[dzink]

The goal should be to not repeat Star Wars - new technology that gives power and advantages is always adopted by companies first, then governments, and then it’s used to subjugate people. In Star Wars you have the trade federation abusing little planets. Little planet leaders go to government for help and vote a more “strong” approach to government that will “fight for the little guy”. An authoritarian leader steps in and uses the new technology to subjugate galaxies. In Foundation that leader can also clone himself, leading to 1000 years of fascism. Today prize camels and horses are being cloned in the middle east. Fiction is a guidebook sometimes.

[dredmorbius]

It's not that the Internet is repeating Star Wars. It's that Star Wars was a fictitious allegory of what power and capabilities provide, and should serve as a warning of what might happen ... or is happening. (I'd hesitate to call The Force a technology per se, though there are other technologies portrayed in the series ... little of which I've watched since Ep. 4-6.)

Technology is a force multiplier, genenerally, and new technologies, after an initial period of disruption, tend to either be adopted by existing power elites, or form new power elites, often a combination of both. I've only come to realise this myself relatively late in the game.

It's instructive to revisit much of the early writing of the Internet. Much of that was strongly hagiographic and deludedly optimistic, but there were exceptions. Andrew J. Shapiro's The Control Revolution (1999) got far more right than wrong.

<https://www.worldcat.org/title/41076267>

<https://archive.org/details/controlrevolutio0000shap>

<http://libgen.vg/book/index.php?md5=9CCE57E117DD4213F395FE07...>