Most of the venture capital that fueled the techno booms were Russian - hence all this dumb “Let’s make everything family friendly!” (anti-LBGTQ, anti-NSFW) mindset. Now that money is going … elsewhere.
Source: my tinfoil hat
No, you don’t understand. The tin foil hat protects me from the government brainwashing 5g cell towers.
Those things are useful as fuck. At first they blocked mind controlling aliens. Then it also worked against mind-reading NSA. And now it blocks brainwashing 5G. The DoD must be spending trillions to bypass tinfoil technology.
We cannot even play music from a device without needing some sort of patent license, usually paid by the hardware vendor.
Yes you can. I often ignore copyright with impunity. I’ve been doing it since the days of home-taping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YejbpHA9Yo
2:37
EMI refused to promote the cassingle due to lyrics (“Off the radio I get constant flow/Hit it, pause it, record and play/Turn it, rewind and rub it away”) that promoted home taping[7] during an era when music piracy was a hot-button issue.[8]
Not an issue when you pirate 🤔
100% capitalism is part of the blame, why isnt there a public option for music? Promoting local artists that are in the public domain and can tour and make a living in public venues. Instead we have ticket master and other such big music. Companies, now this is applied to music but really can be applied to every sector.
Elect local politicians who can make change for the people on the local level.
They didn’t say copyright, they said patent.
I think AAC is the only major music codec that’s still patent encumbered though
Stop tariffs on new technologies
Should we?
The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.
I’d go back even further (to 2007) before the invention of the iPhone. The smartphone has, arguably, IMO been a bad, or at least premature invention. It created a generation of kids obsessed with their photographies, giving girls eating disorders and creating/spreading unrealistic beauty ideals, etc… Also it has severely disrupted teenagers’ social living, created sleeping disorders, chronic doomscrolling, addiction, and more bad stuff. The iPhone was, IMO, not ready for this world.
Replace goodwill with encryption. That’s about data and metadata safety, but the same logic applies to everything else. No trust to people interested in breaking it.
As in - browsers’ developers’ goodwill was intended to keep Web standards’ race in check. Protocols’ extensibility was intended to allow for future backward-compatible development.
This was a wrong idea.
Gemini is one example of solving it, but one can imagine many others.
And it’s fine if we have 12 Web protocols each for some specific idea of the Web. Among them some, say, would allow people to easily create webpages like year 1996, but sufficient for modern tasks and without all the bother with DNS and hosting (perhaps there is a p2p solution), Telegram shows that this is in huge demand. Many such variants are better than one overly complex, dangerous, corporate and oligopolized Web.
That’s similar to how it seemed working anyway, we had e-news for global forums, webpages for personal pages, IRC for chats, ICQ\AIM\MSN for DMs, e-mail for reliable DMs, well, everyone remembers that time.
Nostr is a very raw, but maybe interesting idea for public social media.
Funny how Unix philosophy always shows itself in unexpected places, yes? =)
Well first we kill all they
lawyersInvestment Bankers.Then all the lawyers.
In Minecraft of course…
Any time anyone is able to claw back some scraps of justice or get some kind of recompense for wrongs or - here’s a big one - change the law: that’s lawyers too. The characterization of all lawyers as sharks and assholes has done more to exacerbate the justice gap then help.
Yes! The whole “lawyers are evil money grabbers” is a corporate psy-op. They want you to think it’s unreasonable for a person to sue a corporation when the corporation’s actions are harmful. They also want you to think defense attorneys are people who just look for technicalities to free guilty people.
They created armies of lawyers for themselves, while making americans distrustful of the ones fighting for normal people. We used to think of lawyers like Atticus Finch or Perry Mason. But now we just think of Saul Goodman and Lionel Hutz.
or Perry Mason.
Loved those books. Maybe he’s too perfect a character morally, but still.
If people stopped using tech to exploit people they would stop feeling exploited by it
“People” is a great word. Who do you mean exactly for these roles? Who’s doing what here?
As usual, most people who have control of how technology is used on a broad scale are in positions of power suitable for exploitation. That is, the people I’m talking about are business owners and high-level executives (and the government) using technology to exploit workers. To be fair, that’s not always the dynamic-- “normal” people can exploit each other too, and businesses and the government can as well. But it is the most pressing issue imo, because of the power imbalance. See also rent comtrol algorithms, automated insurance claim denials, etc.
Once capitalism is dead.
Technology is great, it’s just naturally being used to exploit.
That’s for too long a wait—if such ever happens.
DIY. Be your own boss. Not all economic relationships in this world are capitalist.
Yeah but what if I don’t want to starve :-( ?
Why would you starve?
If we work together and do our part, we can shorten the wait by more than you might think
Starting out with small groups shouldn’t be too difficult.
When I see technology actively making the world consistently better rather than constantly trashing the ecosystem that literally keeps us alive, I’ll have optimism about it.
Raze Silicon Valley to the ground and start over?
No: the bad guys will build another one.
However if 250 million Americans each spent 400 hours less on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the next 12 months, the shareholders might have the heads of many members of those corporate boards on pikes.
That just makes it even easier for Wall St to enshittify whatever comes after
Ugh I hate that you’re right. Until we figure out capitalism we’re fucked.
I think you wanted to write “democratic communism” 😏😂
Don’t need to take things further than market socialism to fix the problems with capitalism.
That is the best step towards communism we, in the west, can do right now, in my opinion. Slowly add more and more socialism and democratic laws until we all can be happy together 😁
Great article, totally agree with the author. I would still be concerned with that power moving to the government, particularly in countries with limited options for true representation (eg. two party systems, where it is usually more a matter of “lesser evil” voting), but that then becomes the next challenge; still more appropriate in the government’s hands than the level of power corporations currently wield.
I’ll be optimistic about technology when the last techbro is strangled with the entrails of the last angel investor
I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.
Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.
Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.
How did we get here?
I, for one, have become a lot more optimist about Tech ever since I’ve replaced the closed solutions that deny me control from corporations looking to squeeze every last cent of value from me - from smartphone OSes to TV Boxes - with open source solutions were it’s me who holds the keys.
What TV box would you recommend?
Personally I replaced my TV Box with a Intel N100 Mini-PC (specifically a GMTek G3) running Lubuntu and Kodi, though it’s used for a lot more than just being my TV box. I also got one of these remotes so I control it just like I would a dedicate TV Box (even though it has a mini-keyboard on the back and airmouse functionality, I almost never use it).
I use IPTV with it to watch just the free TV Channels, though there are providers out there who carry over 1000 channels for 5 bucks a month.
If you want something to just use as TV Box, start by checking Libreelec which is a Linux distro with Kodi configured to just work as a TV Box. It has builds for a whole lot of single board computers, which generally are cheaper than Mini-PCs (for example you can get a Banana Pi M5 - one of the supported SBCs - plus box, powersource and even the SD card for about half the price of the Mini-PC I got). The same remote I use should work fine with Libreelect on any platform which has at least one USB connector (not tested it myself but it makes sense since it uses the same kind of protocol and dongle as a wireless keyboard + mouse with pressing the “normal” remote buttons just generating keypresses according to some kind of standard of shortcut keys for media players)
Had I’ve been aiming for just a TV Box replacement I would’ve probably gone via checking which hardware Libreelec is compatible with and then chosen one of those and used the Libreelec since it’s a Linux distro already preconfigures for acting as a proper TV Box (whilst with Lubuntu with Kodi on top I had to go around figuring out and changing the configuration for auto-login, auto-starting Kodi on startup and so on)
Cool! Thanks a lot for the thorough answer!
