Midnight Pub

Despair, or: Riding the Tiger

~softwarepagan

Lately I've been struggling a little bit with despair for the state of the world. (These are unorganized thoughts - bear with me)

Even outside of the fact that so many outlandish conspiracy theories have been proven true in the past months about who actually rules this world, the surface-level stuff is bad enough. Let's start with one thing in particular (don't worry, I'll circle back to a silver lining)

It will probably be impossible to build your own computer soon, and shortly after that, impossible to even own one (they want you to have a terminal that accesses cloud computing, for surveillance purposes). Given that we have decided all human endeavor and resources must go to fuel the Basilisk, the Cancer (AI), it seems soon computer components will be wholly unacquireable for most people, removing the power of computing from the people even further. Devices will get much more expensive afterward.

This may ultimately be a good thing, though, and force many of us off mainstream platforms and ways of computing. We may be connecting to BBSes and Gemini and IRC on old hardware or cobbled-together hardware connected via radio and phone lines or something, and that might actually be healthier for many of us.

Either way, we keep riding the tiger and eventually it will drop.