From a post I saw in another thread, I don't know how to link to the direct comment:
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"Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement.
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
- AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists)
- VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb)
- Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years)
- WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons)
- 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p)
- High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies)
- Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff)
- Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car)
- Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012)
- Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service)
- SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV)
- CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion)
- Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games)
- GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US)
- Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it)
Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.
The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?"
Me again:
It's definitely boring. All the good stuff is hidden behind $50 subscriptions (or whatever), hacker culture from what I've seen (and being alone most of my day) is everybody just working their jobs then disappearing or heading on to video games/a distraction.
It's ..something.
Definitely a bore fest. I like smallweb stuff. Cool projects, seeing things.
You're onto it. Basically the wealthy freeze technological growth until they can understand how to make profit from it. Results are science and tech slowed to a glacial pace. We may not even be able to outengineer our problems due to this one thing.
I am not sure previous epochs and generations ever had to face this kind of active throttling of creativity and problem solving capacity. Maybe they did and its just that the context and feeling of despair is lost to us due to distance.
But in any case due to the cumulative nature of both knowledge and our own aggravating problems with sustainability, the impact of this socioeconomic malfunction is probably the gravest its ever been.
There are very few hints we can escape the stranglehold (as in, effective organizational forms or governance that are immune to this regressive cancer).
It makes me wonder what our future will look like? Are we doomed to climate collapse on this planet? In which case, is space-faring our future?
To further your point– if we can't even get our act together on this planet, what evidence is there that we could get our act together in space?
I think the survivors of these early centuries of the third millennium will be forced into space. By this point infrastructure from mining and refining rare-earth minerals will be in place. It will be survivable, but it won't be comfortable. It may never be.
Our debut as a space-faring species will mark a long dark age in our history. With no evidence that we can create microgravity, terraform, travel even close to half the speed of light, or put ourselves into some form of abeyance (cryosleep)– we will become divided, isolated, and oppressed to a degree we never have in our history. We will struggle for every resource we currently take for granted.
I have no doubt that humanity in some form will continue to survive, but I don't think it will be comfortable or ideal.
Even before patents there were actively ringfenced technologies by state actors (silk comes to mind).
But todays supression feels almost catholic in its reach across the economy. Which is imho directly linked to digital tech being both a set of sectoral technologies and the universal means of information exchange.
> Basically the wealthy freeze technological growth until they can understand how to make profit from it.
And it is super apparent, especially when you look at the latest from OpenAI. They applied CoT duct tape and bailing wire to a glorified mechanical text processor that magically balloons the token generation costs for marginal improvement. Cha-ching! Not a new model architecture or whatever.
You can't separate tech from the rest of the world.
Millennials grew up. And we found that it cost a crap ton of money to just survive, let along thrive. Student loans were the first bodyslam, then figuring out owning a place to live. A ton of precarity is out there.
No kidding people get locked in on economic incentives.
I wonder why there is no mention of Bill Gates in your post, somehow he is not fitting the narrative with his work on reducing suffering in the world?
Also Jimmy Wales is not some kind of saint working for free, he cashed in nice pay checks from wiki and it was more of his lifestyle business than charity work.
I see laundry list presented as infantile so I don't really have time or will to address each one of the points separately. All those topics are much more complex than "should have been public".
>
"Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement.
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?"
Me again:
It's definitely boring. All the good stuff is hidden behind $50 subscriptions (or whatever), hacker culture from what I've seen (and being alone most of my day) is everybody just working their jobs then disappearing or heading on to video games/a distraction.
It's ..something.
Definitely a bore fest. I like smallweb stuff. Cool projects, seeing things.
We went the wrong way.