the internet has this ever present undercurrent of corporate greed driving it, but what we're grappling with is there's this gradient where the specific flavor of greed changes into the openly predatory Saturn Devouring His Babies monstrosity we have today. And it probably would have happened a lot sooner, but a lot of groundwork and innovation had to go into developing and refining the greed into what it is today.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph I think also there's this thing where we have a world wide economic system built around scarcity, and when the fundamental unit of "I put one money into your hand, you put one goods and/or services into mine" doesn't exist anymore things get weird because the only other strats crapitalism has are gambling and rent.

[vordring@bark.lgbt]

@glyph Same thing happened with post before. Anarchists were calling it a savior for humanity bridging gaps between countries and social movements, and then it was used to send death threats, organize illegal activity, and facilitate scams... In other words, everything was back to normal.

[coppercrush@beige.party]

Very nicely put - you are articulating something that most of the 'tech critics' on here are missing.

The idea that computer-based technological progress moves society forward was always an illusion. It cannot be our salvation and it is dangerous to our survival to continue thinking this way.

We have deluded ourselves into thinking tech is fundamentally a tool of progress, a tool of democracy, a tool of liberation, a tool of societal wellness and growth. This was projection, and untrue: it is simply a tool of whatever forces govern us as humans.

Unless we liberate ourselves from an underlying vision of status chasing and material exploitation, we will never learn how appropriately use the tools at hand.

It's the invention of firearms all over again, a symptom of a greater unadressed underlying sickness of human civilizational culture that must be treated at the source.

@glyph

[mike805@noc.social]

@tedmielczarek @glyph IBM tried to take back the PC market with the PS2. It was designed by lawyers to be copy-proof, in a proto-DMCA way.

The market just stayed with the old design and continued to improve it.

The lesson of the PC is that antitrust enforcement can freeze a monopoly long enough for progress to take place.

We wouldn't have a public Internet if you still had to lease a 1200 bps Dataphone from the Bell System to get online. Antitrust changed that.