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Comment by Hammershaft | Hacker News Reader

I think it's very sad that it's such a common sentiment that one of the joys of the past in tech was the optimism.

Me too. I'd love to find some space to work in that rekindles some of that. I love tech, it's a lot of fun, and you can do really cool things with it. But it kind of went from the people in that article who were "hackers", to people like PG who is a hacker too, but urged people to use their skills to set themselves up so they could work on cool things, to just being a business. Nothing wrong with businesses, I'm not some kind of purist hermit. But I miss that air of doing things because they're cool.

The past wasn't optimistic, we merely ignored negative Nancies because they had nothing to say. In the last 10 years for some reason we gave them the megaphone and let them dictate how everything is done.

Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

Before the "negative Nancies" came the malevolent Mallorys. They built and popularized centralizing technologies of the shapes that investment capital could understand and exploit, foregoing all those exciting visions of distributed empowerment. Those newly created levers of centralized power then attracted the politickers focused on shaping society in their various images from the top-down.

(Also don't make the mistake of thinking that these groups continually fighting over how the centralized power is used means that any one of them is aligned with individual freedom)

It's more that the "negative nancies" became necessary nancies. Back when Amazon sold books, they became a considerable player but otherwise big whoop. Now they threaten to dominate logistics AND hosting, and are expanding their grip and stamping out competition in other markets. Google is pretty much synonymous with the web. Meta owns a big chunk of messaging and social media. Computers used to not matter much but now we're glued to one

It costs even more to be reckless today.

Re: "whitey on the moon" - I'm not sure the space program would be my first target there but I think it makes a more poetic contrast and forces people to pay attention by targeting a beloved cultural narrative. Cyberpunk - by my reckoning a bit later - has been preaching a very similar message of massive inequality in the presence of incredible technology and wealth disparity and power concentration. And yet that doesn't draw the same ire. I guess in that case it's easier to dismiss the core message because robot limbs and cool neon lights are too much of a distraction.

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