Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

Maybe it's a blessing in disguise, yes. But I wrote up here [0] about how sad this makes me feel. We've squandered a huge opportunity this past 20 years by allowing BigTech to emerge and basically destroy the good political agenda of the original (D)ARPA project. Sure it was hegemonic. Sure we screwed up with things like "Arab Spring".

But I cannot stop feeling the Internet was the greatest tool of democracy and liberty - and we messed it up by allowing weak minded greedy and insecure types to take over.

It's no surprise that the latest brand of technofascist thugs targeted "data" as the new power-lever. "Flipping" carefully installed defective leaders is a new kind of threat and a new kind of attack we need to think about more in cybserscurity.

I don't think it needs us to be Cassandras for everyone to understand (vigilance is the essence of democracy) that if we want good, nice things, we'll have to actively work for them and defend daily. I'm also quietly optimistic that taking it back won't be such a big deal as we fear. We'll just have a lot of repair work to do when this sad episode is over. I think a Euro-centric rebuild will be a useful step towards a healed global vision again. One day.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/layer10/

My personal perspective is that our (technology evangelists) mistake was constantly lowering the barrier to entry under the guise of removing "gatekeeping" abilities of entrenched players. This idea that technology would be this great equalizer, lifting everyone up together and spreading free access to information to everyone would somehow solve so many of our ills.

The reality is that most people do not care enough about the systems of life to educate themselves, and bad actors exploited this constant lowering of the barrier to entry by flooding these forced-participants with advertising, "free" services, and a glut of cognitohazards. We created a world where authenticity comes not from expertise, but how pretty and usable your website is - and that had knock-on effects our elders tried to warn us about (just look at games like Deus Ex, System Shock 1/2, and similar cyberpunk games of the era and how they warned about mass surveillance, forced adoption of technologies, centralization of infrastructure, etc).

> ...if we want good, nice things, we'll have to actively work for them and defend daily.

This is what I've been trying to instill in others for nearly twenty years, since my days of playing SysAdmin in High School and bypassing proxy-based web filters to get to Newgrounds. To truly be participatory in any community, you must volunteer time in bettering it somehow. Maybe volunteer to be a moderator and improve site policies, or donate surplus resources towards self-hosting, or just helping folks move to better, less centralized or more community-supported platforms.

How I see it digital literacy 1.0 was crude stimulus and not at all disguised, to get globally competitive in the new microprocessor wave, and in the late 70s and early 80s Japan, and to a lesser extent USA were players at the time. BASIC for school kids was like cod liver oil in the workhouse gruel. It made us strong. The "equaliser" worked out well for the few, ones like me, maybe you. Digital literacy 2.0 is a different project. It's to enable those two generations removed, who natural tech users facing de-stimulus and social warehousing, what that tech is really for and who really controls it. Keep at it.

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