3 ms·

What do you see as the future ~20 years from now?

justanother 8y ago
A few years back, I once mused to friends: What happened to the hackers and revolutionaries, the teenage determination to liberate technology at all cost, writing cool text-philes along the way? A friend's answer has stuck with me ever since: "I think that says more about you than the disappearing hackers." I knew he was right: My attitude has a lot to do with how I handle the present and future. Indeed, at the smallest conferences (small-town B-Sides, 2600 meetings, even Apple II KansasFest and so forth, definitely not Defcon), I can still catch a glimpse of that gritty excitement to which I was literally addicted, night and day. To stay up all night discovering, hacking, and plotting to use the new knowledge to build a more democratic knowledge-centered world. I mention this because so far, the future seems to involve more DRM and paywalls, less neutrality, more megabytes of poorly-written crappy Javascript. And if you let that line of thinking get to you, you just feel like tossing your iPad in the trash and going hiking. At least then, you don't have to read all those dumb Alex Jones forwards from your crazy aunt. But it doesn't have to be that way. The re-decentralization movement is slowly gaining mindshare. What happens in 2040 depends 100% on how we act now. The great utopian sharing mindspace that we wrote about endlessly in Mondo 2000 (or Computer Lib / Machine Dreams) can still happen if we want.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bane 8y ago
  When I think of what I wanted the internet to become, HN, Wikipedia, github and Archive.org spring very heavily to mind. I think it's easy to lose site of the fact that the "old" internet is still there, there's just so many new layers of people and layers of things on top of it that it's hard to remember that you can still setup a /~bane/ website pretty trivially...lots of other services could still exist but nobody wants to foot the bill. I think one of the best representations of the old internet is how the demoscene operates. Free, volunteer, information rich, a bit quirky and communal.
yellowbuilding 8y ago
Extreme distaste and aversion of the public internet. Decentralization can only happen by meeting some prerequisites that we as a society are not even comfortable talking about. I don’t want this and insist it’s not coming from defeatism. I say it because I desperately want to change it. I just have yet to be presented with a way out that makes a lick of sense. I come from the advertising industry. The mindless assertion that private industry can be trusted in moral pursuit is breaking our society, and the modern web browser has accelerated that. Decentralization is not a path. It’s a goal. There are two general paths: One is through public regulation of the corporations that broke the internet in the first place and approach something resembling economic justice, making room in the public consciousness for decentralization to proliferate. The other path, a shorter path, is to consider the internet as a public plaza. Equal access, free speech, defended by democracy instead of by capitalists. The public provides an ethical base set of internet services and regulates hiring and privacy practices in such a way that citizens can use these to pursue their livelihoods. Decentralization can proliferate from these spaces of unmitigated discussion, which are not reliant on the ruthless advertising economy. These are each still well outside the realm of the public’s imagination, because people simply have no clue about the advertising regime that governs their lives.

A few years back, I once mused to friends: What happened to the hackers and revolutionaries, the teenage determination to liberate technology at all cost, writing cool text-philes along the way? A friend's answer has stuck with me ever since: "I think that says more about you than the disappearing hackers." I knew he was right: My attitude has a lot to do with how I handle the present and future. Indeed, at the smallest conferences (small-town B-Sides, 2600 meetings, even Apple II KansasFest and so forth, definitely not Defcon), I can still catch a glimpse of that gritty excitement to which I was literally addicted, night and day. To stay up all night discovering, hacking, and plotting to use the new knowledge to build a more democratic knowledge-centered world. I mention this because so far, the future seems to involve more DRM and paywalls, less neutrality, more megabytes of poorly-written crappy Javascript. And if you let that line of thinking get to you, you just feel like tossing your iPad in the trash and going hiking. At least then, you don't have to read all those dumb Alex Jones forwards from your crazy aunt. But it doesn't have to be that way. The re-decentralization movement is slowly gaining mindshare. What happens in 2040 depends 100% on how we act now. The great utopian sharing mindspace that we wrote about endlessly in Mondo 2000 (or Computer Lib / Machine Dreams) can still happen if we want.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bane 8y ago
When I think of what I wanted the internet to become, HN, Wikipedia, github and Archive.org spring very heavily to mind. I think it's easy to lose site of the fact that the "old" internet is still there, there's just so many new layers of people and layers of things on top of it that it's hard to remember that you can still setup a /~bane/ website pretty trivially...lots of other services could still exist but nobody wants to foot the bill. I think one of the best representations of the old internet is how the demoscene operates. Free, volunteer, information rich, a bit quirky and communal.

yellowbuilding 8y ago

Extreme distaste and aversion of the public internet. Decentralization can only happen by meeting some prerequisites that we as a society are not even comfortable talking about. I don’t want this and insist it’s not coming from defeatism. I say it because I desperately want to change it. I just have yet to be presented with a way out that makes a lick of sense. I come from the advertising industry. The mindless assertion that private industry can be trusted in moral pursuit is breaking our society, and the modern web browser has accelerated that. Decentralization is not a path. It’s a goal. There are two general paths: One is through public regulation of the corporations that broke the internet in the first place and approach something resembling economic justice, making room in the public consciousness for decentralization to proliferate. The other path, a shorter path, is to consider the internet as a public plaza. Equal access, free speech, defended by democracy instead of by capitalists. The public provides an ethical base set of internet services and regulates hiring and privacy practices in such a way that citizens can use these to pursue their livelihoods. Decentralization can proliferate from these spaces of unmitigated discussion, which are not reliant on the ruthless advertising economy. These are each still well outside the realm of the public’s imagination, because people simply have no clue about the advertising regime that governs their lives.