> examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech
Would that it were so.
Semi-connected rant: What happened to so many startups to kill the mood was the pattern of: Do something technically legal (or technically illegal!) in a way that seems fixable at first, scale to huge size to get lawyers and lobbyists, pivot to strongly supporting government efforts to rein in "lawlessness" or "combat fraud" or "protect children", and then entrench oneself as the status quo while authoring or suggesting legislation to raise a moat against any competitors that might newly start up. PayPal, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and others tried this. Backpage and e-gold are unsuccessful examples of the same strategy.
The article walks through the logic. Briefly, wide adoption of the ideology expressed in that Davos declaration ("you can't make us obey laws if we're online") enabled the lawbreakers you mention (corporations violating the law while saying "you can't make us obey the laws if we're online").
Dunno man, those things you say were “horrible” before the advent of mobile phones, media players and gps (not even the internet; usable incarnations of those inventions were entirely independent from the internet) - I was also there and it was _fine_.
I recall my tapes sounding ever so slightly worse after each playback. I also once left one too close to my CRT monitor, which erased all the high frequencies from the sound.
Also over time friction would build up in the medium, causing the tape to occasionally resist being pulled so strongly that some sections would stretch and introduce a hard to ignore "wah" effect.
Overall not my favourite means of storing information, like you said - it was fine. I've listened to a huge palette of mixes made by friends for friends and the social aspect of this is something I appreciated greatly.
Same. I’ll gladly take CDs and DVDs over modern streaming platforms. Before all of this streaming crap music and taste had weight. You find people with the same interests and you share physical medium. No corporation in the world had a power to stop me from giving my copy to another person. Now you either like and pay forever like a good cattle or you hide like a rat from the watchful copyright gods on torrents.
I never had the problems with tapes that the author describes--but I still preferred CDs when they came out, and I greatly prefer having my entire music library on a single USB stick that I can just plug into my car.
I was able to find my way around okay with paper maps--but I still prefer having GPS in my phone.
My issue with those passages is that the author is conflating "digital" or "computers are involved" with "Internet". They're not the same.
> having my entire music library on a single USB stick
Worth pointing out how this too is an example of somewhat mistaken value analysis based on libertarian ideals.
The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere.
Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not. Which was one of the points of the linked article.
The free common individual can't really coexist with an economic doctrine that only accepts the pursuit of constant financial growth. Cyberlibertarianism as well as any form of self determination needs a regression to the mean, where we equalize everyone's expression and power. This, however, needs a different mindset, that which is not centered solely on the individual as it's own project of perpetual self improvement and denial of death, but one that realizes that true freedom lies in the common good. One such form of moral doctrine which as been transformed in a product we call the church is called the love of Christ, but it's also encoded in virtually every religion that preaches the care for the other, and also in the philosophy of care. Those are the foundations we need to build in order to truly decolonialize our cultural medium.
Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers.
Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people?
> Democracy will flourish. The gap between rich and poor will close. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and the lamb will have a Pentium II. We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not 'directionally wrong' or 'wrong in the details.' Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation.
This is where I fundamentally don't align with the author's perspective. To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?
The author points towards real problems, certainly, but they're problems because they prevent otherwise great new things from being even more amazing. Would I prefer it if apps that give me interesting photos and videos on-demand had fewer dark patterns and better moderation policies? Yes, that'd be nice.
> To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?
For who? The people who have been living in Gaza for the past millennia (or who were driven there by arms during the Nakba) who the western establishment decided could be deprived of food in 2024? Meaning a genocide. How is all this benefiting them? This is harming them. And many others. Even, to a much lesser degree, the 20% of Cloudflare workers cut this week.
> A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to
Or allow their bosses to contact them anywhere. Or allow corporations to know their location at all times and use that information for advertising.
There have been tradeoffs to smartphones, and arguably they are worse for individuals than no-smartphone. They increase some convenience which doesn't necessarily translate to a better society or better life for individuals
Take parking for instance. Every parking lot now has an app. So in order to park in many lots you need the app to pay with. But there isn't just one "parking" app, there are parking apps for whoever manages the lot. It's not an improvement at all over just paying at a kiosk, but it means the parking company doesn't have to pay someone to man the kiosk so it's better for them
I'm just saying if you weigh the convenience of your smartphone versus the annoyance, I wouldn't be surprised if the annoyance won a lot of the time. I know it does for me.
> examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech
Would that it were so.
Semi-connected rant: What happened to so many startups to kill the mood was the pattern of: Do something technically legal (or technically illegal!) in a way that seems fixable at first, scale to huge size to get lawyers and lobbyists, pivot to strongly supporting government efforts to rein in "lawlessness" or "combat fraud" or "protect children", and then entrench oneself as the status quo while authoring or suggesting legislation to raise a moat against any competitors that might newly start up. PayPal, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and others tried this. Backpage and e-gold are unsuccessful examples of the same strategy.
The article walks through the logic. Briefly, wide adoption of the ideology expressed in that Davos declaration ("you can't make us obey laws if we're online") enabled the lawbreakers you mention (corporations violating the law while saying "you can't make us obey the laws if we're online").
Dunno man, those things you say were “horrible” before the advent of mobile phones, media players and gps (not even the internet; usable incarnations of those inventions were entirely independent from the internet) - I was also there and it was _fine_.
I recall my tapes sounding ever so slightly worse after each playback. I also once left one too close to my CRT monitor, which erased all the high frequencies from the sound.
Also over time friction would build up in the medium, causing the tape to occasionally resist being pulled so strongly that some sections would stretch and introduce a hard to ignore "wah" effect.
Overall not my favourite means of storing information, like you said - it was fine. I've listened to a huge palette of mixes made by friends for friends and the social aspect of this is something I appreciated greatly.
Same. I’ll gladly take CDs and DVDs over modern streaming platforms. Before all of this streaming crap music and taste had weight. You find people with the same interests and you share physical medium. No corporation in the world had a power to stop me from giving my copy to another person. Now you either like and pay forever like a good cattle or you hide like a rat from the watchful copyright gods on torrents.
I never had the problems with tapes that the author describes--but I still preferred CDs when they came out, and I greatly prefer having my entire music library on a single USB stick that I can just plug into my car.
I was able to find my way around okay with paper maps--but I still prefer having GPS in my phone.
My issue with those passages is that the author is conflating "digital" or "computers are involved" with "Internet". They're not the same.
I’m not saying the newer alternatives are not convenient! Just saying the old ones were OK; not the garment-rending disaster TFA purports them to be.
> having my entire music library on a single USB stick
Worth pointing out how this too is an example of somewhat mistaken value analysis based on libertarian ideals.
The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere.
Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not. Which was one of the points of the linked article.
This is analog to 'ecology without class struggle is gardening'.
The free common individual can't really coexist with an economic doctrine that only accepts the pursuit of constant financial growth. Cyberlibertarianism as well as any form of self determination needs a regression to the mean, where we equalize everyone's expression and power. This, however, needs a different mindset, that which is not centered solely on the individual as it's own project of perpetual self improvement and denial of death, but one that realizes that true freedom lies in the common good. One such form of moral doctrine which as been transformed in a product we call the church is called the love of Christ, but it's also encoded in virtually every religion that preaches the care for the other, and also in the philosophy of care. Those are the foundations we need to build in order to truly decolonialize our cultural medium.
What? No mention of Web3?
Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers.
Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people?
For more along this line of criticism, read Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech by Paulina Borsook
> Democracy will flourish. The gap between rich and poor will close. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and the lamb will have a Pentium II. We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not 'directionally wrong' or 'wrong in the details.' Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation.
This is where I fundamentally don't align with the author's perspective. To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?
The author points towards real problems, certainly, but they're problems because they prevent otherwise great new things from being even more amazing. Would I prefer it if apps that give me interesting photos and videos on-demand had fewer dark patterns and better moderation policies? Yes, that'd be nice.
> To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?
For who? The people who have been living in Gaza for the past millennia (or who were driven there by arms during the Nakba) who the western establishment decided could be deprived of food in 2024? Meaning a genocide. How is all this benefiting them? This is harming them. And many others. Even, to a much lesser degree, the 20% of Cloudflare workers cut this week.
> A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to
Or allow their bosses to contact them anywhere. Or allow corporations to know their location at all times and use that information for advertising.
There have been tradeoffs to smartphones, and arguably they are worse for individuals than no-smartphone. They increase some convenience which doesn't necessarily translate to a better society or better life for individuals
Take parking for instance. Every parking lot now has an app. So in order to park in many lots you need the app to pay with. But there isn't just one "parking" app, there are parking apps for whoever manages the lot. It's not an improvement at all over just paying at a kiosk, but it means the parking company doesn't have to pay someone to man the kiosk so it's better for them
I'm just saying if you weigh the convenience of your smartphone versus the annoyance, I wouldn't be surprised if the annoyance won a lot of the time. I know it does for me.