> Americans surprised when their economic and political system worked exactly in line with historical trends.
But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.
So we just need a nice all encompassing global conflict again that largely leaves the American industrial base alone and then when it is the only one standing there can be another growth in the American middle class.
In all of these cases real incomes grew enormously. Yes, a big part of that was starting from a low base after the destruction of WWII. But I'd argue it was also a strong consequence of the technology of the time: the was an explosion in consumer goods enabled by new tech, but companies still needed lots of employees to create these products. In the past ~25 years I believe tech has instead allowed more wealth to accrue to a smaller and smaller subset of people.
Yes, all fueled by ridiculously abundant/cheap oil. This is something that might not happen in Earth's history ever again, not to mention the climate change issues (which at least weren't clear until much later, 80s rather than 50s for oil depletion issues).
Yeah, I'm personally of the opinion that the 50s-60s economical benefits are not generally sustainable. Similar to China's rise up until now, it's the result of a one time boom often as a zero-sum game with other parts of the world. The humans on the planet are definitely getting a more comfortable life over time, but any individual state with our current political systems I don't feel ever leads to that 50s-60s level of purchasing power for a long time.
I'm not sure about that. Very little was digital back then. It was far easier to claim lack of earnings back then than it is now, even with the high rates
The political philosophy guided by neoclassical economics; the political economic philosophy that has governed most public discourse since the early 80s.
Investopedia seems to agree with you: "Neoclassical economics theories underlie modern-day economics, along with the tenets of Keynesian economics. Although the neoclassical approach is the most widely taught theory of economics, it has its detractors."
According to https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/5wdup7/are_ec..., however: "The vast majority of all economists today work in the New neoclassical synthesis. This paradigm is essentially a combination of the best ideas from the New Keynesian and neoclassical trains of thought. The idea of separate schools isn't nearly as relevant as it used to be - these days ideas that work get added to the synthesis regardless of where they come from."
Kind of, yeah. I remember being a teenager in the 90's and it really felt like things were going to be radically different, and better. The cold war was over (well, we thought it was), anybody could talk to anybody else anywhere, anybody could publish anything, and surely this would mean regular people would be more empowered than ever before, right?
It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk and they had figured out how to do cool amazing things and make money and not be evil.
Sadly, it was not to be. But maybe I was just a naive teenager.
Naive twenty something (back then) here. The latter half of the 1900s changed so drastically that yeah... a Star Trek like utopia seemed plausible, if not inevitable.
It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend.
We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants.
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Right. Unfortunately I don't have the capital, but would love to work on the problem... even for free/cheap in my spare time. And will.
For example, been testing the new Starlite tablet with Phosh... and it is soooo close! I'm about to start learning how to develop for it. But it would go faster if say... starlabs, purism, system76, pine, riscv companies, FLOSS peeps would collaborate more effectively. They do to some extent, but don't often push in the same direction.
One major problem is the quality of documentation of interfaces. One of those boring things most don't want to do without a paycheck. Despite decades of experience with Linux I don't (yet) know where to start with wayland, dbus, gstreamer, gtk, etc. A book that pulled all this together for developers would be a big enabler. Think it would need to be sponsored as it won't be sustainable on its own.
"It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse"
I think this doesn't leave enough blame at more technical people embracing the same platforms as normies. After years of bulletin boards and forums where people built up small communities online, everyone migrated to behemoths that actively undercut any chance of that kind of community (examples including Facebook's restrictive interfaces and aggressive push to merge personal and online lives, Twitter's character limit, Reddit's tree-based ranked discussion structure or its obliteration of any iota of personalisation to profiles).
Even with the current BlueSky boom it's wild that so many techies tried to persevere with Twitter in the last few years (the boosting of subscribers to the top of all replies should've been instant death).
The few forums I was on back then that actually survived that mass migration are _still_ around and some of the only fun parts of the internet.
not an expert at all but maybe if ipv6 was embraced it'd result in people returning to doing a lot more grassroots stuff and just by being fun it'd massively challenge the grimness of the last 10 or so years of an increasingly restrictive online experience.
Ok, but I think the gravity of normal folks bends the industry whether we techies like it or not.
To further subdivide the techie contingent, lots of them have no problem using Windows even though Linux/FLOSS has been viable for a decade or two. So even most techies don't care about the problem.
I don't know how much the internet changed or I changed. Finding some niche forums on Prodigy (so not even the internet) and talking to a small group of people felt a lot different than just going to reddit and finding a forum for whatever random thing I'm looking up.
Did it? I personally feel the pervasive optimism lived on in the zeitgeist until about 2015 or 2016. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Trump being elected is what ended it; rather, I believe it was the hyper-polarization (already being talked about by then) of that election that really quashed it.
Everyone's different but I think I felt like the increasing polish and commercialization of the web killed it slowly. And that makes sense to an extent, as there was money to be made people would invest more (and have entire teams) in making ad-optimised content instead of just having one person cranking out homestarrunner or thebestpageintheuniverse or what have you.
Also, the closing of open systems. This whole idea of "whatsapp me or slack me or discord me" - that's ridiculous! It's _obvious_ that I should be able to use whatever client I like to talk to people, just like I did with gaim and AIM and MSN messenger and ICQ etc. etc. Now we're perilously close to the point where websites will just block you if you're not logged in (conveniently via Google using their browser, of course! Firefox users can get lost.) I can even get the need for it as AI makes bots increasingly good, but it sucks.
Edit: Also re: open systems - we went from default-open with desktop computers to default-closed on phones. Now you and your work exist at the pleasure of and for the purpose of enriching Apple and Google. Android SHOULD be something you can run and do with as you please, but of course you can't if you want to be able to do things like use your banking app.
Years before 2015 “the internet” for most people had been replaced by “social media” and its was pretty well understood that big tech companies now had a means and motivation to monetize our most toxic traits.
The optimism about the internet’s influence peaked when things were highly decentralized with personal websites, mailing lists, web rings, etc. it was hard to imagine an entity big enough that could manipulate “all of the internet”.
Eventually centralizing forces like google/yahoo/myspace made things much more usable, for a while, until their hacker-ethos were overtaken by an MBA-ethos.
I’m not sure that positivity died with 9/11, but I can look back and recall a large number of people struggling after the 2008 crisis, and whole economies never entirely recovering, and so optimism had taken some hard knocks well before 2015/2016.
Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?
For me and my cohort (I'm in my early 50s now), yes, absolutely. Again, from my point of view, things got even worse post 2008, with the rise of mobile and social media. The tech world specifically evolved in directions dramatically opposed to the pro-human mood of the 90's towards a much more predatory stance.
Interesting, based on the replies here, maybe it's a somewhat generational thing. I was born in 89, so I remember 9/11 when it happened and the wars that followed, but it wasn't something that I put that much thought into. Similarly, I was barely out of high school and into college in 2008. My main concern was playing video games with my friends and trying to come up with excuses to skip my Minnesota History class.
I'm sure generational differences are a big part of it. I was already in the workforce by the mid 90's, and honestly, it was such an optimistic time, for everyone. Lots of hope for the future. I wish I could share what it was like. It was a remarkable, special time, and even though we thought we knew it, we didn't really appreciate what the actual special aspects were until long after the fact.
I don't think it did. The utopian optimism of tech changing the world for the better epitomized much of the 2000s and 2010s. Neither did the author of the featured article, which is referring to the current day as the death of tech utopianism, even though I don't think they argued this point well, considering that they simply pointed towards a selection of high profile examples of right wing members in tech as evidence of the demise of utopian optimism overall.
90s scifi had some penetrating foresight tho... I feel like we're inching closer to Neuromancer's universe as the war festers on in Ukraine, Japan keeps on roboticizing and somehow a mixture of corporate and populist right wing captures the electorates worldwide.
>It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk
I think that's very much an insider's view, the sentence is in particular funny because "cyberpunk" is not exactly a term of endearment. Mike Pondsmith and William Gibson are hardly disenchanted Zoomers or Millennials. I think Google still does seem a bit cyberpunk, and I don't mean it as a compliment.
I think the John Barlow, cyberlibertarian school of thought had always more to do with what's later been dubbed the "Californian Ideology" rather than technology per se. I don't think it was ever a mainstream view.
Well, maybe it's because I'm Californian. I don't think I'd call myself an insider, I never worked at Google and I'm from Sacramento (which felt painfully un-cool back then!). And the Google I'm talking about would be staffed by Gen X'ers/Xennials at the time mostly - Someone who's 25 in 2001 was born in 1976.
I don't think an embrace of cyberpunk ideas, whatever those are, was entirely mainstream, but the idea that the world was opening up, the internet interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it, and it would help bring down dictatorships, was definitely in the ether.
It definitely brought about a lot of positive changes. It's fair to be disappointed that some of the things we hoped for didn't materialize, and that a lot of negatives were even worse than expected.
The historical trend is for improvements followed by lulls. But we never can predict in advance how far the improvements will go. We do feel that there was a lot left on the table.
If you were alive back then: yeah, pretty much? The expectation was that merely getting a tech education would seamlessly and immediately roll you into a six figure job no matter which industry you were interested in, because much like AI today, tech was literally seen as the magic ingredient that had been missing all this time.
Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.
In the year 2000, Google was fresh, the Internet was becoming a normal thing for people to use and it was supposed to get rid of the old power structures and bring about a new age of egalitarianism and meritocracy. Plus I was younger and much more idealistic. And to be fair, it has caused revolutions and caused new power structures to be established, and torn down old ones. But as the old adage goes, it turns out that power corrupts. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I'd like to pretend I'd do better with my money if I'd invented PageRank back in the 90's, but having seen how money corrupts people, I'm not convinced that I would.
But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.