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I think it's an open question as to if we can turn our current tech into something human-centric and not violently human-toxic at some level or another. And I'

by Syonyk 3y ago

I think it's an open question as to if we can turn our current tech into something human-centric and not violently human-toxic at some level or another. And I'll argue that it's really not. And that, yes, we should "gear back down," and stop using nearly as much. I've been on a gradual trip that way over the past half decade or so, and it's pretty darn nice. Tech has been my entire career. I look forward to the day I can put a computer down for the last time. You're arguing that "something like what a lot of people hoped computers and the internet would become" can still happen, and I think the time window on that has closed. Within a rounding error of "nobody" understands computers deeply anymore - and most who still can keep up with the low level stuff are in their 40s or older, grew up in the ISA era, and generally are looking to retire. An entire generation doesn't know how computers work now, for an awfully wide range of definitions. But unfortunately, even if you could "give the luddites control of the machines," most of those neoluddites don't want control of the machines. They've tried them for a few decades, and have found an awful lot of it wanting. And if you do insist on asking them, you'll find out that most of them lurk on IRC, and are quite happy with the 80s level of interaction IRC allows. :)

rektide 3y ago
Computing needs new paradigms forms & structures to become legible. Your timeline is absurd to me. How long did it take for writing to become useful? Yet you expect the world will adapt & become competent... in this? What we have now will not be the way. I suspect the web will probably be the platform that a user-agency enabling computing will come from, but it will come from making pages with entirely different ethos, pages designed not by and for developers to develop on, but pages designed to surface & raise the hypermedium. People love themselves some hypercard, & I don't 100% get it, but that idea of combination visual / programmatic experiences, that notion of making computing more tactile & rooted, I think is what has to happen. Data and declarative systems are such shit now, nothing affords us our data, it's all burried deep inside code, and the hypercard world, the web/dom world is about an inversion, a juncture where the abstract code falls below the surface of a more general information platform of which code is just a part. There's no timeline here. There's no past due, time's ran out. Iteration, and back & forth can keep happening. The frontier isn't defined & circumscribed by the mainstream, by the popular. Good ideas have plenty of opportunity to take root & grow. If anything, I think the desperation & starvation society knows it's undergoing emphasizes how rapidly better could take hold.

by Syonyk 3y ago

rektide 3y ago

Computing needs new paradigms forms & structures to become legible. Your timeline is absurd to me. How long did it take for writing to become useful? Yet you expect the world will adapt & become competent... in this? What we have now will not be the way. I suspect the web will probably be the platform that a user-agency enabling computing will come from, but it will come from making pages with entirely different ethos, pages designed not by and for developers to develop on, but pages designed to surface & raise the hypermedium. People love themselves some hypercard, & I don't 100% get it, but that idea of combination visual / programmatic experiences, that notion of making computing more tactile & rooted, I think is what has to happen. Data and declarative systems are such shit now, nothing affords us our data, it's all burried deep inside code, and the hypercard world, the web/dom world is about an inversion, a juncture where the abstract code falls below the surface of a more general information platform of which code is just a part. There's no timeline here. There's no past due, time's ran out. Iteration, and back & forth can keep happening. The frontier isn't defined & circumscribed by the mainstream, by the popular. Good ideas have plenty of opportunity to take root & grow. If anything, I think the desperation & starvation society knows it's undergoing emphasizes how rapidly better could take hold.