Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement.
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
- AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists)
- VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb)
- Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years)
- WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons)
- 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p)
- High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies)
- Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff)
- Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car)
- Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012)
- Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service)
- SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV)
- CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion)
- Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games)
- GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US)
- Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it)
Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.
The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?