The future in old computer magazines (1984–2004)

>after the first few have been eaten.

This is a bit more difficult in the modern world. If a Chinese CEO, for example, is ruining the world he's going to be very difficult for me to eat.

Also with a modern governments ability to monitor all your actions it may be very difficult to rise up without getting noticed and disappeared almost instantly. "The USSR brought to you by Flock".

> Sometimes I fear that the vastly wealthy will only remember the social contracts that allowed them to become wealthy are two way contracts after the first few have been eaten.

The only social contract the vastly wealthy will remember is that the plebs must respect their private property rights as a divine right, in return they'll give the plebs the opportunity to work...sometimes.

I'm pretty sure the reason why the modern world sucks so much is that it is built on an endless maze of distraction machines.

We argue of politics, over why someone's opinion on the other side of the planet is wrong. We gawk at celebrities with terrible personalities and surgically or digitally amplified talent. We spend billions on bad movies with terrible plots that never correlate to or make us think about our own lives. We envision ourselves wealthy and beloved and poised to be greater than the greatest of all time, and we do this all while constantly being driven to work harder, output more, find new ways to make money so that we might have more for ourselves, never really considering how much we make for others and how much we are being completely and totally used until we are wrung dry and discarded by the very world we gave everything to.

We all think a small life is worthless, when it's the only thing we have.

What does one have to do with the other?

It's never been easier and more accessible to be an enthusiast hacking various stuff together though, from hardware to software. You don't have to rely on subscription services. Open-source software has never been better (see Blender, Kicad, Photopea). You can easily create custom software for your one-off needs using LLMs, and you don't have to rely on a bigco subscription either - pay API prices for open source models, or self-host. Run your own private cloud for your vacuum robot, reverse engineer your smart TV, deploy your own camera firmware...

You don't even need to rely on a single centralised corporate search engine for all your information look-up. 10 years ago, it would have been unimaginable that you could self-host something that could actually replace or be better than Google.

The biggest change has not been technological, it has been in the attitudes of society. Optimism and enthusiasm have given way to pessimism and fear. I think people realized that if someone invented Star Trek replicators tomorrow and ended scarcity, the first thing people would replicate would be weapons to fight over the energy to power them.

We need something like Omni magazine to return. Something without the cynicism of Wired, but with sharp and stylish images that juxtapose the cool with the intellectual. The kind of thing that has slightly too cool booze ads and half naked people sitting next to interviews of Nobel prize winners and perhaps overly optimistic Science Fiction. We need dreams that are not just the seeds of new nightmares.

We usually get the future we dream of, and I'd like us all to start imagining it to be more like Star Trek and less like Black Mirror.

That must be why the birth rate is plunging.

Be realistic - we've gone from "You, yes you, will be able to do an incredibly new and fun thing with Shiny New Technology™" to "You probably won't have a job or drinking water, your TV and phone are tracking you, all creative work is now worthless, the planet is on fire, AI may kill us all, but buy into our IPO anyway" in less than ten years.