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It’s so interesting to me that there are still so many people who see the monkey’s-paw thing as somehow secondary or incidental, even those who acknowledge that

It’s so interesting to me that there are still so many people who see the monkey’s-paw thing as somehow secondary or incidental, even those who acknowledge that it’s often there! I don’t really understand why this is, or why I feel differently. To me at least, the monkey’s-paw aspect is primary now, to the point that the gee-whiz aspect hardly bears on my thinking at all. I’m not telling you that I think you’re wrong or foolish, to be clear! I just have this different instinct from you, although it sounds like we basically agree on the reflective level. I’m interested in what it is that directs peoples’ attention and interest in such a way that new information technology products pattern-match to “cool, shiny, new, handy, exciting; freedom” or to “dystopian social control, creepy surveillance capitalism; unfreedom.” People have different System 1 intuitions, orthogonal to their System 2 thinking! It’s so weird because I used to be the other way. I can’t put my finger on when or how the phase transition took place in my mind.

JKCalhoun 2mo ago
It's still "be careful what you wish for." We got tech and only then realized all the things that we then lost.
- throwaway_7274 2mo ago
  Well, you know, it depends on who “we” are! Lots of people predicted what would be lost. I thought many of them were a bit silly for a long time, but they were right in the end. Many others still think they’re a bit silly.
noman-land 2mo ago
The web is truly taken over by the biggest scumbags on the planet preying on the technological naivety of a populous they helped entrap. In the beginning they stepped in with the cloud to bring the "always available" thing to the masses, while simultaneously socially and legally destroying the burgeoning p2p ecosystem. Convenience at the cost of freedom. That had the effect of kneecapping the technological progress and knowhow of ordinary people and has left them trapped on platforms they moved their lives to but are owned by their abusers. The abusers are now in complete control and the abused have no ability to even imagine an alternative. The alternative is to leave these platforms. Form alternate social groups with open technologies that stay resilient to outages and attacks. We don't need the cloud anymore for the vast majority of civic and social life.
- throwaway_7274 2mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

JKCalhoun 2mo ago

It's still "be careful what you wish for." We got tech and only then realized all the things that we then lost.

throwaway_7274 2mo ago
Well, you know, it depends on who “we” are! Lots of people predicted what would be lost. I thought many of them were a bit silly for a long time, but they were right in the end. Many others still think they’re a bit silly.

noman-land 2mo ago

The web is truly taken over by the biggest scumbags on the planet preying on the technological naivety of a populous they helped entrap. In the beginning they stepped in with the cloud to bring the "always available" thing to the masses, while simultaneously socially and legally destroying the burgeoning p2p ecosystem. Convenience at the cost of freedom. That had the effect of kneecapping the technological progress and knowhow of ordinary people and has left them trapped on platforms they moved their lives to but are owned by their abusers. The abusers are now in complete control and the abused have no ability to even imagine an alternative. The alternative is to leave these platforms. Form alternate social groups with open technologies that stay resilient to outages and attacks. We don't need the cloud anymore for the vast majority of civic and social life.

throwaway_7274 2mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure