231–240 of 300 posts
I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history. Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful about tech.
Lots of people are still optimistic about tech. They just generally don't have time to get into silly arguments about it on HN.
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They should have known that if they built a giant centralized platform, the government would eventually come knocking.
s/government/governments/ Also corporations, political parties, propagandists, hucksters, and others. Pathogens co-evolve with their hosts.
I think people here are too young to remember the tech industry in 2012. None of the images and ideas conveyed in this book (printing press, cave art, fall of the Berlin wall, Arab Spring, particle accelerators) were outlandish for the time and space it was printed in. Tech was all about optimism and idealism. Everyone in silicon valley knew they were changing the world for the better, and tech was the missing piece…
This aesthetic represents to me the dead tech-optimist future we were promised but never got. It's a "ghost future." Mark Fisher had a lot of interesting writing about this phenomenon as applied to music, termed hauntology[2]. It's about how some genres/labels of music (like Ghost Box) were characterized as a misremembered past that was perceived as more rosy than in reality.
I suspect but cannot be certain that "vectorflourish" aesthetics like those and/or simple but not condescendingly dumbed-down ones like Bootstrap 1.0 will experience a resurgence in the coming decade, the same as the "Windows XP" aesthetic of ten years prior had a while ago, in the name of reclaiming such a lost future. With today's CSS I imagine it would be much easier to recreate such an aesthetic than in the past when mostly you had to use Photoshop to create all the raster assets.
page 27 > Zuckerbergs's Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year. I initially thought wealth, ideas and love was meant but no ... it's just data.
What I find interesting about this "law" is that for a while it seemed true, but things seem to have reached some kind of peak for some of us, and nowadays, I rather share very little online.
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You're likely too young to remember anything much before 2012. Honestly, this stuff has been around for 50 years. Go watch a video about Steve Jobs at NeXT from the 1980s.
People thought the invention of the telegraph was going to bring about world peace.
I remember that optimistic view we all had of technology in our youth.
For me the optimism was a little earlier than 2012 so maybe it goes hand in hand with being young and less experienced (jaded?).
I agree with some of the other commenters that a corporate structure makes altruistic goals like these impossible.
Only Wikipedia and The Internet Archive for me carry that feeling of goodwill still. I think OpenAI going from non-profit to profit will similarly erode the product as market incentives push it further away from what benefits the user most.
Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit.
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I have a serious problem with calling everything social media and (more importantly) how it spells doom for this that and the other If you want to criticize specific companies - yeah. But I literally do not understand what people are talking about when employing the usual "Social media was a mistake" type stuff
(apologies for the ridiculous length of this, and totally understand if you pass up reading the comment, it's also a bit incoherent/lazy/quickly put together) ---- To me, the real problems are the following. All related to "social media" but not social media in itself. 1) The Stream (timeline, whatever you want to call it). Instead of static single "pages" that linked to each other as separate entities with their own…
P.S. Your JPB quote from 1992 reminded me of Stuart Brand in 1985:
> "Computers suppress our animal presence. When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel."
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What I find interesting about this "law" is that for a while it seemed true, but things seem to have reached some kind of peak for some of us, and nowadays, I rather share very little online.
People like to look at the start of the sigmoid and extrapolate.
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Tomato, tomahto; Naive, cynical; potato, potahto. "Best" in a Darwinian memetic sense of "optimized for reproduction and dissemination", not "accurate" or "helpful".
I wonder how loudness factors into that. Maybe ideas which make their "host" express them loudly have a higher chance of "infecting" others?
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particularly the bit where they are painting over the old Sun Microsystems sign. a solid engineering company that actually build good stuff, destroyed in collateral damage from the dot-com bust, sold off to oracle of all things. now further being humiliated by this narcissistic, exploitative, personality-disorder-masquerading-as-a-service company?
Huh? That's a weird take. What should they have done? Left the entrance to their headquarters with a Sun Microsystems logo rather than their own? The Sun Microsystems sign continues to be there at the end of Willow Road, just facing toward the campus vs toward the street. This is doing more to honor Sun than any other realistic choice they could have made.
