I agree with your starting expression a lot. I worry that this reflection on how we've been muddied though shades what is valuable. Microsoft used to ask, in t

I agree with your starting expression a lot. I worry that this reflection on how we've been muddied though shades what is valuable. Microsoft used to ask, in their ad campaigns, "Where do you want to go?" There was a semi-symbootic relationship, part machine, part man, working together, with users still expected to be prosumers, being invested in their tech, & working it, setting it up, customizing it, exploring it. The personal computer was a blank slate we got to push forward, each of us. And yes by huge contrast, the modern tech world is much more pre-set up, easier to adopt, and most of it runs on far off clouds we have no real control into. We've arrived at a much stricter consumerism, with prebaked applications, with less ability to explore & push frontiers. A couple hours of poking around will probably expose almost all capabilities of an app or network today. Fewer & fewer systems enable maturation of the user into an expert. There was a great submission today, Maggie Appleton talking about Programming Portals, ehich talks some to how we might start to open windows between the glossy, pre-baked GUIs that define modern consumer computing, and a more empowered realm that begins to let users Under the Hood[2]-- another fine submission today! There's also the Malleable Systems Collective which very much is about reempowering users. Im less concerned with the bad. It'll sort itself out, if we can reemerge a good. But weust envision & create new good computing, that befits this much more connected time we are arriving at. [1] https://maggieappleton.com/programming-portals https://maggieappleton.com/programming-portals https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33310344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33310344 [2] https://aeon.co/essays/computers-are-so-easy-that-we-ve-forgotten-how-to-create https://aeon.co/essays/computers-are-so-easy-that-we-ve-forg... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33310402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33310402 [3] https://malleable.systems/ https://malleable.systems/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22857551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22857551