I used to feel excited about new screen technology and I used to upgrade my TV / monitor for watching movies pretty regularly. But now that all the newer models are "smart" which effectively means they limit my freedom, spy on me, and shove ads into my face, I'm trying to avoid upgrading as much as I can.
Similarly, I used to feel enthusiastic about all the cool new stuff Apple would put into MacBooks. But then they became more and more totalitarian and by now with Gatekeeper, Signing, mandatory App Store, and all that image scanning plans, I feel like I'm at best a tolerated visitor on MacOS, but I'm very far away from the power that root granted me when I was a kid.
Big Tech is about taking control from our hands and put it into stockholders' or whoever has money for ads. They're trying to sweeten the deal by making things ever 'easier' to use (which aligns in part with removing user control). In fact things have become harder to use, because using should mean understanding, adapting, repurposing. Some products can't even be resold anymore...
I agree with your starting expression a lot. I worry that this reflection on how we've been muddied though shades what is valuable.
Microsoft used to ask, in their ad campaigns, "Where do you want to go?" There was a semi-symbootic relationship, part machine, part man, working together, with users still expected to be prosumers, being invested in their tech, & working it, setting it up, customizing it, exploring it. The personal computer was a blank slate we got to push forward, each of us. And yes by huge contrast, the modern tech world is much more pre-set up, easier to adopt, and most of it runs on far off clouds we have no real control into.
We've arrived at a much stricter consumerism, with prebaked applications, with less ability to explore & push frontiers. A couple hours of poking around will probably expose almost all capabilities of an app or network today. Fewer & fewer systems enable maturation of the user into an expert.
There was a great submission today, Maggie Appleton talking about Programming Portals, ehich talks some to how we might start to open windows between the glossy, pre-baked GUIs that define modern consumer computing, and a more empowered realm that begins to let users Under the Hood[2]-- another fine submission today!
There's also the Malleable Systems Collective which very much is about reempowering users.
Im less concerned with the bad. It'll sort itself out, if we can reemerge a good. But weust envision & create new good computing, that befits this much more connected time we are arriving at.
I used to feel excited about new screen technology and I used to upgrade my TV / monitor for watching movies pretty regularly. But now that all the newer models are "smart" which effectively means they limit my freedom, spy on me, and shove ads into my face, I'm trying to avoid upgrading as much as I can.
Similarly, I used to feel enthusiastic about all the cool new stuff Apple would put into MacBooks. But then they became more and more totalitarian and by now with Gatekeeper, Signing, mandatory App Store, and all that image scanning plans, I feel like I'm at best a tolerated visitor on MacOS, but I'm very far away from the power that root granted me when I was a kid.