A few years back, I once mused to friends: What happened to the hackers and revolutionaries, the teenage determination to liberate technology at all cost, writing cool text-philes along the way? A friend's answer has stuck with me ever since: "I think that says more about you than the disappearing hackers." I knew he was right: My attitude has a lot to do with how I handle the present and future. Indeed, at the smallest conferences (small-town B-Sides, 2600 meetings, even Apple II KansasFest and so forth, definitely not Defcon), I can still catch a glimpse of that gritty excitement to which I was literally addicted, night and day. To stay up all night discovering, hacking, and plotting to use the new knowledge to build a more democratic knowledge-centered world.

I mention this because so far, the future seems to involve more DRM and paywalls, less neutrality, more megabytes of poorly-written crappy Javascript. And if you let that line of thinking get to you, you just feel like tossing your iPad in the trash and going hiking. At least then, you don't have to read all those dumb Alex Jones forwards from your crazy aunt.

But it doesn't have to be that way. The re-decentralization movement is slowly gaining mindshare. What happens in 2040 depends 100% on how we act now. The great utopian sharing mindspace that we wrote about endlessly in Mondo 2000 (or Computer Lib / Machine Dreams) can still happen if we want.