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.

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.

I still think information wants to be free. Democracy dies behind paywalls. It's this idea that everything must be for sale that's killing us.

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

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.

Which I think of often in this AI world.

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.

Now it feels like they're being used to extract value from people's lives.

If you're asked to lead someone somewhere, and you do that, then afterwards you'd say you LED them.

It reminds me of that Who song,
Meet the new boot / same as the old boot

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)

My computer time was severely restricted as a nineties kid but I feel like I got more of the optimism as well. Pity to see it fly. I feel disappointed on the daily.

But I wonder.

I think what made us optimistic is that we can work together and can outsmart bad things. And that’s still the case, though the boot wants us to think otherwise.

Everything we learned and will learn is useful and a tool in our hands.