The big mainstream political topics might be getting more intertwined, but don't think for a moment that means we weren't already heavily politicized. It's bee

The big mainstream political topics might be getting more intertwined, but don't think for a moment that means we weren't already heavily politicized. It's been that way for at least as long as I've been paying attention. So many overlapping opinions can feel less political when the people that would disagree aren't paying attention (or dissent isn't noticeable). We've spent the last decades proving that there is no soul and no ethics to be found here. Just sleazy after the fact rationalization. Morally bankruptcy extends all the way into the design of software. We abuse the unearned trust of users that have no option but to come to us for tools. And devour our own when they stray too far from the fashionable perspectives. The end of net neutrality makes us face the possibility of someone doing to us what we did to the nobodies: forcing ourselves into the middle of their day-to-day business and instead of just facilitating what they want to do, finding every single way to extract money from that privileged position. Like the man who worries about the possibility of his country becoming a police state to distract himself from the fact it already is, we debate topics as if our little slice of the world hasn't already been hollowed out. Even if we don't like that Eich was run out of town, the fact it happened feeds the lie we tell ourselves: that we have the ability spot actual wrongdoing and act meaningfully to stop it. The system didn't need anything more out of Eich, so he can be disappeared over $1k to Prop 8. Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg have overseen the destruction of privacy as a human value, but they're fine and nobody cares all that much about losing it. The system needed privacy to go. In 50, 100, 200+ years, when people look back at our time now, who do you think will be seen as more malicous? Eich or Zuck? How long until golden boys of tech turn out like Christopher Columbus? A reductionist and simplistic fairy tale about his amazing contribution to our history has eventually swung. Now all you see are people that continue to "bust myths" about this monster, long after everyone has stopped believing them.