You've gotta fight... for your right... to IT Perhaps the greatest lie ever told is that the many are powerless against the few. This is rarely, if ever, true, yet is something that we are told every day of our lives until we believe it. This is especially the case when it comes to IT. If the many are powerless against the few, then surely the individual has no chance to …
The idea that "technology uplifts the masses" is also nothing but lies and propaganda.
The internet is a "winner takes all" natural monopoly by default. It's their platforms their rules, trapping us in their ridged logic. By happy coincidence, governments can piggyback massive surveillance infrastructure on top at vanishingly little cost, in a way that doesn’t cause mass revulsion according to western values. (Just a little revulsion among the tech literati)
"access to all of humanity's knowledge"
Riiiiiiiiiiight. Filtered though the world-view of pale stale US males on the autism spectrum.
"...Arab spring"
Oh I knew that was coming way before I read it. Turns out the Arab spring was severely warped though the lens of the western media, to the extent that it was a total fiction. Technology's role was hideously over exaggerated in a media twitter circle-jerk.
This just reinforces the Silicon valley dogma, which clearly isn't working at all. I'm currently reading an article that's the exact opposite of this one, based more from a European technological realism/pessimism perspective, and it's way closer to the mark.
If change is possible, it's completely outside the vocabulary ("crowd sourcing", "social meeja", "sharing") used in this article, and probably involves using technology to organise a good old fashioned smashing of heads.
If indeed the positive effect of technology is just lies and propaganda, then perhaps you don't need that smartphone at all. Or that ultra-thin, laptop computer. Or that Bluetooth functionality in your car. Or any infinite other improvements that technology has brought to the masses.
You miss the far more significant point by fixating on the digital Boogie man and whatever the fuck a "natural monopoly" is (try looking at the definition of a monopoly and you'll see that it doesn't apply). The point is that technology is one of the agents for change that actually takes luxury goods and makes them cheaper over time, such that they become accessible to the masses. If that kind of free-market capitalism makes your skin crawl, then perhaps there's a socialist paradise in Venezuela that you should visit.
Honestly, take a good look in the mirror at what a lonely, paranoid twat that you've become. The world is a far more wonderful and happy place than you recognize it to be.
Personally, I'm a socialist and I think the world is a horrible place with the deck stacked against most of us, thanks in no small part to those who dogmatically believe in ultra-free-market crap like "supply side economics" and "regulation is evil".
That said, I am also aware that people are malleable, technologies almost always have uses their originators never envisioned and that it is very early days yet for computers, the internet and formal social engineering.
I’ve experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are...still alive.
https://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=QC-SCIENCEVERB
TBH I winced at "effectuated" too, though I was polite enough not to mention it. And yet obnoxious enough to speak up now the subject has been broached.
Just put it down to me being a pale stale US male on the autism spectrum, everybody knows we're uncivilized louts. Also, we don't speak proper English.
(Some of these words are giving my spell chucker [sic] absolute fits. It's almost fun, kicking it in the balls repeatedly. For instance, it insisted that "effectuated" should be "accentuated" until I beat it into submission.)
I'm looking at UEFI and the ever diminishing hope of owning what we paid for and the fact that rapid increases in technology have allowed unprecedented intrusion into our lives by unknown organisations (and I'm not just talking about the spooks - think of all those lovely Like buttons)...
...and I can't help but think that you're dreaming. Just as many believe that we can't make a difference, you believe that we can in a very naïve way.
One person with the right plan can make a difference, certainly, but the simplest way to do so is not by trying to make hardware vendors embrace openness, it's by killing people. History is littered with the corpses of the fallen and the scare stories of the megalomaniac nut jobs that did the evil deeds.
In recent times, one man with an ambitious plan and some crazed followers pulled off an act that went down in history and changed a country in a single hour, the repercussions of which are being felt today and will for the remainder of my lifetime (afterwards I won't care, I'll be dead).
Well, you're talking in a grander scale than just IT so it is worth remembering that while power and money shape the world we see day to day, history is shaped by who's the biggest bastard. So I'm kind of pointing out the obvious. Most of us are powerless not because we are weaker but because we have morals and believe in things more substantial than the rantings of a 12th century (give or take) lunatic.
"Just as many believe that we can't make a difference, you believe that we can in a very naïve way"
Funny, I don't think anything about what I've written is particularly naive. Group dynamics shows people are malleable, especially in large groups. Technology makes reaching people and manipulating them easier. The scientific method gives us the tools to experiment and refine our techniques.
Now, yes, all the tools are available to the enemy. The enemy is significantly better resourced than any individual one of us. That said, there are a hell of a lot more of us, and science absolutely provides for "accuracy through volume" as one possible method of refining techniques.
Nowhere in my article did I say that we can just up and make the world a better place "because internet". Nor did I even say that the internet gives us the ability to make changes bloodlessly.
If you want change - real change - you have to be ready to bleed for it. You may even have to shed blood for it. That's life. That's probably never going to change with our species.
But what technology does give us is ease of organization. It gives us the ability to beta test our ideologies. It lets us contact experts in various fields and plan for eventualities. It lets us share knowledge of what worked, what didn't, and try experiments and simulations to - sometimes even on real people/companies/governments/etc - until we find a solution within our means.
There's nothing naive about any of that. And yes, the colder you are, the easier it is to use the tools available.
That said, the ability to run experiments, contact experts, share knowledge and perform limited trials means that the truly sociopathic options need not be the only ones that work. We have the means to find alternatives. Even if we can't make our revolutions entirely without sacrifice, we can use the tools available to us to make them as quick and painless as possible.
And hey, who knows? Maybe - just maybe - we can even accomplish some of our victories using nothing more than technology, communication and democracy.
What a world that would be.
Why? Isn't global domination always the ultimate end goal? I prefer that global domination be achieved by "the people", through something roughly approximating a democratic government system where all citizens are cared for, treated as equals, allowed to express themselves and their rights preserved. All the alternatives are worse.
In the end, either the people win, or an elite wins. Either victory is through bloodshed or it is not. I prefer the people win, without bloodshed. So, by all means...let us go forth and plot global domination.
How about global accommodation instead of global domination? The concept of domination implies stamping on everything else in the way to replace it with a one-size-fits-all solution (because you and your supporters?) believe it to be the correct answer.
Whether we're talking about gods or operating systems, it is quite obvious that no such thing exists.
The pertinent point is that needs differ. While your desktop computer, broadband router, and television may ultimately be running derivations of Linux; your printer, an industrial process controller, and smart MP3 capable CD player probably aren't. They don't need to, the use cases of all of these devices are wildly different so applying "domination" here would be a bad thing.
The secondary aspect is also the danger emphasised by the saying about not putting all of your eggs in one basket. Every time a flaw is found in Android, iOS users can smile smugly. Every time Apple screws up something that should have been caught in basic beta testing, Android users can smile smugly. But the point is that issues affecting one system are rather unlikely to affect the other, unless it is a flaw in a shared piece of code that both systems have in common. So to have diverse operating systems that aren't all derived from the same codebase, there are attributes to this.
So maybe instead of domination, it should be accommodation? Diverse and different systems can work together once you remove the blowhards that turn it into a commercial, economic, and political battle.
To give a small example from my experience, I have an Android phone and an iPad Mini. Both have good points and bad points. For instance, for years Android couldn't work with bluetooth keyboards but iOS never gave me problems. Talking of Bluetooth, my phone can easily share files with my computer but iOS only shares with the proprietary AirDrop protocol. However, I don't really have a preference of one over the other other than preferring Android because it is just easier to drop files onto the SD card (no farting around with iTunes). Both let me read emails (and the iOS default mail client is much nicer to use than the Android mess, including properly handling in-line quoting), both let me look at websites, both run Google Docs for basic word processing needs, both play music, both can play movies and such including less common formats such as mkv and embedded or standalone subtitles (VLC on iOS and MXPlayer on Android). They are different, but they are the same. One does not need to dominate over the other. It would be far better for each to learn to accommodate the other, so files can be sent directly between devices and, whatever...
...accommodation, not domination.
I have no interest in accommodating my enemies. They will convert or they will be ostracized until their beliefs are so marginally represented that they are irrelevant. Tolerance extends only so far. Namely: it does not tolerate the intolerant. As my views are largely focused around "the needs of the many", those that care only about "the needs of the one" must be fought without mercy or quarter until they are vanquished.
There is victory or there is death. History allows for no other alternatives.
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