Post B1Fa3XyMtsGfFEEESm by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
(DIR) More posts by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
(DIR) Post #B1FZI6X36dvMWppO4G by glyph@mastodon.social
2025-12-11T22:19:35Z
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I'm trying to shift my perspective from "there was a glorious computer revolution that empowered the user and disrupted authority and we have fallen from the heights of its transcendental grace" and towards the more accurate "my formative years just happened to coincide with a period where a few technical innovations briefly conferred a small amount of power on individuals and labor, and capital has been efficiently reversing that small disruption ever since" but it sure doesn't *feel* like that
(DIR) Post #B1FZI85pIpKxMz6fui by glyph@mastodon.social
2025-12-11T22:23:11Z
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It's not like the "computer industry" did this, that industry was IBM and Siemens and Xerox and Cray. At the start it was all missile targeting systems and concentration camp organizers. A few upstarts happened to notice that miniaturization and cost reduction in industrial process was going to open up new target markets (small office / home office / individual use); the fact that this gave people new capabilities was (from a corporate perspective) an unfortunate, and temporary, side effect
(DIR) Post #B1FZI9IGq2sx5rw7wu by glyph@mastodon.social
2025-12-11T22:45:58Z
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We should, by all means, do our darnedest to reclaim that agency, to use computers to lift up rather than punch down, and we have proof positive that it *is* possible, and we should draw hope from that. But we also need to contextualize that we are not attempting to return to a past; that past was always built on the surface of a soap-bubble; we need to carry the fragments of that past forward into a more durable future and to see every scrap of liberation we manage as a miracle in its own right
(DIR) Post #B1FZIAgPfln7P2EvDc by baconandcoconut@freeradical.zone
2025-12-11T22:49:18Z
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@glyph I like to think about it as an alternate future that we veered off the path of. Like we had this idea that computing was going to empower the masses, democratize access to information and power over the discourse. We didn't quite get it, but we tried a lot of times. I still have hope for our timeline.
(DIR) Post #B1FZIBfjzkqcTEvtoG by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-12-14T20:19:29Z
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(1/?)@baconandcoconut A couple of things, you're right that it wasn't a revolution, in the sense of the French, US or Russian revolutions. The period we've lived through was more like a speed run of the industrial "revolution", complete with Luddite rebellion. But with information processing tech not material processing tech.@glyph
(DIR) Post #B1FZIDieNuMaoqJFce by glyph@mastodon.social
2025-12-12T00:26:39Z
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Lots of replies expressing that this is deeply sad or depressing. I get that there's a bittersweet cast to this idea (given that it highlights how the "good old days" weren't so good), but it should be optimistic. The whole reason I'm trying to shift my viewpoint is that it feels *devastating* to have lost an entire revolution. Getting back a revolution is an impossible task. The point is, we didn't have a revolution. We had a few cool but promising ideas. We can get them back.
(DIR) Post #B1FZIFGicjD1cnFyMa by baconandcoconut@freeradical.zone
2025-12-11T22:52:26Z
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@glyph A thing that I take lot of encouragement from is knowing that for every famous moment of change and famous change maker (eg Rosa Parks) there were dozens, if not hundreds of earlier attempts that paved the way for the one time it was successful. I don't need people to visit the house I was born in in 50 years or ask me for advice on unrelated stuff. I am completely happy to be part of one of the hundred earlier attempts that paves the way.
(DIR) Post #B1FZIIds56Vm5T70Mq by glyph@mastodon.social
2025-12-12T01:54:22Z
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OK I think the missing piece ( thanks @aeva ) that makes it depressing is an aspect of this I assumed but did not state here: the PC revolution *did* meaningfully increase access to powerful computing technology for a huge proportion of the world. That technology *can* still be used to achieve meaningful increases in agency. We are never going back to a world where general-purpose computers are exclusively reserved for the military or billion-dollar corporations.
(DIR) Post #B1FZINxuI2Vcb3WZn6 by glyph@mastodon.social
2025-12-12T01:56:33Z
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When I say "we had a few promising ideas" and "we can get them back" I was trying to say, specifically, that we are not starting from zero; we don't have to re-run tech from 1978 forward. The big disruption in the market left us with a lot of *tools to work with* that we didn't have before, and while many of those tools have features that oppressors love, they're not particularly designed or suited for oppression; they were, are, and can be used in a panoply of different ways.
(DIR) Post #B1FZITGsYvej3LRIYa by glyph@mastodon.social
2025-12-12T01:57:45Z
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For example: commodity PC parts do exist now. Incredibly powerful parts that can be combined to do all kinds of things. Even suppliers like PCBWay put *way* more of the supply chain within reach of motivated individuals or small groups.I mean… not RAM. RAM definitely doesn't exist right now. But hopefully that's temporary?
(DIR) Post #B1FZIYFe2wdiUxtspM by glyph@mastodon.social
2025-12-12T02:37:36Z
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The point I was making in the earlier part of the thread here is that the corporations that made the revolution happen paid lip service to liberation, and it was a side-effect of some of their activities, but they were *never* interested in that as a goal, and there was never as *much* liberation as they talked about. But the tools were and are real and can and are used for good as much or more as they're used for evil.
(DIR) Post #B1Fa3XyMtsGfFEEESm by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-12-14T20:29:18Z
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(2/?)The Luddite rebels in the computing "revolution" were Project Gutenberg, the various people working on internetworking, TBL/W3C, the GNU Project/FSF, EFF, arXiv, Indymedia, Wikipedia, CC, etc;https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Free_Culture_TimelineSome of these people had corporate day jobs, and some of them ended up going to the Dark Side later on (eg Marx Andreeson). But that's not where any of this innovation was coming from, and some of these projects were explicitly anti-corporate (eg Indymedia).
(DIR) Post #B1FaMRa6t3FGvNtPMm by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-12-14T20:33:10Z
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(3/?)@baconandcoconut> computing was going to empower the masses, democratize access to information and power over the discourse. We didn't quite get itMaybe you need to be old enough to remember pre-internet life, but we totally did. When I was a teenager, most people had to travel to a library to access an encyclopedia, and it was all but impossible for us to publish audio or video. Voice calls to people overseas were prohibitively expensive, and sending written messages took weeks.
(DIR) Post #B1FayKdX9iicOEYoKG by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-12-14T20:40:00Z
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(4/?)The scanner darkly of the techlash is making us look back at the few things that didn't go our way, and make that the story of the net rebellion.Yes, "cloud" computing has re-centralised some computing. Yes corporate-run portals/ platforms attracted more of the people who came online in the last 20 years than community-run commons using open protocols. Yes surveillance advertising is horrific, and gig platforms have displaced some commons-based peer production;https://disintermedia.net.nz/crowdsourcing-or-outsourcing-who-benefits/
(DIR) Post #B1FbPc9a8W7IXJYmY4 by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-12-14T20:44:57Z
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(5/5)But overall, given the choice of living in the information technology of the early 1990s or today, there's no way I'd want to go back. We just need to continue the information technology rebellion. Try to link it into the larger revolution that's arguably needed to end the ecocidal industrial paradigm, and realise the promise of the political democracy rebellion that's been ongoing for centuries.
(DIR) Post #B1FdQUDrJDhO8X6W4e by jeffcliff@shitposter.world
2025-12-14T21:07:35.274151Z
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@glyph that isn't more accurate, though there really was a transcendental break with the @fsf leading the way