Sultan Knish by Daniel Greenfield September 25, 2013
The peculiar thing about the new iPhone, aside from all the homeless people standing on line for it, is that it is really one of the last drops of a social revolution that began when amateurs started tinkering with kits that have as much relation to a smart phone as the Wright Brothers plane has to an Osprey.
The computer revolution wasn't a accident. A society needs its frontiers and by then one of the few frontiers remaining in America was the abstract conceptual world inside a metal box. It would take decades until that abstract world became concrete and we were all living inside it. Its final revolution was to eliminate the metal box. Or least to make it as portable as possible. But by then the things in the real world that the box was supposed to take you away from were already inside it.
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." Thomas Jefferson
"If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here." - Barack Obama, June 7, 2013
ZitatI don't take the computer lightly. It's an amazing device. But there's a reason that we have it instead of all the things everyone expected the future to bring. Doing some of those things would have meant pushing real frontiers, instead of abstract ones. It would have meant an open society of individuals, instead of a closed society where everyone is trying to be an individual to escape the conformity.
ZitatThe frontier has closed. The tinkerers found a new one in a metal box and for a while the internet was a new frontier. But that was before Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. It was also before Amazon and Google
ZitatThe internet's more revolutionary possibilities involved the escape from control. Some of those possibilities are still there, but they are fading as the abstract becomes concrete and the same forces that eliminated freedom in the old real world are doing the same thing in the new digital world.
The internet was always destined to become a mirror of our societies and that meant that it could never serve as an enduring escape. The rule of the nerds who helped shape it was always going to give way to the corporations looking to monetize it, the governments seeking to exploit it and the masses who just want whatever the corporations and governments tell them to want. But most of all, the same forces that shaped our society would come to shape the internet.
From the comments
ZitatWe were promised the stars, and all we got was Facebook and a misbegotten welfare state.
I remember the internet from the time of Windows 3.1 and Netscape 1.0. 5 free hours per month as an AT&T long distance customer. I wondered how this all got past the 'suits'. Well the suits caught on.
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
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Wed Sep 25, 2013 8:35 am
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