Archaeofuturism is the way to self-sovereignty, before Big Tech gained self-awareness and morphed into Panoptic Technocapital there was a brief moment in the 2000s, a window where accelerating technology was coupled with data ownership
The walkman, the early Apple products and a whole host of other mp3 players - cloudless, tethered to you without an email, without a number or a social identifier - entirely yours to do as you see fit, no lockins. A golden age before H*ndu-CEO delivered SaaS
Something happened after the early 2000s, cloud feudalism, data serfdom as Big Tech realised the great truth - data is spice. It has changed the way we interact with technology, no longer as creative partners but as consoomer slaves
I don't think this is necessarily inevitable - it is a quirk that was foisted on us during the most tremendous rollout of the most impressive surveillance state in history - American Empire post 9/11 that by now has been documented in detail by whistleblowers and dissidents
It is the relationship & calibration between self-sovereignty and nation-state backed private partners like Apple, Microsoft etc that is what many are mistaking for as "technology" - this is a dynamic layered with political and social consideration, and not with protocols per se
Linux advocates have been sounding the alarm on their for years, perhaps decades starting with Stallman's advocacy and more popularly today with people like Luke Smith (excellent blog by the way) - lukesmith.xyz
The question that Land and others neglect to a degree is the political calculation behind the architectural design of the web - the practical considerations of who is designing the hardware, software and importantly the implications of nations patronizing cloud feudalism
If the pre-cloud/SaaS era before 9/11 of tech continued accelerating unimpeded without the games of spooks, surveillance states of competing empires, we would have a very different environment today.
The counter would be that capital demanded the configuration elites parasitically renting out and trapping the consumer in intelligence agency ecosystems, locked into competing proprietary systems that are now starting to assume nation-state sovereignty - I'm not sure it holds
This is not obviously the most straightforward way of development and most efficient model
Neither is the emergence of Big Tech companies necessarily and episode of spontaneous libertarian economic organization - the formative history of Silicon (Surveillance) Valley owed a great deal to intelligence agency cooperation and legal and even logistical support from govt
The mythology of "startup" culture prevalent today does not hold to historical scrutiny - more important seems to be the presence of a competent, ruthlessly meritocratic Administrative State layer with proactive espionage infrastructure working in sync with universities
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