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The difference between the two mindsets you describe is not that events have changed our expectations: it's that the former was a kid's fantasy and the latter i

The difference between the two mindsets you describe is not that events have changed our expectations: it's that the former was a kid's fantasy and the latter is an adult's reality. Any informed, serious adult at the time could and did have similar (albeit vaguer) concerns along the same lines. Decades before the modern form of Big Tech, there was plenty of serious conversation about the dystopian potential of our technological present and future. Every trope you can imagine was well-represented in these conversations: centralization, panopticons, loss of user/customer control; hell even addiction to online communities was well-trod ground in at least fiction. These hazards are just inherent to these technologies. I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues.

mindslight 5y ago
Your framing bothers me because it implies the current situation was inevitable. Sci-fi was the way to we grappled with these possibilities. And for the most part, us technical people were very concerned with dystopias, both the cynical and the wide eyed dreamers. Then venture capital got here, latched onto the terrible centralizing technologies like AJAX, and paid everyone enough to stop thinking - "don't be evil", etc. But even at the time, looking at the incentives, these businesses' benevolence was clearly unsustainable. But "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it". Now we're down to simply playing catch up. I can roll my own eyes every time some article cries about big tech cutting them off, safe knowing that I run my own infrastructure. But I'm well aware that I spend time and effort to maintain it. And doing so does little to change the larger societal expectation that people's digital lives can be arbitrarily destroyed at any time. I can envision a Free and easy future story for things like private communication, filesharing, etc. But hardware like toilet sensors? Large scale analysis? I've got nothing. Best result is that someone reverse engineers a proprietary device's protocol, does some simple analysis on their own turds, and creates a niche community around it. Until the larger company gets word of that "security problem" with their hardware, smites them, and the community is stuck refurbishing used toilets off eBay until their numbers dwindle through attrition. The real problem is there is little widespread pushback on these defective-by-design technologies before they're even adopted. The "average person's" expectation has been completely neutered between a combination of overwhelming advertising and the politics of corporations first. As dysfunctional and regulatory captured as the US Government is, I'm increasingly thinking the only way forward for wider society is some GDPR equivalent legislation. Ideally we'd end up with a fiduciary relationship for personal data (after all, personal data is more sensitive than money). Or in the worst case storing personal data just becomes toxic such that most companies want to avoid it, and the behemoths that remain can be gradually reigned in through successive legislation and focused public concern.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > Your framing bothers me because it implies there was no alternative No, I went out of my way to emphasize that I wasn't saying this: > I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues. The _challenges_ were inevitable. Failing to surmount them (to whatever extent you think we did) was not. But those two don't add up to where-did-that-come-from bewilderment at what happened, as failure was always a possibility. If we've utterly failed at handling climate change in twenty years, a reasonable reaction wouldn't be "20 years ago we thought we'd be living in a perfect solarpunk future, who could have predicted climate dystopia?". The presence of a difficult problem implies the possibility of failure, which is incongruous with the GP comment's Pollyanna-ish view of the future when he was a kid. > for the most part, us technical people were very concerned with dystopias, both the cynical and the wide eyed dreamers. Yes, these are the people I was referring to when contrasting the GP's framing that when he was a kid, he didn't worry about the privacy etc concerns of technology.

mindslight 5y ago

Your framing bothers me because it implies the current situation was inevitable. Sci-fi was the way to we grappled with these possibilities. And for the most part, us technical people were very concerned with dystopias, both the cynical and the wide eyed dreamers. Then venture capital got here, latched onto the terrible centralizing technologies like AJAX, and paid everyone enough to stop thinking - "don't be evil", etc. But even at the time, looking at the incentives, these businesses' benevolence was clearly unsustainable. But "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it". Now we're down to simply playing catch up. I can roll my own eyes every time some article cries about big tech cutting them off, safe knowing that I run my own infrastructure. But I'm well aware that I spend time and effort to maintain it. And doing so does little to change the larger societal expectation that people's digital lives can be arbitrarily destroyed at any time. I can envision a Free and easy future story for things like private communication, filesharing, etc. But hardware like toilet sensors? Large scale analysis? I've got nothing. Best result is that someone reverse engineers a proprietary device's protocol, does some simple analysis on their own turds, and creates a niche community around it. Until the larger company gets word of that "security problem" with their hardware, smites them, and the community is stuck refurbishing used toilets off eBay until their numbers dwindle through attrition. The real problem is there is little widespread pushback on these defective-by-design technologies before they're even adopted. The "average person's" expectation has been completely neutered between a combination of overwhelming advertising and the politics of corporations first. As dysfunctional and regulatory captured as the US Government is, I'm increasingly thinking the only way forward for wider society is some GDPR equivalent legislation. Ideally we'd end up with a fiduciary relationship for personal data (after all, personal data is more sensitive than money). Or in the worst case storing personal data just becomes toxic such that most companies want to avoid it, and the behemoths that remain can be gradually reigned in through successive legislation and focused public concern.

wutbrodo 5y ago
> Your framing bothers me because it implies there was no alternative No, I went out of my way to emphasize that I wasn't saying this: > I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues. The _challenges_ were inevitable. Failing to surmount them (to whatever extent you think we did) was not. But those two don't add up to where-did-that-come-from bewilderment at what happened, as failure was always a possibility. If we've utterly failed at handling climate change in twenty years, a reasonable reaction wouldn't be "20 years ago we thought we'd be living in a perfect solarpunk future, who could have predicted climate dystopia?". The presence of a difficult problem implies the possibility of failure, which is incongruous with the GP comment's Pollyanna-ish view of the future when he was a kid. > for the most part, us technical people were very concerned with dystopias, both the cynical and the wide eyed dreamers. Yes, these are the people I was referring to when contrasting the GP's framing that when he was a kid, he didn't worry about the privacy etc concerns of technology.