So the internet didn’t turn out the way we hoped
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Imagine all the same tech is available at the same periods in time, but produced by different companies so you can't do the "Back to the Future Sports Almanac" thing.
Imagine you're 40 today. Would you rather have 10X as much money, but know you won't get Aol until your 55? No smartphones until you qualify for Social Security? Maybe 10X is worth it, but 5X? 2X? It helps put the value we get from the web in perspective.
Just once, I'd love to read a story about tech in a major pub from the perspective of someone 35-55-ish who remembers the pre-internet world — and can't stop raving about how much better everything is now.
I get that it might not be a majority position, but it's not insignificant, but it's almost entirely invisible in the NYT's tech coverage.
Moreover, I find it crazy how every misstep of American tech companies portends the end of democracy, but they have the gall to write: "In China, a whole new internet is flowering."
The harsh truth is that they still sucked before the internet if not worse. It is just that a middle or high school student could prove them woefully inaccurate with low level basics with an internet connection. Hell any teenager could ask them how goddamn dumb do they think they are about the moral panics flat out made up by them or credelously accepted like rainbow parties. Even the cool dude would gotten have bullshit claimed about getting seven different girls with color coordinated lipstick to blow him. And this isn't a purposely absurd rhetorical anecdote - these are real claims!
Nobody is flawless here - I believe the proper model is freedom of the press and calling out when the press is total fucking bullshit and letting it go out of business on its own.
Dude yes, and I'd do it for free.
First thing I'd do is go see the clash live.
Are we happier now? And would even a 2x salary not offset the worries one might have?
The world has matured a lot but if you have good income in a rich country you are in a pretty good place.
If your entire career or hobby doesn't exist yet I don't think that will make for a happy ending. Not that you can't pivot of course but that might be a gamble.
Sure, we have vast amounts of knowledge and entertainment at our fingertips, but the reality is that most of us are spending our days staring at Facestagram and binge watching Netflix.
Having enough money to be able to retire after a couple years and then spending the rest of my life traveling the world and reading every book I can doesn't sound so unenlightened in comparison.
+ FEA/FEM would make the airplanes you use to travel much safer.
+ The drugs that might not have been developed as quickly might prolong that retirement dramatically.
It's hard to disentangle all the ways tech has improved our life!
FWIW, I'd take a 50% pay cut to stay in the modern era...
- Escaping surveillance capitalism, facial recognition, pointless IoT, telemetry
- Assuming I get to work in the same industry, the opportunity to work full-time as a systems programmer on 1979-era tech
- Better weather
- More affordable housing
- Getting to live through the 80s as they happened
Even if the deal is altered so that magically the only difference between 1979 and now is the tech landscape - the first two items are compelling enough on their own.
Do you know anybody with a time machine that can hook me up?
I would have money to go on fancy ski trips, golf every weekend, eat fancy dinners, hike in exotic places. I could drive my dream car, etc.. etc.. I would also be able to retire early.
There are definitely many non-computer related hobbies to keep me interested.
For HN readers, what makes an era's technology appealing are the opportunities it presents to be creative and make a contribution. By that measure 1979 was not worse than today, in some ways it was more interesting because there was more variety and it wasn't clear which few technologies would shake out. Look at a 1979 issue of BYTE - in addition to Apple and Microsoft there were hundreds of other companies of similar size pursuing promising, eccentric, and/or dead-end ideas.
For another view of computing as seen from the 1970s, including many roads not taken, see Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming": http://worrydream.com/dbx/
And that means it would be in some institution or company, rather than in your home.
The big difference in 1979 would be that the consumer computing hardware available then was poorly affordable even for consume hardware, and terribly under-powered.
If you wanted to do anything beyond dinking around with some 1Mhz 8-bit processor with a few kilobytes of RAM, and weren't rich, you would only have access to decent hardware through work or school.
If you were interested in computing it wasn't so hard to get yourself to a company or school that would provide access. They didn't stop you from creating and inventing.
Nowadays computing is more dominated by a few large companies and institutions than it was then. Do you really own, control, understand, and trust your phone and other gadgets as well as they did then with their 8 bit processors?
Gates had access to mainframe computers capable of running an emulator of the 8 bit systems he was targeting, using which he was able to debug his BASIC interpreters.
> If you were interested in computing it wasn't so hard to get yourself to a company or school that would provide access.
And as for the rest, why they could just get a terminal with a 110 baud acoustically-coupled modem and try their luck breaking in.
Nobody was going to let you near equipment costing 100K's of dollars, without credentials, and even then, it would have been be difficult to use the equipment for hobby projects.
It's still possible for anyone to run their own stuff. And it's still a massive repository of all human knowledge, if you take into account all sources, legal or illegal.
What do we do from here? Stop being dumb and trying to change into subscription TV, for starters.
Fringe believers need actual education, not more control over the sources of their misinformation.
If we all hate ads enough and tracking, how about we invent a convenient way to pay for content across sites anonymously? I really like the design behind GNU Taler, which is a simple centralized cryptocurrency without the mining BS, so it can be used as a simple standin for currency, like PayPal. All we need to do is make a few popular content creation services use it, tipping small amounts for gratis content and larger amounts for access to pay restricted content. The only cookies that need to exist are proof of payment, cryptographically tied to the transaction.
I don't want to sign up for $10/month or whatever to access an article or view a video, I just want to access some given content. I do want to subscribe to content that I consume consistently to get a bulk discount, and I'd rather pay a little bit than see ads. That being said, every payment system so far is more work than it's worth to send a dollar or less, and the fees on top remove a lot of the value. I'd rather put $X into an account each month and click a button to send a small part of that to the content creator with little to no fees involved (maybe a one time load fee if anything).
The internet is only broken because the current solutions are insufficient and we've turned to legislation instead of innovation to solve the problem.
It was good, the internet was a 'cold medium' in Marshal McLuhan terms. If the internet of that time replaced the 'hot medium' of television, things could only get better I thought.
I was a fool! I never conceived that outrageous bullshit like antivax or God Emporer memes could get so much traction.
The stupidity and evil is coming from humanity - merely destroying the current bridge it is crossing won't remove it and will hinder everyone else more.
The headlines are usually clickbait and the subjects play with your fears and concerns. It’s really tiring.
Why are independent blogs bad again?