I miss being a teenager and thinking pervasive computing and connectivity would bring freedom rather than just rebuild traditional social structures but with complicated software mixed into them.
I miss being a teenager and thinking pervasive computing and connectivity would bring unbounded forms of communication & evolving, personalized mediums & interchanges rather than just ongoing increasing centralization of all speech activity into fewer and fewer large hubs (which we then under ever-increasing pressure war over how they ought be run).
I'm on the fediverse, where text is hosted almost entirely with two systems, Mastodon & Pleroma, which is better but still such a limited form of diversity/alternative. Projects such as scuttlebutt/ssb & gemini come to mind, as other people trying things. There's so much anger & distrust & hate of Big Tech, but I see almost none of the proportioned response I would expect, none of the resistance, the trying & supporting other attempts. The main thing that makes me miserable is how miserable everyone else seems to want to be. Go forth, find your golden paths all. The future is open to us. Build it. If we build it, we will come. I believe.
It’s a shame that this thing that excited me (internet) has become something that I now consider a huge barrier. Not that we should be without the benefits; I simply don’t know how we reconcile the vile aspects.
Eternal September:
Here, we have Mockapetris and Dunlap reflecting on rolling out DNS to UC Berkeley (the B in BSD) between 1985 and 1988 [0, 1]:
> Educating even the sophisticated Berkeley user community on the new form of [DNS] addressing turned out to be a major task.
They're complaining about how some of the most technically inclined users and researchers at one of the most technically advanced organizations couldn't RTFM. It seems like, depending on your perspective, the Eternal September might've started a bit early that decade.
"Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence."
–Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
DMCA 1201 is totally useless at its state purpose (stopping piracy) because pirates can distribute their circumvention tools in the same channels as the pirated materials. If you could stop that then you wouldn't need DMCA 1201. So what it does in practice is act as an anti-competitive cudgel to prohibit adversarial interoperability.
The CFAA does something similar -- it's excessively broad and basically everything it prohibits which is actually bad was already prohibited by other laws.
There are a wide variety of financial regulations (mandatory chargebacks, KYC) that effectively require the result that you can't have a low-friction anonymous digital payments system. This means that if you want to consume media on the internet where the author gets paid instead of them paying to host content, without all your media consumption ending up in a dangerous central database associated with your social security number, it has to be supported by advertising. And then we're back to the dangerous central database.
These laws are harmful to a free and democratic society.