i grew up in the 90s, as a computer geek.
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i grew up in the 90s, as a computer geek. this meant i soaked in the techno-optimism of the age. it has been really disorienting seeing that techno-optimism lead to this current era of techno-authoritarianism, lead by the proponents of that techno-optimism.
the bright and shining future i was promised was a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.@pikhq The past tense of 'lead' is LED.
If you're asked to lead someone somewhere, and you do that, then afterwards you'd say you LED them.
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i grew up in the 90s, as a computer geek. this meant i soaked in the techno-optimism of the age. it has been really disorienting seeing that techno-optimism lead to this current era of techno-authoritarianism, lead by the proponents of that techno-optimism.
the bright and shining future i was promised was a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.@pikhq It felt like computers and the internet could be used - no, *were* being used - to add value to people's lives.
Now it feels like they're being used to extract value from people's lives.
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@pikhq we made a machine that can do anything and used it to do this
computers can do a lot of things but it's a far stretch to say "anything". there are a lot of things computers can't do and tasks for which they should not be relied on.
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@pikhq It felt like computers and the internet could be used - no, *were* being used - to add value to people's lives.
Now it feels like they're being used to extract value from people's lives.
@aspragg @pikhq I think it was the naïveté and ignorance of the technocratic middle class. We took the money of the oppressors and built things that we thought were egalitarian, but almost universally failed to prevent misuse. It wasn’t ill intended, but it is obvious in hindsight that we were co-opted with minimal resistance at every step.
Which I think of often in this AI world.
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@pikhq So you have an idea of how socialists and communists must have felt.
Well, that future is just postphoned, not cancelled.
After all, Marx said that socialism would need late-industrial society, and Lenin read that to mean that you could coup agrarian society and speedrun it through capitalism.
The problem with that is what happened: then the actual late-industrialised societies could start using that coup as a way to manufacture consent.
In a way collapse of the East Bloc is just a return to previously scheduled programming.
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@burnitdown we literally made a machine that can compute any computable function. that’s the church-turing thesis, the whole foundation of computing. every processor is an implementation of a turing machine; a universal machine
now
to be sure “any computable function” both stretches very far and is not very compatible with many tasks. that is rather my point, you may imagine my original response read with an inflection of horror and disdain on “this”, because I am horrified by what we collectively have done with the universal machine
I guess what I’m saying is, hard disagree on the first part: computers can, to a first approximation, do anything in a theoretical sense. but big agree with the second thing: there are a great many things they ought not be used to do that they are frequently pressed into service as anyway
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@pikhq The past tense of 'lead' is LED.
If you're asked to lead someone somewhere, and you do that, then afterwards you'd say you LED them.
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@burnitdown @Athena @pikhq this feels like unwarranted pedantry
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@pikhq How I long for all the optimistic sentiments about information wanting to be free and how everything would optimize itself for a Greater Good if only everyone had access to that freed information. Simpler times, certainly. Also: No more wars, that was a nice lookout.
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i grew up in the 90s, as a computer geek. this meant i soaked in the techno-optimism of the age. it has been really disorienting seeing that techno-optimism lead to this current era of techno-authoritarianism, lead by the proponents of that techno-optimism.
the bright and shining future i was promised was a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.@pikhq Similar, except I grew up in the 70s. The 80s did squeeze some of the optimism out of me, but maybe not enough to prepare me for what is happening these days.
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i grew up in the 90s, as a computer geek. this meant i soaked in the techno-optimism of the age. it has been really disorienting seeing that techno-optimism lead to this current era of techno-authoritarianism, lead by the proponents of that techno-optimism.
the bright and shining future i was promised was a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.@pikhq This is not the cyberpunk dystopia we were promised!
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i grew up in the 90s, as a computer geek. this meant i soaked in the techno-optimism of the age. it has been really disorienting seeing that techno-optimism lead to this current era of techno-authoritarianism, lead by the proponents of that techno-optimism.
the bright and shining future i was promised was a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.@pikhq as long as you have google and microsoft owning the web and personal computer space, then yes, enshitification will be inevitable and rife. On top of that you have the AI bros Meta etc ruining humanity
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I am slightly older and grew up with tech in 1980s, it always started out as something for the military/industrial complex (especially nuclear weapons related stuff) so I never really believed in the techno-optimism of the 90s (it was all crumbs from the table after the temporary lull in the Cold War)
@vfrmedia I too started in the 80s but in the computer networking space connected with Bell Labs. Man what a pace that was. Then I moved over to Intel charged with explaining it all to the techs in that space. By the late 90s we were ready to launch a web tablet plus home wireless network bundle. The week b4 our launch date (50 thousand units) the tech bubble burst and our group got disbanded. It's been downhill ever since. These days I barely touch my laptop finding it very triggering. I really feel for everyone who is a part of tech but hates the bigger picture.
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I am slightly older and grew up with tech in 1980s, it always started out as something for the military/industrial complex (especially nuclear weapons related stuff) so I never really believed in the techno-optimism of the 90s (it was all crumbs from the table after the temporary lull in the Cold War)
We were the generation of cyberpunk literature (even before Gibson), reruns of sci-fi television and Saturday matinee movies replete with evil computers, and a reboot of a cartoon series that lampooned futurism of prior generations. Plus Challenger blew up live on classroom televisions.
Optimism wasn't quite the latchkey ethos.
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i grew up in the 90s, as a computer geek. this meant i soaked in the techno-optimism of the age. it has been really disorienting seeing that techno-optimism lead to this current era of techno-authoritarianism, lead by the proponents of that techno-optimism.
the bright and shining future i was promised was a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.As a programmer kid before "geeks" were cool, watched despairingly as the industry masculinized and the hobby professionalized, even ahead of the fetishization that was STEM.
Any optimism was coded within a gendered framework of power, prestige, and gatekept identity-group cohesion. The seeds were there, though most at the time were apologists for the planting.
But hey, myself was thinking of computer programming in terms of Der Zauberlehrling, before even emerging from my tweens, so perhaps my perspective was always going to be of the killjoy.
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i grew up in the 90s, as a computer geek. this meant i soaked in the techno-optimism of the age. it has been really disorienting seeing that techno-optimism lead to this current era of techno-authoritarianism, lead by the proponents of that techno-optimism.
the bright and shining future i was promised was a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.@pikhq That appears to be the end state of libertarian technologists.
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