@nprofile1q... This really summarizes the Charlie and Lucy football scenario around tech utopianism they keep marketing to us: "Nuclear power was to make electricity "too cheap to meter", in the 1954 words of the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The personal computer arrived under the banner of computer liberation (Ted Nelson's phrase from 1974). It was the people's machine against the corporate mainframe. The internet was declared independent of every government on earth in 1996, in a manifesto written, of all places, at Davos. Social media was credited for the uprisings of 2011 and briefly renamed liberation technology by a few. The gig platforms of the 2010s sold freedom as being your own boss, one ride at a time. Cryptocurrency promised to free money itself, and the unbanked along with it. Each was announced as emancipation from some drudgery or some gatekeeper. Each settled, within a decade or two, into a familiar shape: owned by few, worked by many, and marketed in the language of freedom."
