#teleconferencing

Fastforward to 2021 and disability activists still trying to get accessibility on the table. We went backward because there was no money in it. Take a look at the publication date on this paper:

Travel: The internet was supposed to link the world together. Before that was "See the USA, in your Chevrolet..." Personal vehicles were supposed to liberate the average Joe to explore the length and breadth of the land. Good thing cars haven't made whole sections of cities endless parking lots that churn out black smoke or anything.

With the steam engine, factory drudgery will be a thing of the past!

And yes, even art has been down this road several times. YT was supposed to create a completely commercial-free creative space, y'all remember that? Whole thing started as a way to archive video for posterity and easy searchability. Used to be all you had to do to get on the front page and go viral was upload a ten year old home video of holding your cat so it looked like it was playing a piano.

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Sidebar: Did you know they ended AmazonSmile about a week ago? Poof. Gone. A warning email went out a few weeks ahead of time and then the whole service just disappeared, after years of reliable service. There's more than a few non-profits that are scrambling because it wasn't a lot of money, but it was definitely more than nothing. Which means even when these corporate oligarchs and captains of industry "share the wealth" they're not doing it strictly out of the kindness of their heart, they're doing it for the advertising clout. The second it doesn't serve their egos they'll rug-pull the hell out of it.

Let's build the world we want. Let's not beg techies to kill us slower.

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The entire framing of this convo is such abject nonsense. Every week some jackass with a silicon chip and a dream comes along and laughingly explains how they're gonna revolutionize the universe by taking one step out of a 50 step process and make it slightly less onerous. They're in all the tech mags, all the early adopters jack off to their proposal a few times, all the 'venture capitalists' put their pic on an altar made out of stacks of $100 bills and the severed limbs of children, and then we go right back to the same as it ever was.

Instead here we are, falling for their pitch, and then spooking ourselves as if it's already done and dusted. "What if AI ruins all human art for all universal time and space?!" We're not even discussing what it is the AI is doing, how it gets programmed or by whom. Who's training it to sift all those pictures. Who's maintaining its massive server farms and databases. And then a bunch of doomers are out here thinking Chatbot9000 getting activated is finally the Singularity Event from Terminator 2.

Every. Single. Time.

Is it the Fundamentalist Christianity? Why are so many people so desperate for the apocalypse? I remember when IBM beat a chess grand master and they called it proof the robots were gonna take over the world. That was 27 years ago. Now half of Deep Blue is on display in a museum that charges admission, the other half schedules airline flights. Capitalism's gonna capitalism.

Turns out you can't run a full panel blood test on three drops, email didn't end deforestation, and billionaires aren't the geniuses they keep insisting we should believe they are. Maybe. Just Maybe. It's time to start disbelieving the tech bros every time they try to patent their latest jar of piss as the greatest painkiller humans will ever know. We don't have to fear everything that's new, but not everything needs to be new.

Maybe. Just Maybe. Start asking why offices would even continue to exist if email really did what it was supposed to originally. Why are so many people still trapped in cubical hell when networked interfaces should have made centralization obsolete 30 years ago? Because then the middle manager can't watch you like a hawk to count the number of times you go to the bathroom.

Every time someone asks the human question, these bros' fantasies disintegrate. Like Elon Musk's technocolor tunnel of nonsense: what if there's a fire? Faster cars: why not trains that can carry more people using fewer resources? Everybody live in their own self-contained universe: what about shared and walkable spaces? More amazing drilling tech: what about subsidizing wind, and solar, and battery tech?