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Cycles of optimism and pessimism

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A post from a Ghopher "Phlog", and if you've read many Gopher Phlogs,
you'll identify that it's the standard Gopher Phlog topic, but
probably better written than most.

Cycles of optimism and pessimism
 By Solderpunk, 2019-06-01
- gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/cycles-of-optimism-and-pessimism.txt

"My overall attitude toward the online world has tended to go through
 long cycles of alternating optimism and pessimism.

 I started using unix, learning to program and learning about
 networking around 2000.  During the early naughties, I was generally
 feeling pretty good about the whole scene.  Mozilla were doing a great
 job championing the cause of a web based on open standards, and
 Firefox helped to break the IE browser monopoly.  OpenOffice offered
 the prospect of doing the same for word processing.  The idea that
 proprietary file formats were evil had a lot of traction and wide
 awareness, and big-profile free software projects were addressing
 these major problems.  The One Laptop Per Child project came along and
 for the first time exposed me to the idea that computers could be not
 just fun and interesting and useful in a practical sense, but that
 they could actually be a force for genuine good.  During this time I
 bought myself a domain name, setup my own web and email server, and
 poured a lot of energy into being part of what I felt was a community
 with a strong moral compass that I believed in, and which was going
 to make the world a progressively better place.

 But the OLPC project failed, and Facebook came along, and Twitter came
 along, and smartphones became a thing, and it kind of seemed like
 everybody stopped caring about the things we previously had (this was
 actually more or less what my second ever phlog post[1] was about).
 By the time the...teens?  twenty-teens?  whatevers...rolled around I
 was starting to feel disenchanted.  The Snowden leaks, and the
 general lack of serious response to them, were a bit of a turning
 point.  I started to get seriously pissed at how the people who I felt
 *should* have been leading the way out of the mess didn't seem to have
 the guts to actually do it.  I read a transcript of a speech by Jacob
 Appelbaum about how he believed the US government had compromised his
 iPhone and were using it to spy on him, and I just wanted to scream at
 him "why the fuck do you still *have* the thing, then?!".  I read an
 interview with Bruce Schneier where he talked about his iPhone, and
 said that expecting people to live without iPhones wasn't a reasonable
 response to privacy problems with them and instead we should ask our
 governments to pass laws to protect us.  I was so frustrated!  I
 thought "Bruce, you're older than I am, you lived a long time without
 an iPhone and your life, while less convenient because of it, was in
 no sense miserable because of it.  Of *course* we can give them up!".
 I wondered why so many people and organisations who espoused
 principles in favour of a decentralised internet were nevertheless
 on Twitter and/or YouTube.  By actively refusing to use a lot of these
 things, I started to feel like I was somehow in the most radical
 0.0001% percent of the planet, and that nobody else cared, really
 cared, about any of "our" old principles anymore.  I largely withdrew
 from any and all online communities and became a bit of a hermit." ...

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Cycles of optimism and pessimism not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-06-10 01:23 +0000
  Re: Cycles of optimism and pessimism Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2019-06-10 01:48 -0300

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