by trueno | 2026-02-23 20:48:17+00:00
The technology is the easy part, the people are the hard part. The reality is that we simply don't have thought leaders in charge anymore, there's no innovations or anything that are coming to correct course, few channels for good ideas to flow up in that end up with proper solution implementations. I think a lot of bright minds who could be solutioning for some of these things understand the dynamics at play even if they've never taken a huge moment to think about it.

We plebs are just driftwood floating in massive waves of nation state decision making. I don't doubt there are people who literally work at ISPs who are depressed at the state of things, depressed that theyre not allowed to take action on certain things, depressed that they see first-hand what kind of control mechanisms they're forced to implement or disallowed from implementing and more. It's got to be a trove of BS in an age of misinformation which has always been an information systems problem that humanity has implemented checks notes zero solutions for. And at the end of the day they, like all of us, just want to live a good and meaningful life.

That's not to say just... give up on ideals. But instead to acknowledge the realities of ideals not being enough on their own. So much work needs to be done before new ideals can even be shared. Outreach alone to spread ideals is a massive uphill battle at this point due to conglomerate control of broadcast media and concentrated ownership of social media apps. A lot of these particular ideals require a decent understanding/background of technology in general which most people don't even have, making these things an incredible difficult basis for a society that is well-enough understood. So the circus trick here is how do you make it a digestable topic that touches the souls of many and galvanizes them to take the correct stance so that these things become embodied in the set of ideals a society values, so that legislators and whatever other proxies that are tasked with decision making give these things the resourcing or policy making attention they deserve. That's the mega hard part, which is then additionally compounded in difficulty by ... most households in our societies just never having these types of discussions make it to their TV/computer screens. Hackernews types like to call these people "normies" and tack the blame on them, but they can't seem to wrap their mind around that not everyone could or should have a deep compsci background. We should be coexisting with people of a variety of backgrounds and instead we should be looking at their "normie"-ness as a thing to account for, not blame. It would be absurd to have a "normie" expect us to be exceptional at rebuilding car engines or any other broad subset of knowledge that we haven't ourselves committed our own lives/spare time to.

So that leaves the other route to take is just... renegade we'll-do-it-ourselves. Which can succeed, but has its own set of challenges. Fronting infrastructure for a lot of stuff is expensive, so donors are needed on sometimes vast scales. To another commenters point like... ain't none of us on the renegade front laying undersea cables any time soon which are multi-billion dollar projects to cross the Pacific. Often times we see these underground efforts fail in their infancy simply because the UX just flat out sucks and we're up against entities who can giga-scale all their infrastructure/resources & ultimately capitalize on making whatever app thing fast&pleasant for users. It feels like we're drowning against titans sometimes, it's overwhelming.