this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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It's absolutely amazing how we went from the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer in the beginning of computers to everyone knowing how to do at least the bare minimum on a computer in the 2000s to now circling back to the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer because pretty much everything they do can and probably is done on a phone. It's also real scary to think since I'd assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren't properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we're too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.
Millennial here, putting my tinfoil hat on for a minute:
This is exactly what the big tech corpos wanted all along. They've been curving the arc of history towards people at large being digitally dependent but incapable of self-service. They want addicts, not citizens. Serfs, not an educated populace.
In the 70s, 80s, 90s, and into the early 00s there was this "hacker culture" which was centered on the idea that as long as we keep our wits about us we could use computers as a great equalizer. The common person was empowered. Any and all software would be distributed for free so anyone who couldn't afford it could get it. Bill Gates was painted as a villain because he was overtly capitalistic. The corpos were kept in check by a diverse, rapidly evolving market and a ton of savvy users who knew what they wanted.
Giant corporations pretty much caught on that they needed there to be fewer tech savvy people who could get one over on them. When politicians needed to ask experts what to include in school curriculums, guess who had lobbyists ready to go? Microsoft and Apple. Eventually Google too.
And now that there are fewer tech savvy people? Everything got shittier. Shinier, faster, dumber, more locked down and shittier. And the enshittification is just going to accelerate until people straight up reject it, then it'll pause for 6 months to a year and start up again.
That's a theory I can actually agree with. Sounds plausible enough to be true, given what we know about large corpos.