Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
What do you think all those “hacker” scarecrow movies and alarmist articles and laws were aimed at and caused by?
Modern computers allow one person to do the monthly work of the Soviet Genplan on their home machine in a day if they are smart, in a month if they are average, and Soviet Genplan employed more than one person.
Together with the Internet they make power over masses a much less certain thing.
Except if you poison both, you can not just neuter, but invert the effects.
We still have more and less powerful people in our world.
What I mean is that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “user-friendly” computing, bloating of the Web and rise of authoritarianism happened with the same intensiveness in the same ~20 years.
What do you think all those “hacker” scarecrow movies and alarmist articles and laws were aimed at and caused by?
Modern computers allow one person to do the monthly work of the Soviet Genplan on their home machine in a day if they are smart, in a month if they are average, and Soviet Genplan employed more than one person.
Together with the Internet they make power over masses a much less certain thing.
Except if you poison both, you can not just neuter, but invert the effects.
We still have more and less powerful people in our world.
What I mean is that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “user-friendly” computing, bloating of the Web and rise of authoritarianism happened with the same intensiveness in the same ~20 years.