Whenever people start acting all pomped up and talking about how the market chooses as though somehow a fiat zero-sum game is rational indicator I have to ask:

What percentage of the worlds GDP is founded in open source technology? How many people working for peanuts in their basements wrote code that changed the world for nothing? It's like economists don't understand that there are people who can create utility at an exponential, amplified, perfectly scaling rate and their only limit is their self-determination and the empowerment of their chosen language. And they work on their own time. What happens when programmers start truly proselytizing the power of digital creation to the horde of consumers?

Considering the lacking macro facilities in algol-syntax derivatives it's important to understand that programmers are not any more rational than economists. Complexity has gone from being a price of performance to being the crux of a fallen generation, of individuals unable to shower themselves of their neighborly turing tarpits.

I guess at this point what I am trying to say is that there are new fundamentals for the tech economy that are simply unknown. They aren't variables, they are completely off the board. I mean we use emacs/vim, pretend that virtualization can count as security and seem utterly choked in our own miasma of complexity. Integrating old ideas with new is not a matter of mixing software like a chemical mixture but a dick sizing competition without a ruler.

We are mechanics who barely understand our own tools and more than that are philosophically against questioning the separation between programming language/user. It is this behavior that puts more fear in me than what the government does or what tragedies may occur... because it is a sign that our communal process, despite making progress, is a frictional force that doesn't abide by logic.

I know most people are going to latch on to stereotypes or how the models used by an editor/os are still useful... but that isn't the point. The point is that the dynamics and decisions we see reflected everywhere are issues of personalities and groups, and thus the source and solution is via communal interaction. The solution is of course deeply unsettling but luckily novelized throughout our televisors in the form of AI systems that are doing there best to hide their HAL face.

When google shows you custom results, what are they doing? They are acting as a moderator or parent would. But it has always been seen under the guise of the friendly mentor. What happens when our mentors start making suggestions? Do you think that same data could be used to find the most efficient manner to shift your opinion? How deeply does the ranking of links affect your judgement about a subject? Are these new questions to you, or have you simply been holding your hands over your ears?

This isn't about google being malicious, or about another entity forcing their hand. The point is much more unsettling... that there are incredibly important and influential decisions being made not by individuals or beliefs, but by circumstance and yet they remain unquestioned despite their significant social and economic impact. I am supposed to be afraid of the NSA or some entity but what I truly fear is how blinded we all our own confidence with predicting the next day of this collective delusion.

I do not fear the man in Washington, the man in the Vatican or the man in Moscow. Instead I fear our inability to hold ourselves accountable as individuals and as a community to taking the stance for quantifying decisions based on potential impact and not limiting the debate to mob rule or to hand picked numbers. It is only through the somehow supply/demand immunized Moore's law will humanity be given its mirror, and that truly is an act of a fearful god if there ever was one.