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0 pointsrektide3y ago0 comments

Thanks for the nice words, & thanks for the words at all. It's great just hearing back from anyone.

A lot of my post is about unchaining ourselves from the wall, getting out of this underground, & seeing the world a little more.

Right now there's a lot of privilege & skill & dedication it takes to escape the produced, to go beyond the commercial application experiences. But I do think change has a certain inevitability to it. Networks as a product have somewhat reached their zenith, that we're in a long slowly shifting holding pattern until time is released from these confines. This is highly-networked but deeply anti-personal computing, is as massified in extreme as it comes. I'm not a refusenik, I believe in connectivity & communication & in technical progress (the way out isn't backwards), but making technology owned, personal, malleable: there's a feeling of predestination, not that I know what comes next, but that nothing is possible under these preconditions, that a shift to a more flexible, changable, evolvable model, where more actors have a real stake in how technology works & what we do with it: that's how inevitability begins. Re-personalization, re-introducing choice.

I don't have a great crystal ball that tells me exactly how the world is going to start becoming more interested. I don't have models of the on-ramps to the better future (truth be told I do have some in-progress starting-point guesses). But judging us by what we are and what we see, taking the current situation & projecting it endlessly forwards forever & ever: I think society is really really trapped seeing itself trapped in atemporality forever, is hideously unable to think of slow, shifting change, at the edges, and the pressures that ultimately creates. The trend of cool, of something better & empowering to come along & reinforce itself, to create strong communities: that gets things going. Sometimes we never build the adoption curve, never figure out what on-ramps look like, don't kind enough value for the thing to really survive (Concorde?), or to stay in a niche forever. But for things of value, big real sincere value: eventually the people who know they are doing it right get seen, eventually others want on, eventually we start thinking about delivery & easing & adoptability.

I can't claim to be completely free of the masses, their chaotic ways & how weakly so many seem anchored to & perceptive of our shared gaian spacecraft. But overall I rate the importance of the current times pretty low, at most points. The interesting bits of history happen when there's something for people to chip-in to, when there are hooks for engagement, and right now those equations are all woefully lopsided; we ask for your content and we give you a platform, but the experience is not yours, you and your audience have no control, no volition in the social media networks of the world. This tyranny of far off machines & fixed platforms, it will not last forever. For their existence is only possible by trading off genuine engagement & possibility, and the dam of what they hold back keeps filling ever higher with water.

Some reports from a new, emerging outside world will eventually make it back into pop culture. Different styles, different possibilities are still so young, but emerging. Right now I look mainly to those who are interested in shaping some kind of future for themselves, who want to be new seeds upon earth, who help beget new human futures we can freely develop. Those shifting assemblages are very small now, and most wont make it, but the overall alignment, of getting out of massified, controlled, dictated experiences, of being chained to the wall, will not last forever, and I'm not afraid of it (and I don't think it's particularly effective trying to work to hard to shape or reform or alter it).

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noduerme3y ago

I nodded to the Concorde because HN feels anachronistic in that it's still trying to maintain modes of dialog that are no longer widely understood. I'm not saying there isn't going to always be somewhere like that, at the edges; and as long as there is, I suppose there's hope. But to me, it's terrifying to see what's happening to society. If it was just the subjects or the windows of dialog that had shifted, I'd agree that this was an interim step, or a pendulum swing. My main concern is that the capacity for moving the window back toward comity, humanity, mutual understanding and dialog is being damaged to the point that we'll need to start much, much further back in time. That we may need to re-invent the Enlightenment over many generations when this system collapses. Because the framework for intellectual curiosity and logic in interpersonal relationships is now being hijacked by systems beyond most people's comprehension - which may now be beyond the control of even the people who created those systems.

I do like your optimism. But I grew up in the America that embodied the outside culture which managed to penetrate the closed, totalitarian societies which without outside influence might well have entered a permanent state of "1984". Who will be that for us? I'm pessimistic not because I assume that these systems will continue to evolve as fixed & far away masters forever, but because they don't need to. Like Uber; once they control the market (in this case of thought), they can drive every alternative out. Here, their functionality is distorting the aspirations and dialog of whole generations of humans who will have to rediscover how to think and speak for themselves, if that's possible. And they've so embedded themselves in governance that alternatives might as well be illegal in many places.