How can we return to techno-optimism?

Anti-capitalist regulations, I imagine.

All power to the users. And I do mean ALL. Complete control over cellular modems for one. Control over every little bit of hardware in the consumers hands.

That includes warranty promises, that includes schematics, source code for firmware, everything. For all current, past and future devices.

Once capitalism is dead.

Technology is great, it's just naturally being used to exploit.

Taking patent, trademark, and copyright laws to what they were in, say, 1790, might be a good start.

Regard today's billionaires with the same contempt that one does of criminals.

Wait at least 5 years before buying a new computer.

Don't pay by credit card.

We stop the acquisitions. We work out ways to foster innovation and protect patents only in the short term.

We need more than a couple phone manufacturers, we need more than a couple of food producers. All of these monolith mega corporations keep smaller upstarts from coming up and competing.

If people stopped using tech to exploit people they would stop feeling exploited by it

I'll be optimistic about technology when the last techbro is strangled with the entrails of the last angel investor

The use of open, decentralized platforms such as the fediverse is one small step in the right direction at least.

Raze Silicon Valley to the ground and start over?

Break up the mega corps. Enact user privacy-by-default laws. Market dominance via "free product" followed up by bait and switch tactics should be outlawed.

Reduce tech bro and VC headcount via analog French method.

Concrete goals, and reasonable steps to achieve them.

I feel like lately we've hit a weird speculative investment period in tech, where we have a bunch of tech that's created because it can be, but not because it's needed. Do LLMs, crypto currency, or NFTs have actual uses? Very possibly, but nothing concrete enough to satisfy the bubble that formed from them.

We live in an age of unreality. Give us something achievable and genuine, we get excited. It doesn't have to be complicated, just real. Hell, I'm excited as fuck over solid sodium batteries, and that's boring as shit.

Repairable technology with encouragement to repair things that break by designing them to be fixable.

Open source technologies becoming the rule, rather than the exception (this is already the case in some ways, but I truly mean EVERYTHING).

Open Standards that make interoperability easier by removing walled gardens (iMessage, G-Sync, etc).

Get rid of the billionaire tech-lords. The ones that create the only new tech we’re allowed to have: fees, ads, and enshittification.

I’m a developer posting on Lemmy so maybe take this with a huge grain of salt but I think we need to focus less on STEM/finance and more on humanities education. Definitely in the United States but probably most of the world considering India and China focus on tech too.

When I was learning to code (in the 90’s and 2000’s unless you count a 9 year old making BASIC do loops), my mentors basically all had majored in something besides computer science because there wasn’t necessarily even a computer science major available if your college didn’t have “Tech” in the name. It was a lot of hippies who spent their weekends making pottery and got into IT or software development almost by accident; it was a job to fund their non-lucrative hobby or passion.

Basically, we lost something when being a programmer became a goal and not a way to reach some other goal. I’m not sure we can return to a time when it was tinkerers and hobbyists coming to the field with different backgrounds but more creatives should learn to code and more coders should be forced to make art.

Should we?

Uh, NOT put surveillance and extremely questionable AI into everything? I don’t need my toilet tweeting how healthy I am

We cannot even play music from a device without needing some sort of patent license, usually paid by the hardware vendor.

Producing products that the users wants, and that solves tje users real problems. And not trying to make products as addictive as possible, to harvest as much user data as possible to sell.

Decomodify software. Refuse to respect copyright laws for software, or mandate that all software must be GPL or an equivalent restrictive license.

Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.

If you are a public institution of any kind, you should not be using corporate, proprietary software, no exceptions.

Closed source software and hardware is largely what allowed massive corpos to take over the software and hardware scene, and it's what creates the incentive for silicon valley tech bros to create new technology solely in the hopes of being acquired for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars by some massive megacorp.

Corpos and private equity scumbags wouldn't be interested in acquiring these companies if they knew all the code and technology was under a GPL-like license, and anybody could take that tech, modify it, redistribute it, fork it, rebrand it, etc.

I, for one, have become a lot more optimist about Tech ever since I've replaced the closed solutions that deny me control from corporations looking to squeeze every last cent of value from me - from smartphone OSes to TV Boxes - with open source solutions were it's me who holds the keys.

"AI will make all of your work obsolete, there's nothing we can do about it. Shame..."

I'm fine with losing my job, it's tedious anyway. I'm not with losing my income though. Let automation and programs do the work and share the fruit of their labor to the people. Get rid of CEOs.

Then we can talk about optimism.

Open source.

Automate terra forming against climate change. I want big machines and swarms of drones doing 24/7 regreening and planting forests in the desert.

When I see technology actively making the world consistently better rather than constantly trashing the ecosystem that literally keeps us alive, I'll have optimism about it.

Round up all MBAs and put them in reeducation camps

Opensource (specifically Libre)

Worker and community cooperatives.

Right to repair.

Public money, public goods.

Privacy by default.

Decentralization > Federation > Disconnected > Centralized

Treating addiction as a disease and people intentionally seeking to exploit it at a mass scale should be charged for harm.

Organizations should be held liable for user data exposed to malicious actors both intentionally and through neglect of security.

Well first we kill all they lawyers Investment Bankers.

Then all the lawyers.

Anarcho-transhumanism, or ig more open source innovations unsullied by the profit motive would-be nice.

I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.

Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.

Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.

How did we get here?

Get rot economists out of tech companies and return to private ownership.

Great article, totally agree with the author. I would still be concerned with that power moving to the government, particularly in countries with limited options for true representation (eg. two party systems, where it is usually more a matter of "lesser evil" voting), but that then becomes the next challenge; still more appropriate in the government's hands than the level of power corporations currently wield.

In a capitalist economy, corporations act within the free market established by the government. Government is responsible for establishing fair and transparent ways of doing business, such as maintaining a currency, and legal and accounting frameworks. But that’s not enough.

The article has a good starting point about breaking up monopolies to reestablish competition. We’ve let so many monopolies grow in the last few decades, to our detriment.

But that’s not enough. It’s also governments role to incorporate externalities into the market so corporate actions are fairly priced instead of costing society, and to ensure the market is working for the citizens. As prime examples, corporations need to bear the costs of resource extraction or an imposition on the environment. How could the free market work effectively, if some corporations are allowed to impose costs on society that are not priced into their goods? They’re effectively being subsidized, given an unfair advantage against their competitors, while also working against the future of the citizens forming this market.

But a fair market is only fair, if all the participants have standing, including the consumers who are the focus of the market, and workers who make it all happen. Currently we’ve let corporation ps dominate other roles in the market, we’re following a corporate economy and of course are not happy with the results. For example, consider “terms of service” imposed for just about everything these days. They’re always phrased as a contract and as if customers agree, yet are completely one sided, imposed without recourse or even any reasonable standard for a legal contract, and without any real choice. How can that be called a free market?

We could go a long way toward a free market that serves society if government does it’s part of establishing fairness, transparency, honesty for all entities in that market, and remembering that both governments and the market serve society, rather than the other way around

Replace goodwill with encryption. That's about data and metadata safety, but the same logic applies to everything else. No trust to people interested in breaking it.

As in - browsers' developers' goodwill was intended to keep Web standards' race in check. Protocols' extensibility was intended to allow for future backward-compatible development.

This was a wrong idea.

Gemini is one example of solving it, but one can imagine many others.

And it's fine if we have 12 Web protocols each for some specific idea of the Web. Among them some, say, would allow people to easily create webpages like year 1996, but sufficient for modern tasks and without all the bother with DNS and hosting (perhaps there is a p2p solution), Telegram shows that this is in huge demand. Many such variants are better than one overly complex, dangerous, corporate and oligopolized Web.

That's similar to how it seemed working anyway, we had e-news for global forums, webpages for personal pages, IRC for chats, ICQ\AIM\MSN for DMs, e-mail for reliable DMs, well, everyone remembers that time.

Nostr is a very raw, but maybe interesting idea for public social media.

Funny how Unix philosophy always shows itself in unexpected places, yes? =)

Relevant for me; i nearly changed careers out of tech entirely -- being fed up with the state of the industry -- but found some great folks in worker cooperative spaces. Here's what's kept me optimistic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UmU1dSe3n0

Plucked a vid off this channel and let it be known the idea of the channel name is to "reject isms/be your own ism"

Solarpunk has replaced, for me, the plasteel+glass greenhouse skyscraper skylines. Afrofuturism offers a much better preconfiguration than anything of capitalist and anglo origins. Importantly, the dismantling of unjust heirarchies.

I never lost the optimism, i just recognized that the root cause of our pain is not going to be addressed by technnlology (new invention) without an equal-or-greater effort into decolonizing and unlearning on the part of those building, using and promoting a given technology.

Build anarcho-communism, thereby removing any incentives to enshittify.

The only way is to build technologies that allow humans to escape the capitalist system and allow us to build our own communities in direct opposition to capitalist greed and exploitation.

#NO

The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.

I'd go back even further (to 2007) before the invention of the iPhone. The smartphone has, arguably, IMO been a bad, or at least premature invention. It created a generation of kids obsessed with their photographies, giving girls eating disorders and creating/spreading unrealistic beauty ideals, etc... Also it has severely disrupted teenagers' social living, created sleeping disorders, chronic doomscrolling, addiction, and more bad stuff. The iPhone was, IMO, not ready for this world.

Stop tariffs on new technologies

Most of the venture capital that fueled the techno booms were Russian - hence all this dumb "Let's make everything family friendly!" (anti-LBGTQ, anti-NSFW) mindset. Now that money is going ... elsewhere.