[shantly]

> Fuck tech. Fuck computers. What a waste of a career.

I'm coming around to a the-medium-is-the-message / technological-determinism perspective on the Internet, that it cannot exist as anything like the way it is now and mostly be a force for good. Just can't.

Always on ubiquitous wireless Internet. Decent battery tech so you don't need a power cable to everything. Low-powered cheap computers and sensors (cameras, microphones, those creepy human-body radars Google's about to start putting in phones). Storage so cheap you can collect everything. Algorithms to sift through it.

I don't see any possible way for all those things to exist and for the results not to be, overall, disastrous.

I also see exactly no way to stop it.

[homonculus1]

I'm "opesstimistic" about it. I think the average person is simply too stupid to foresee the problems. It takes a broader view to see the parallels with history and how these technologies can (likely will) lead to abhorrent abuse. I don't mean to be arrogant but I think the average person lacks the mental depth to look past the immediate convenience or to be skeptical of the glitzy sales pitch.

Stallman, Snowden, the EFF, and the rest of us are Cassandras. People just don't give a shit. Let alone the future, people are still trying to roll back protections we got in the 18th Century. There just isn't going to be a public consciousness of how we need to limit power from using tech that was invented a decade ago, no matter how many articles or blog posts those weird nerds write about their tinfoil paranoia.

I think we're just doomed to suffer the consequences again and learn from the suffering. It will be hell on earth for a lot of people but the light at the end of the tunnel is that tyranny is an objectively inferior mode of organization, and it always has to collapse eventually.