| HN Mirror

>The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

Nobody is denying it, indeed we see many related development.

However, it's not only about "the lost future that never comes", I think it's also due to the people being increasingly alienated about the current state of computing. Primarily, it's about the lost mentality of the future.

Cyberpunk promised a future where computing is the disruptive technology. Since 2006, the ever-increasing clock speed came to a halt. Since 2013, the general performance of Intel processors remained constant. Selling of PCs keeps declining. No major breakthrough in practical operating systems are made beyond Unix (http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf).

Cyberpunk promised a future where megacorps and governments being increasingly oppressive to the population with technology, it has occurred as predicted. Cyberpunk also promised the "cyberspace" is going to be the electronic frontier where technologists reclaimed liberty... Today, the damn web browser that runs all the craps written in Electron and JavaScript is hardly the "frontier", neither Facebook, Twitter and the endless timeline of buzz, which constitute 90% of the Internet activities count. Also, from 2000-2013, decentralization was killed, not built. Move importantly, today, we don’t even know how to waste time on the Internet anymore (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068138). Though, It, still, has arguably occurred to some extents too, but progressed slowly, even the basic tech like HTTPS was only deployed after Snowden.

A future where anything seemed possible and all of it was magical is definitely gone. But the new generation of developers, armed with decentralization, P2P, cryptography, and trustless system, no matter if it's going to be successful or not, would bring the Internet back to its cyberpunk ideals, revive the dream and set the history forward.