[tehjoker]

This is a just so story. The main issue today is the lack of democracy in the country and the use of technology to surveil and govern a restive population as the government has less and less legitimacy. The narrative you are telling is the heroic tale of computing and the internet c. 1990-2010.

Yasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the computers were going to be linked to government databases and share data on anti-Vietnam war activists. Despite protestations, activists were correct and this happened, and now it happens at huge scale.

http://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley

[mikestorrent]

Yes, and RMS was correct in his Right to Read and so many other things - we're seeing the slow death of the never-enshrined-in-law right to compute. Luckily open-source is big enough to slow this down; we should all be pretty amazed and appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all, out there, because it is a profoundly democratizing thing.

[jbxntuehineoh]

> appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all

thank, mr 习

[fwipsy]

I don't think parent commenter means tech in the modern sense. Seems like they're describing a transition to democracy which started centuries ago, not decades.