I'm about as technical as it is possible to get. I fucking hate technology these days. It all sucks, it tries to insert itself between everything human and sane, and extract value for its masters. People are serfs in closed silos. They own nothing, just like the serfs of old: not their farmlands or cattle (laptops, phones and data), nor their homes (accounts in the 'cloud' subject to AI shutdown without human recourse).
It will take a while of it getting progressively worse before an apathetic consumer class will finally be exploited enough to start demanding proper rules around all of this. I don't think progress will stop when the situation at it's worst. But I do think we'll have to get through that first.
> It will take a while of it getting progressively worse before an apathetic consumer class will finally be exploited enough to start demanding proper rules around all of this.
We'll see about that, I guess. Revolutions in the past were successful because you couldn't control people so strongly and you needed the to work to be able to tax them.
With our new surveillance tech and automation I am afraid this has changed for the worse
1) Initially, when a new technology is discovered and leads to a paradigm shift, commercial/capitalist ventures are most efficient at digging down and innovating quickest. A depth first search if you will: relentlessly driving down costs, improving the technology and consuming or destroying the competition. Then, once the time is right, the exploitation begins. No longer are the newest models of $TECHNOLOGY strictly better than their predecessors, any progress is incremental and genuine innovation is partially co-opted by marketing.
When this happens the screws start getting tightened. Companies used to rapid growth due to merit try to maintain growth velocity by cutting cost, exploiting regulatory loopholes yet to catch up with the paradigm shift, and any other things not directly related to their new niche that the risk/reward calculators deem worth it (breaking laws, anti-patterns, etc.).
The reaction to this is two fold: 1a) governments want to stick their hand in the newly-added piece of the pie, 1b) people don't like being more and more exploited.
2) People understand when they're being screwed. Our sense of 'justness' is about as evolved as can get, people might not always be able to pinpoint what is screwing them over, but the anger still builds. I believe (really can't justify any of the things I'm claiming here as truth, it's just my opinions) that trust takes longer to build than to destroy. I loved google for 2 years, I've hated them for much longer. I feel intuitively that I'm being exploited when forced to help their machine learning algorithm detect traffic signs that only a few people will profit off. I feel like I've never entered into a fair contract where I'm obtaining search results in exchange for some of my attention; I'm just forced to fill these things out every once in a while to access a site unrelated to google. Can you believe my GP's site has a google captcha page on the contact form? Where I enter medical data? I _HATE_ that.
3) People like me (and you?) spread the word. After the initial rush described in point 1. other ways of working gain speed. Technology, organization, open source, education, they all make it easier and easier to replicate what was an enterprise deployment a decade ago as a small group, or even individual, today. One day a matrix bridge will allow me to message all my friends from a single, polished place, with good UX. One day later a friend will see me using it, and the word will spread.
The inherent nature of information favors the communicators, integrator and middle men. It's impossible for a silo to detect with certainty that you are not actually using a third party app, like a matrix bridge, to talk to your friends. A false positive will lead to more feelings as shown in point 2, a false negative is the natural result of progress in point 3.
4) Governments cannot afford a completely tech illiterate population. Security and military forces around the world have recognized for years already that information technology is another avenue to achieve their goals. Knowledge of the possibilities of information technology is a natural (but certainly not perfect) antidote to some of the ways an opponent might exploit your population. Organizations (in a liberal country) in this sphere will focus on education, partially to increase their own resilience against attack, and create a fertile recruiting ground for new recruits.
It will take a while of it getting progressively worse before an apathetic consumer class will finally be exploited enough to start demanding proper rules around all of this. I don't think progress will stop when the situation at it's worst. But I do think we'll have to get through that first.