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Comment by guax | Hacker News Reader

> not much have changed.

So much have changed. The way we shop, travel, navigate a town, the way we socialize, receive information. My formative memory is during the transition from computers are a furniture piece and internet a thing you do to being on your pocket with constant high speed connection and the difference is incredible.

I was also part of the people that thought everyone having access would turn out a lot better than it ended up being. I think the issue is not that it did not change much, is that good changes got offset a bit by a lot of very bad outcomes.

No comment on the distribution and concentration part, that one I agree.

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In the limited pockets of society you experience directly. How much has changed in the relationship between the West and Asia, the economic inequalities globally, or even in the West, etc... if you look at macro, everything moves according to laws that have little to do with the even distribution of technology and a lot to do with the decision makers that get to pick how that distribution takes place.

Just because something doesn't impact geopolitics doesn't mean it isn't important

That's not what I'm saying, and I don't know where you inferred that from. I'm saying that tech has changed the world in the way we experience it, for sure, but it has been driven by political choices, more that drive political choices itself if we look at the bigger picture.

Isn't that exactly one of the interesting tensions here?

You original point is that at a macro level it's driven by the elite decision makers not technology. I think the point you are perhaps missing is how much of that is constrained by the distribution of power and how technology can change that distribution.

I think there is no doubt that access to the internet and information ( and propaganda ) , and self-organised mass communication has had an impact - that's why countries switch off the internet when trying to suppress an uprising for example.

A lot of previously stable countries are starting to feel 'ungovernable' in the sense that's it's increasingly difficult for the established order to create and maintain it's preferred narrative.

If you look back in history at the last big information revolution - the printing press - the consensus is that it played a significant role in things like the French or American revolution or the breaking the power of centralised religion.

And sure those in power are scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and they may succeed - but that just illustrates the potential transformative power.

Wasn't the whole Arab Spring in 2011 due, in a large part, to technology/twitter/mass-communication and organization enabled by the internet?

Maybe I am misremembering it.

That example alone feels enough.

Huh? What are you talking about?

The relationship between the West and Asia in its current form (Asia as a manufacturing powerhouse, the West as hub of global finance, outsourcing all over the world, JIT manufacturing) all this stuff is totally dependent on instant communication over the internet.

We would not be able to coordinate the world's production activity from Manhattan without the internet. Capital would be far less accumulated and allocated in a way less granular way. Demand signal would be completely different, based way more on brick and mortar. Feedback loops between capital and demand would be constrained to different geographic areas which would make basically all markets way more segregated...

So it changes labor, production, demand, markets, culture, media... I think that's basically everything!

I'll tell you. I would have a different job, my city would have a different population, I would spend my time after work differently, I would shop differently, I would watch different movies and listen to different music.

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