Once upon a time we thought that inviting people to join the Information Superhighway would bring them together and herald an age of unity and shared purpose.

We didn't realize that we were opening the noosphere to subversion and attack.

It wasn't long before weaponized memes were deployed to deepen societal divisions. Old antagonists brought their wars to the digital frontier. Commercial entities outcompeted their FOSS forefathers and to reshape discourse. Engorged vectors emulated human creativity and threatened to forge new underclasses.

Was the utopian dream wrong? Were we naive to believe technology could unleash humanity's potential? Or are these mere birth pains of the future we were promised?

I feel like the capital has taken the internet away from us. Everyone is locked up in shit holes now and the free internet feels like some post-apocalyspe wasteland (Lemmy is cool but damn there are like 20 people here fr).

the election has put me in a strange mood and that combined with the nostalgia (good and bad) of the past from things like that poster on the wall is so hitting very hard rn; jfc this is going to be stuck in my head all day today. thank you for sharing.

techno utopianism, the synthesis of defence lab hacker culture and the new left has inherited the flaws of both. the disillusion of the children raised on this heady mix was inevitable. nostalgia beckons, the punch card and mainframe once a symbol of dehumanization is now a quaint museum piece, sublime objects of engineering prowess. i could spend my whole life exploring the intricacies of these old systems. the dream of connecting people through computers is perverted into the goal of connecting to computers. "ah, but it could have been different, if only my preferred programming language or paradigm had won out!" so we tell ourselves, nursing our pet projects. ahhh i'm feeling depressed now

It really did, didn't it?

Joining a mailing list wouldn’t be so bad if the mail apps weren’t so bad at doing mail.

It was supposed to make us smarter.

The Capacitent Sun scorches the frayed edges of a once-lamenated advertising poster. The disheveled fastenings still clinging ecstatically to the decaying concrete. A rogue piece separates itself, and catches the solemn eye of the wandering hacker. She stares at it, the ancient symbols and depictions reach through time to find themselves in her. "Learn more. Do more. Be more." Each period stung with some long forgotten but deeply ingrained urgency. Directionless, it pounded at the insides of atriums and ventricles like a machine that could no longer stand to be air gapped. Externally, she was frozen. Her brain fought the internal dissonance of messaging and reality. This is what they believed, that they would be alright.