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Cory Doctorow's Vision for a Just Tech Revolution

58 points by webmaven 3y ago

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
"Just" seems like a nice virtue, but to me it's largely a question of whether we allow ourselves, our future, to be active agents in shaping & crafting the world around us, or whether far-off powers-that-be get to dictate everything about how our mechanicized/techanicized world about us works. We owe it to our species to create a situation where people have some power, where volition matters. The current trend has been sapping that little blip of agency at the heart of the promise of the personal computer. Computing is becoming unhip; it's undergoing a large slower thermocline of trust as it asserts itself over us. And while that means less interest & creeping dispassion, I think it also hints at a potential underdog movement. It creates space for a new incarnation of engaged pro-human computing. We risk creating a disaffected culture. We risk losing humanity's greatness and vibrancy, risk losing a world of empowered people. General purpose computing costs so relatively little, and provides so many potentials and avenues for exploration & growth; it can and ought to be a pinnacle of man-as-toolmaker, inspire us individually & collectively to keep reaching & exploring. Justice or no, I think we are far lesser if we dont find leverage to liberate computing from the far off would be masters at the other ends of the fiber.
- pockybum522 3y ago
  This is much the same sentiment as the book. Though your concept of "we" relies on an educated public. I fear it may be a bit late for that.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    the only thing to do then is to fight back and reeducate the public. the hard part here is to understand and accept that doing so is a long slow process whose effects may not be visible for years. nevertheless we must not give up and continue to educate and promote education and research
    - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
      I feel like there's a huge onus on techies who care to create meaningful personal technology that's worth caring about. The fate of humanity is at stake (excuse the pretention but it's true), but only the experts can see or grasp the magnitude & nature of the struggle. We can write on and on a out the struggle, but I don't think our conversion rate to building hyper competent uber techies will be enough. Rather than being people to computing, I think those that care need to bring computing to the people. We need to be building better general purpose computing experiences. We need to blend user experience and developer experience. Users need to be able to "open the engine bay" on running software and see how it's working, and tinker around. We can open up the experience more of being close to the machine, better share the fun empowering side of being close to the machine, with less friction & less years of wonkery to reach that amazing closeness. Making our software systems & their running highly visible seems like a great moonshot effort we should be up to. Ever striving to make it easy to see the man behind the curtain. Dynamic programming should be key. Users should be able to muck around with & play with the software they know and use. Projects like Node-RED I feel have enormous potential. They make systems real in a high level way, create a grapsability that should be there but is missing. But also, these experiences are still lower level, are still clearly computing experiences. To really bring computing to people, I think we need to be looking hard & creatively at ways to bring higher level application like experiences to people in ways that also let people delve in to the compute, where the facade of interface connects to the explicitly visible/observable compute of something like Node-RED. Imo we do have to fight back, yes, and fight back strong. But the revolution has to be won by reforming who and what we are, to make adaptable morphable wares and platforms, toake software soft again. Human curiosity & ingenuity roots our species powerful self motivation, but the funnel right now into empowerment-in-tech is so onerous andong, and of we can create more flexible & welcoming hybrids of applications and compute, the revolution will amplify and drive itself. Please consider joining https://malleable.systems https://malleable.systems , a home base on the internet for humanity to consider augmenting ourselves better.
      - em-bee 3y ago
        you are absolutely right. just focusing on creating uber-techies won't get us very far. what i have in mind with educating the general public is more in a broader sense, to create an understanding and awareness of the challenges of technology, to give people the capacity to make value judgements and be able to evaluate which technology to trust. malleable systems appears to approach this from the other side by pushing for technology that can be trusted because it is easier to adapt by anyone to their own needs (and therefore easier to understand) even as a developer i want that. i have only recently realized how much of a barrier elaborate toolchains used to build software are to the maintenance and adaptability for my own needs. subconsciously i have always preferred building software without a toolchain, but this realization has helped me to make that preference explicit. any application i build now must be able to run directly from a source repo without any installation step. to be able to make changes at worst a restart should be necessary, but preferably not even that. using languages and development environments like smalltalk, lisp and pike i can build applications that can be changed at runtime, which greatly increases the malleability at least for those who are able to learn some programming.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
I enjoyed the interview and Cory’s new book. He mentions Yanis Varoufakis’ new book, Techno Feudalism. I went to buy that book also, but it has not been released yet. I think it is coming out in February. I watch at least one Yanis V. interview a week on YouTube - I find him very reasonable.
- reedciccio 3y ago
  Varoufakis sounds interesting but wasn't he the minister of economy in Greece that further threw the country in economic disarray?
  - petermcneeley 3y ago
    I think that is a very odd view of events. "He was appointed Finance Minister by Tsipras shortly after the election victory. The party promised to renegotiate Greece's debt and significantly curtail the austerity measures which had led to the longest recession in post-war global history"

58 points by webmaven 3y ago

"Just" seems like a nice virtue, but to me it's largely a question of whether we allow ourselves, our future, to be active agents in shaping & crafting the world around us, or whether far-off powers-that-be get to dictate everything about how our mechanicized/techanicized world about us works. We owe it to our species to create a situation where people have some power, where volition matters. The current trend has been sapping that little blip of agency at the heart of the promise of the personal computer. Computing is becoming unhip; it's undergoing a large slower thermocline of trust as it asserts itself over us. And while that means less interest & creeping dispassion, I think it also hints at a potential underdog movement. It creates space for a new incarnation of engaged pro-human computing. We risk creating a disaffected culture. We risk losing humanity's greatness and vibrancy, risk losing a world of empowered people. General purpose computing costs so relatively little, and provides so many potentials and avenues for exploration & growth; it can and ought to be a pinnacle of man-as-toolmaker, inspire us individually & collectively to keep reaching & exploring. Justice or no, I think we are far lesser if we dont find leverage to liberate computing from the far off would be masters at the other ends of the fiber.

pockybum522 3y ago
This is much the same sentiment as the book. Though your concept of "we" relies on an educated public. I fear it may be a bit late for that.
- em-bee 3y ago
  the only thing to do then is to fight back and reeducate the public. the hard part here is to understand and accept that doing so is a long slow process whose effects may not be visible for years. nevertheless we must not give up and continue to educate and promote education and research
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    I feel like there's a huge onus on techies who care to create meaningful personal technology that's worth caring about. The fate of humanity is at stake (excuse the pretention but it's true), but only the experts can see or grasp the magnitude & nature of the struggle. We can write on and on a out the struggle, but I don't think our conversion rate to building hyper competent uber techies will be enough. Rather than being people to computing, I think those that care need to bring computing to the people. We need to be building better general purpose computing experiences. We need to blend user experience and developer experience. Users need to be able to "open the engine bay" on running software and see how it's working, and tinker around. We can open up the experience more of being close to the machine, better share the fun empowering side of being close to the machine, with less friction & less years of wonkery to reach that amazing closeness. Making our software systems & their running highly visible seems like a great moonshot effort we should be up to. Ever striving to make it easy to see the man behind the curtain. Dynamic programming should be key. Users should be able to muck around with & play with the software they know and use. Projects like Node-RED I feel have enormous potential. They make systems real in a high level way, create a grapsability that should be there but is missing. But also, these experiences are still lower level, are still clearly computing experiences. To really bring computing to people, I think we need to be looking hard & creatively at ways to bring higher level application like experiences to people in ways that also let people delve in to the compute, where the facade of interface connects to the explicitly visible/observable compute of something like Node-RED. Imo we do have to fight back, yes, and fight back strong. But the revolution has to be won by reforming who and what we are, to make adaptable morphable wares and platforms, toake software soft again. Human curiosity & ingenuity roots our species powerful self motivation, but the funnel right now into empowerment-in-tech is so onerous andong, and of we can create more flexible & welcoming hybrids of applications and compute, the revolution will amplify and drive itself. Please consider joining https://malleable.systems https://malleable.systems , a home base on the internet for humanity to consider augmenting ourselves better.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      you are absolutely right. just focusing on creating uber-techies won't get us very far. what i have in mind with educating the general public is more in a broader sense, to create an understanding and awareness of the challenges of technology, to give people the capacity to make value judgements and be able to evaluate which technology to trust. malleable systems appears to approach this from the other side by pushing for technology that can be trusted because it is easier to adapt by anyone to their own needs (and therefore easier to understand) even as a developer i want that. i have only recently realized how much of a barrier elaborate toolchains used to build software are to the maintenance and adaptability for my own needs. subconsciously i have always preferred building software without a toolchain, but this realization has helped me to make that preference explicit. any application i build now must be able to run directly from a source repo without any installation step. to be able to make changes at worst a restart should be necessary, but preferably not even that. using languages and development environments like smalltalk, lisp and pike i can build applications that can be changed at runtime, which greatly increases the malleability at least for those who are able to learn some programming.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I enjoyed the interview and Cory’s new book. He mentions Yanis Varoufakis’ new book, Techno Feudalism. I went to buy that book also, but it has not been released yet. I think it is coming out in February. I watch at least one Yanis V. interview a week on YouTube - I find him very reasonable.

reedciccio 3y ago
Varoufakis sounds interesting but wasn't he the minister of economy in Greece that further threw the country in economic disarray?
- petermcneeley 3y ago
  I think that is a very odd view of events. "He was appointed Finance Minister by Tsipras shortly after the election victory. The party promised to renegotiate Greece's debt and significantly curtail the austerity measures which had led to the longest recession in post-war global history"