The world used to be made of user-serviceable lego bricks. Parts of it could be yours to own. You could take them apart and put them back together any way you w

The world used to be made of user-serviceable lego bricks. Parts of it could be yours to own. You could take them apart and put them back together any way you wanted them. New technology meant new bricks to add to your collection; new ways for people to impose their will on the world, entire new categories of things you could shape from your imagination. The future used to be full of possibility. We would explore the universe! We would cure disease and push back death! We would automate away drudgery and lead lives of abundance free to create! The world is now made of black boxes. Parts of it can be yours to rent. You can arrange them in precisely the manner the designer specified, and sit back on your couch and pay in some fashion to keep looking at the pretty result for as long as the owner is willing to accept your payments. New technology means more different pretty things you can rent and put in front of your couch. Lego itself has gone in this direction: more and more large carefully moulded parts that can only be put together one way, for one specific design or theme. Once the design on the box is assembled you can place it on the shelf to admire from your couch. "Lego is great for encouraging creativity", people used to say once. "Lego is good for teaching kids to follow instructions, I guess", someone said to me recently in full seriousness. I imagine that the younger the reader, the less sense the metaphor in the first paragraph of this post will make. The future is full of doom. We've abandoned space: there is nothing up there worth the cost of getting a canned ape up there and back. We've decided we are tired of experts, and only the rich deserve to be healthy. We've automated the jobs of telling people things they won't want to hear, and people are now drudges for machines when they are not sat on their couch renting chewing-gum for their brains. ...at some point, new tech stopped being exciting. What happened? ...I got old, perhaps. Try asking a child what excites them. Time to put the social media down and find something fun to hack on.