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  • I'll be optimistic about technology when the last techbro is strangled with the entrails of the last angel investor

  • Get rid of the billionaire tech-lords. The ones that create the only new tech we’re allowed to have: fees, ads, and enshittification.

  • Decomodify software. Refuse to respect copyright laws for software, or mandate that all software must be GPL or an equivalent restrictive license.

    Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.

    If you are a public institution of any kind, you should not be using corporate, proprietary software, no exceptions.

    Closed source software and hardware is largely what allowed massive corpos to take over the software and hardware scene, and it's what creates the incentive for silicon valley tech bros to create new technology solely in the hopes of being acquired for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars by some massive megacorp.

    Corpos and private equity scumbags wouldn't be interested in acquiring these companies if they knew all the code and technology was under a GPL-like license, and anybody could take that tech, modify it, redistribute it, fork it, rebrand it, etc.

    • Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.

      Schools included.

      Many students today don't touch a personal computer a lot outside of school and then workplace.

      My conspiracy theory:

      I suspect that's the desired effect of "smartphones", and also the reason "smartphones" without keyboards are such an industry consensus. Not them being cheaper. Not them looking nicer. First, keyboards can be very sexy (think ZX Spectrum, or Blackberry for PDAs), second, however they look, touchscreen UIs are PITA, third, they are not that more expensive.

      The strategy thus is that entertainment personal computing should be pressed out to devices hardly usable for work. So that "normal" people would gain their experience with that, and thus not gain the experience accompanying normal personal computing. As in - tinkering, customization, creation.

      Because I remember how in my childhood any kid with a PC at home would do some tinkering and exploration. Today's kids scroll, and scroll, and scroll.

      Mind-boggling actually, my sister (now kinda helpless with computers) was making websites and RPGs with RPGMaker2000, my younger cousin who is a designer was - I actually don't remember what she was doing, but something connected to editing amateur films they were making with my older cousin, who's a software engineer now.

      Getting back to various pressures, this reduces the space for personal computing free from corporate and governmental policies. And this also reduces the unwanted effects from more creative entertainment - people who do something as a hobby are a direct competition to corporate gaslighting. The contrast is like between an 18yo girl on a rock festival and a Soviet propaganda poster. The latter never wins. And such a situation sadly negatively affects the chances of people getting the kinds of hobbies corps wouldn't want them to have.

  • In a capitalist economy, corporations act within the free market established by the government. Government is responsible for establishing fair and transparent ways of doing business, such as maintaining a currency, and legal and accounting frameworks. But that’s not enough.

    The article has a good starting point about breaking up monopolies to reestablish competition. We’ve let so many monopolies grow in the last few decades, to our detriment.

    But that’s not enough. It’s also governments role to incorporate externalities into the market so corporate actions are fairly priced instead of costing society, and to ensure the market is working for the citizens. As prime examples, corporations need to bear the costs of resource extraction or an imposition on the environment. How could the free market work effectively, if some corporations are allowed to impose costs on society that are not priced into their goods? They’re effectively being subsidized, given an unfair advantage against their competitors, while also working against the future of the citizens forming this market.

    But a fair market is only fair, if all the participants have standing, including the consumers who are the focus of the market, and workers who make it all happen. Currently we’ve let corporation ps dominate other roles in the market, we’re following a corporate economy and of course are not happy with the results. For example, consider “terms of service” imposed for just about everything these days. They’re always phrased as a contract and as if customers agree, yet are completely one sided, imposed without recourse or even any reasonable standard for a legal contract, and without any real choice. How can that be called a free market?

    We could go a long way toward a free market that serves society if government does it’s part of establishing fairness, transparency, honesty for all entities in that market, and remembering that both governments and the market serve society, rather than the other way around

  • Replace goodwill with encryption. That's about data and metadata safety, but the same logic applies to everything else. No trust to people interested in breaking it.

    As in - browsers' developers' goodwill was intended to keep Web standards' race in check. Protocols' extensibility was intended to allow for future backward-compatible development.

    This was a wrong idea.

    Gemini is one example of solving it, but one can imagine many others.

    And it's fine if we have 12 Web protocols each for some specific idea of the Web. Among them some, say, would allow people to easily create webpages like year 1996, but sufficient for modern tasks and without all the bother with DNS and hosting (perhaps there is a p2p solution), Telegram shows that this is in huge demand. Many such variants are better than one overly complex, dangerous, corporate and oligopolized Web.

    That's similar to how it seemed working anyway, we had e-news for global forums, webpages for personal pages, IRC for chats, ICQ\AIM\MSN for DMs, e-mail for reliable DMs, well, everyone remembers that time.

    Nostr is a very raw, but maybe interesting idea for public social media.

    Funny how Unix philosophy always shows itself in unexpected places, yes? =)

150 comments