[Mielke]: I just think that fundamentally analysis is great […] of history, especially in a field like tech, which is in some ways, pretty disconnected from its own history and there's almost kind of like a pride in that of moving, so quickly that we don't even look to the past.
[Wiggins]: Yeah, all right. Almost listed as a sort of willful disregard of history because I think there's the classic Y Combinator startup founder, fresh out of school. It's actually their naivety that allows them to reinvent their not dragged down by the legacy baggage of how we do things today. They can just think about it and kind of of a greenfield way and dream up a new idea. […] But that comes at the expense of well actual naivety and reinventing everything and not using scholarship of the past to learn what's worked and what hasn't in order to kind of stand on the shoulders of giants or build the way that any other field would. Of course, you learn from the past and then you use that to inform what you should do, going forward into the future, and yeah, the young naive startup founder, other types that we hold up as our role models sometimes and technology are not into scholarship.
Mielke & Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 16:50, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=KRW6ed30T1KEm4G8fa8FSA
It’s not just that the culture of the digital media industry is disconnected from it’s history, it’s uncritical and often unreflective, just going after the short/mid term profit and driven by hype.
[…] let me bring the positive side, which is I totally agree that they did lay out a vision for computing. That is grounding in a world where we do seem stuck in social media consumer not exactly sure what; everything is oriented around commerce, and again things are all good: commerce entertainment, these things are fine, I consume these. But the reason I got interested in computers that are very young ages seeing their potential for creativity, and unlocking the noblest parts of the human spirit.
Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 23:25, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w
[…] there was these amazing visionaries who saw the potential for computers and creativity, sort of laid out a vision way back in what seems like just the stone age's to us the 1960s and 1970s and then in some ways we lost our way. And we ended up with, I don't know, social media and kind of lockdown appliance like smartphones.
And in fact, there's this glorious world of Smalltalk, Dynabook and Mother of all Demos style stuff that we still need to build, or we haven't built or something like that.
Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 14:30, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w
Situationist critique of the Spectacle and the passiveness of culture is very relevant here. It’s more problematic that Wiggins thinks here.
Ultimately, the problem with commercial offers and decentralized software applications boils down to the same thing. In order to challenge state reLavabitn and capitalist exploitation effectively, it is necessary to stand and organize collectively against the state and capital. Cypherpunk initiatives like Lavabit or decentralized software can go a long way to challenge the status quo, but they are historically limited by their understanding of social change and social conflict.
Social change is not simply a matter of consumer preference like the choice of an individual’s email provider, neither social conflicts are mere mathematical problems that can be resolved through a strategic application of mathematics. Radical technology collectives build political solidarity and nurture security behaviors within and between activist groups in addition to providing things like email and putting the right cryptographic algorithms in place.
Autistici/Inventati - +KAOS - 10 Years of Hacking and Media Activism, Institute of Network Cultures 2021, p.12