the outcome of that war depends, imho, largely on whether digital computing will continue evolving at breakneck speed or whether it will become commoditized, ge

the outcome of that war depends, imho, largely on whether digital computing will continue evolving at breakneck speed or whether it will become commoditized, generic and (dare I say it), open source in the former case the current pattern of abusive oligopolies will persist as society continues being dazed and confused about the new toys and suspends critical judgement but we might be erroneously projecting the rapid developments of past decades (and the idiosyncratic events and actors that shaped them) into a future that is increasingly driven by other dynamics for one thing, the pace of innovation/adoption seems definitely to be slowing down facing a combination of technical and behavioral limits. a few more years without self-driving cars and regular space travel tourism and we might start having a second look at what has been the quid-pro-quo of all the tech hoopla. awareness of the dangers and pitfalls of surveillance capitalism (which is now the de-facto economic model through which computing is deployed) is diffusing, slowly but surely. finally, the ability of a tiny crowd of severely under-resourced hackers to maintain fully functional alternatives, whether that is the linux desktop, its huge collection of applications or the fediverse, shows to anybody that cares to look that there IS an alternative. Once/if the TINA spell is broken revisiting the role of computing in society may get us into completely different directions and the suffocating status-quo may forever be a thing of the past