> I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place. I think it depends what the "old days" are for e

> I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place. I think it depends what the "old days" are for each generation. For me it is the early days of the Internet becoming widely available, late 80s to early 90s. Suddenly everyone I know has email, everyone is on usenet, I can talk (i.e. text chat) with anyone around the world. Which of course we can today. But back then there were no corporations involved (commercial use of the Internet was prohibited), so no marketing involved, it was all real people. And to me this is a key part: > if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control This wasn't a thing. All the communication protocols were open standard (RFCs), the implementations were open source. Every program I used (aside from the OS, which was the domain of proprietary software back then) was one I compiled myself and could modify or rewrite to taste. So it was just us, regular people, who owned and controlled how everything worked and the possibilities were unbounded and thus extremely exciting. Today mostly we're stuck using proprietary software/apps, or even worse, the "cloud" where the companies control everything. As much as I can, I still want to control my environment so I stick with open standards like email instead of proprietary chat apps, and I run Linux & FreeBSD, and I avoid phones like the plague since there is no way to own anything on a phone platform.