I'm trying to shift my perspective from "there was a glorious computer revolution that empowered the user and disrupted authority and we have fallen from the heights of its transcendental grace" and towards the more accurate "my formative years just happened to coincide with a period where a few technical innovations briefly conferred a small amount of power on individuals and labor, and capital has been efficiently reversing that small disruption ever since" but it sure doesn't *feel* like that
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@glyph Hmm.
I, while agreeing with most of this (and getting good thoughts from all of it regardless), think I disagree pretty strongly (and hopefully generatively?) with a small detail of how you expressed it:
I think possibly more than "... a few technical innovations briefly conferred ...", it was "... a few SOCIAL innovations* happened to develop/were inadvertantly allowed to locally-flourish, that briefly (in the societal niche they happened to grow with around a few technical innovations) conferred ..."
(* not to say social innovations as in definitely-entirely-novel or unprecedented or not-elsewhere or whatever, just, new-to-those-people-at-that-time. new-in-that-context.)
@glyph (I guess maybe pushing back on the "technical innovations" bit of it might be a bit of a path towards building back the utopianism you're trying to move away from -- in the "the ideas are powerfulstrong" way or in a "it wasn't a utopian setting but such-and-such was an objective-universal Better Way To Act" or stuff like that --
but hopefully it can coherently be kept down to a "social innovations, like technical innovations, also shape experiences and capabilities granted, and are worth putting into history on equal footing". Like, I think the social innovations weren't any more utopian than the technical ones -- just that, in that context, they were also conferring power in certain ways in their own right.
And if trying to build back that power to try to build a similar experience for the next generation, we should also look around for social innovations in addition to technical innovations, as blocks that might be able to confer things to the people/communities.)
@glyph To me it looks like worker-power shone through when it took serious skill to overcome computing's shortcomings. Which was a poor strategy that couldn't last.
Since then it looks like capital doubled-down on financializing tech.
It's not like the "computer industry" did this, that industry was IBM and Siemens and Xerox and Cray. At the start it was all missile targeting systems and concentration camp organizers. A few upstarts happened to notice that miniaturization and cost reduction in industrial process was going to open up new target markets (small office / home office / individual use); the fact that this gave people new capabilities was (from a corporate perspective) an unfortunate, and temporary, side effect
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