Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

What I feel AK (and others) are advocating is for computing to support individual problem-solving in an iterative manner. You have this powerful general-purpose machine, you should be able to mold it towards something that solves the problem you currently have.

I agree. I see the conflict between designers and users to be one of the primary reasons for the current state of the web.

The conflict is about who gets to control how the content looks. The web was intended for users to have that control. The browser is your "user agent", you get to decide what and how gets fetched and displayed. The designers, on the other hand, want to treat webpages as color magazines - they want to have full control over what's shown on your screen, as for them the form is just as important as the actual content. They would happily serve you the web page as a PDF, if they could get away with it.

Personally, I'm firmly in the "user gets to control" camp, but the market prefers the "designers get to control" camp. So here we are, with web browsers continuously removing the ability to control anything, and the HTML/CSS accruing more and more layout control tools.

Almost all the thought I did was based on what had already been done in the ARPA community -- rendered as "services" -- and resculpted for the world of the child. It was all quite straightforwardly about what Steve later called "Wheels for the Mind".

If people are interested to see part of what we had in mind, a few of us including Dan Ingalls a few years ago revived a version of the Xerox Parc software from 1978 that Xerox had thrown away (it was rescued from a trash heap). This system was the vintage that Steve Jobs saw the next year when he visited in 1979. I used this system to make a presentation for a Ted Nelson tribute. It should start at 2:15. See what you think about what happens around 9:05. https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=135

Next year will be the 50 anniversary of this idea, and many things have happened since then, so it would be crazy to hark back to a set of ideas that were in the context of being able to be built over 10 years, and would be ridiculous if we didn't have in 30 (that would be 1998, almost 20 years ago).

The large idea of ARPA/PARC was that desirable futures for humanity will require many difficult things to be learned beyond reading and writing and a few sums. If "equal rights" is to mean something over the entire planet, this will be very difficult. If we are to be able to deal with the whole planet as a complex system of which we complex systems are parts, then we'll have to learn a lot of things that our genetics are not particularly well set up for.

We can't say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" because we want them to be voting citizens as part of their rights, and this means that a large part of their education needs to be learning how to argue in ways that make progress rather than just trying to win. This will require considerable knowledge and context.

The people who do say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" are missing the world that we are in, and putting convenience and money making ahead of progress and even survival. That was crazy 50 years ago, and should be even more apparently crazy now.

We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality.

We can't let the commercial lure of "legal drugs" in the form of media and other forms put us into a narcotic sleep when we need to be tending and building our gardens.

The good news about "media as environment" was what attracted a lot of us 50 years ago -- that is, that making great environments/cultures will also be readily learned by our nervous systems. That was one of Montessori's great ideas, and one of McLuhan's great ideas, and it's a great idea we need to understand.

There aren't any parents around to take care of childish adults. We are it. So we need to grow up and take responsibility for our world, and the first actions should be to try to understand our actual situations.

You become fully immersed in Plato's worldview when reading The Republic, but if you were see someone explaining the allegory of the cave in the absence of a wider context you will only take the elements which fit your worldview and not his wider conception of knowledge.

I think this ties into what happened to the concept of a centralised computer network, working for the good of humanity, turning into todays fractured silos, working to mine individuals for profit.

[1]http://index.varnelis.net/network_culture/1_time_history_und... [2]http://index.varnelis.net/network_culture

I think a big point here is that going to a network culture doesn't mandate losing narrative, it just makes the probability much higher for people who are not self-conscious about their surrounding contexts. If we take a look at Socrates (portrayed as an oral culture genius) complaining about writing -- e.g. it removes the need to remember and so we will lose this, etc. -- we also have to realize that we are reading this from a very good early writer in Plato. Both of them loved irony, and if we look at this from that point of view, Plato is actually saying "Guess what? If you -decide- to remember while reading then you get the best of both worlds -- you'll get the stuff between your ears where it will do you the most good -and- you will have gotten it many times faster than listening, usually in a better form, and from many more resources than oral culture provides".

This was the idea in the 60s: provide something much better -- and by the way it includes narrative and new possibilities for narrative -- but then like reading and writing, teach what it is in the schools so that a pop culture version which misses most of the new powers is avoided.