> There are options. They just take a little bit work, because of course they do. These options took more work than they did a quarter century ago. Yes, it wa

> There are options. They just take a little bit work, because of course they do. These options took more work than they did a quarter century ago. Yes, it was more difficult to learn how to use a computer back then. Yet, for the most part, it involved following written instructions until one understood how things worked. In the worse case scenario, the was troubleshooting. Yet even then the difficulty diminished once one understood how things worked. The challenges today are far less technical and far more psychological. We are constantly being bombarded by messages of consumption. Some of those messages are easy to sidestep. You can run a community oriented Linux distribution. You can install an ad blocker on your computer/network. Other times it is more difficult to avoid. Consider how many articles end up being an advertisement for a company or promoting a book. Consider how much time we spend filtering out results from a major search engine when we do decide to look for something new. Filtering is probably the best description of the hard work we face today. Contrast that with a quarter century ago, when the hard work was learning. It is also worth noting that we have less access to effective tools these days. A few weeks back, I stumbled across a web-ring. Discovering new sites was difficult 25 years ago. The problem with embedded links or bookmark pages was their static nature. The problem with search engines is that they relied entirely upon keywords (as well as their smallish index). One of the early solutions was the web-ring: a dynamic collection of links on a common topic. While some may have led to sites with advertising (e.g. the Angelfires and Geocities of the world) and consumerism (e.g. sites following television shows), most of these were also sites about creating things for other people. To make a long story short: not only are the old ways hard, they are made more difficult because of the current environment. We need to find some way to make it easier.