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The people in support of this horrific plan need to listen to PHK's advice at FOSDEM[1]. It may seem like he's talking about a certain three-letter-agency in that talk, but his thesis is far more general. It's a warning about how frighteningly trivial it is to prevent a whole crowd of techies from addressing core political/sociological problems by distracting them with useless technical distractions. The question has nothing to do with what "URL" means, the various ideas about how to make an efficient UI, or even the current knowledge and skill-level (or lack thereof) found in the median user. Those are distractions. Instead, the only question any of you should be asking is if removing URL visibility serves, in the long run, to educate and empower users, or if it instead removes power from users - even those that do not yet exercise that power. Often - and especially here on HN - there is a tendency in geeks to avoid the hard political and sociological issue. Unfortunately, some issues are inherently non-technical at their core, and attempting to avoid those hard questions by limiting attention to the technical minutia, a political or sociological choice is still being made. All too often, it is leaving that choice to those who seek to steal power, making those that avoid the real question into useful idiots. Because this is a crowd that enjoys scifi, a quote from the end of Sleeping In Light: "[Babylon 5] taught us that we had to create the future, or others will do it for us.
It showed us that we have to care for each other – because if we don't, who will?
And that strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely of places.
Mostly, though, I think it gave us hope that there can always be new beginnings,
even for people like us."
Instead of giving the "large serving" of offensive language that this proposal does deserve, I suggest instead that there is still time to choose to create a future that includes a free internet similar to the one we've enjoyed, instead of another step towards the encroaching "dumbed down" corporate nonsense that treats users as idiots and actual internet addresses being only shown to some new corporate/techie priesthood.[1] http://video.fosdem.org/2014/Janson/Sunday/NSA_operation_ORC... |