It kinda did that for a few wonderful years.

considers

I’ve been in a couple conversation threads about this topic before on here. I’m more optimistic.

I think that the Internet has definitely democratized information in many ways. I mean, if you have an Internet connection, you have access to a huge amount of information. Your voice has an enormous potential reach. A lot of stuff where one would have had to buy expensive reference works or spend a lot of time digging information up are now readily available to anyone with Internet access.

I think that the big issue wasn’t that people became less critical, but that one stopped having experts filter what one saw. In, say, 1996, most of what I read had passed through the hands of some sort of professional or professionals specialized in writing. For newspapers or magazines, maybe it was a journalist and their editor. For books, an author and their editor and maybe a typesetter.

Like, in 1996, I mostly didn’t get to actually see the writing of Average Joe. In 2026, I do, and Average Joe plays a larger role in directly setting the conversation. That is democratization. Average Joe of 2026 didn’t, maybe, become a better journalist than the professional journalist of 1996. But…I think that it’s very plausible that he’s a better journalist than Average Joe of 1996.

Would it have been reasonable to expect Average Joe of 2026 to, in addition to all the other things he does, also be better at journalism than a journalist of 1996? That seems like a high bar to set.

And we’re also living in a very immature environment as our current media goes. I am not sold that this is the end game.

There’s a quote from Future Shock — written in 1970, but I think that we can steal the general idea for today:

It has been observed, for example, that if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves.

Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.

That’s just to drive home how extremely rapidly the environment in which we all live has shifted compared to how it had in the past. In that quote, Alvin Toffler was talking about how incredibly quickly things had changed in that it had only been six lifetimes since the public as a whole had seen printed text, how much things had changed. But in 2026, we live in a world where it has only been a quarter of a lifetime, less for most, since much of the global population of humanity has been intimately linked by near-instant, inexpensive, mass communication.

I think that it would be awfully unexpected and surprising if we would have immediately figured out conventions and social structures and technical solutions to every deficiency for such a new environment. Social media is a very new thing in the human experience at this scale. I think that it is very probable that humanity will — partly by trial-and-error, getting some scrapes and bruises along the way — develop practices to smooth over rough spots and address problems.

Consider, say, the early motorcar, which had no seatbelts, windscreen, roof, suspension, was driven on a road infrastructure designed for horse-drawn carts to travel maybe ten miles an hour, didn’t have a muffler, didn’t have an electric starter, lacked electric headlights and other lighting, an instrument panel, and all that. It probably had a lot of very glaring problems as a form of transportation to people who saw it. An awful lot of those problems have been solved over time. I think that it would be very surprising if electronic mass communication available to everyone doesn’t do something similar.

It wasn’t just you, this was the general sentiment in the west. Cory Doctorow (now of “enshittification” fame) wrote “The Net Delusion” about it

came here to see this

In the mid-nineties I passionately believed that the internet would democratize information and usher in a wonderful new era of well-informed critical thinking and general enlightenment

The profit motive killed this dream. Capitalism seems to wither anything it touches.

Yeah. Didn’t we all. Although I’ve met several smart young people that self educated themselves in to a impressive degree.

Then again I’ve met dozen times more dumb-dumbs that have made their idiocy much much worse and are spreading it around.

Polarizing as always. Sorry to say, on average for the worse.

It did that, but we had an overly rosy view of what “democratize” meant. We thought that citizen journalists would leaven the bulky corporate media of the time. And they did. But there was also a torrent of bullshit. We have no excuse for not seeing this. The Greeks and Romans spent a great deal of thought on what would happen if the rabble were given a voice. We dismissed their ideas as gatekeeping oligarchy, but it turns out that populism is moatly a dirty word.

Same, except mid-00s.

Yeah I never thought how it would be the hot bed of spreading misinformation…

“What’s a computer?”

Yes. This is also similar to Strugatsky brothers’ fiction where people of the future seem like a society of scientific workers.

I mean, the Newton hadn’t done well. The Pippin hadn’t done well. The eMate hadn’t done well. What were the odds of Apple doing a really successful new consumer electronics product?

Even after seeing it, I was sure the iphone would fail. I thought, “Why would anyone use a crappy computer on a tiny screen instead of a laptop or desktop?”

It’s so obvious, I wish they had caught on! I remember there was a failed Ubuntu phone Kickstarter for exactly this…

And I can’t really understand why we aren’t there yet. Do we really need 8 cores to phone and read IMs? And isn’t there an OS that works both on mobile and desktop? I’m baffled.

I remember playing with a Motorola Atrix in a store. It seemed like a really cool idea.

The nearest thing we have is the Steam Deck dock.

Still hoping…

My Steam Deck is basically that.

There’s a few Android phones that have it, old and new. I have an iPhone 16 at the moment and while it works with a dp-alt mode dock, it only mirrors the screen and nothing else. I think there’s some things you can do to trick the phone into enabling stage manager and other ipad features.

“No parent is going to buy a Wii because of the stupid name” -me, 2005

I thought the switch was gonna end up with the same depressing library as the 3DS, if that’s any consolation.

I never had one but IMO Zune was one of the few Microsoft hw wins. And their mice.

I mean you’re not wrong, for some people in some cases. But it’s not so easy to teach yourself how to learn, nor why to learn it.

I think another major factor for Linux gaming beyond Valve was a large shift by game developers to using widely-used game engines. A lot of the platform portability work happened at that level, so was spread across many games. Writing games that could run on both personal computers and personal-computer-like consoles with less porting work became a goal. And today, some games also have releases on mobile platforms.

When I started using Linux in the late 1990s, the situation was wildly different on that front.

Oh they definitely felt like a gimmick at First

except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.

The one niche that they’re probably the biggest is the “I just need a public facing web browser in this spot”

Its really hard to beat a locked down iPad for that usecase, both from a financial perspective (~$250 hardware cost for a lowest-tier iPad was the price I was seeing when ordering and provisioning them for this usecase) and from a management perspective (join it to the MDM and by nature of being an iPad, even if they get out of the browser window its really hard to cause trouble, basically 0 malware risk and iOS has far less obtrusive updates than Windows) plus from a support perspective you can simply walk users through rebooting them and swap the hardware if it needs more than a reboot

Yeah, I think tablets are cool, but if they were full-fledged Windows/Linux computers with mobile app compatibility, they’d be absolutely incredible.

I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.

Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it’s nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.

Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.

I remember thinking similarly. Specifically “well duh you’ll just be hitting buttons with your face on calls with those dang touchscreen phones” except it turned out I spend way less time on phonecalls than circa 2006 me could have ever imagined, and also the proximity sensor blanking the screen and blocking input works really good (and even did back in the early 2010s when I got my first smartphone)

I bought and moved like 1 in late 2013 when it spiked just to play with it and see how it worked, out of curiosity about the tech. (And soon after, mined Dogecoin on Reddit when it started, and we all began tipping like crazy because it was fun and funny.) I made a few bucks off the BTC and kinda regretted not holding it longer. Then cut to a decade later… Sheesh. I may be more sour on the tech now, but damn I’m not so crazy as to not regret selling it.

I let ~20 of them disappear after hearing about the first domino pizza being bought with them for 600 some odd