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There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.
I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.
I've been feeling of late that we've (well, maybe not the youngest of us) living through The Internet going through the entire cycle from "new digital frontier" to "the railroad has moved in and brought civilization". Open rangeland has been wholesale fenced off into walled gardens, and those of us "digital natives" (not really analogous to Native Americans, but the term was bandied about a couple decades back) are sometimes struggling to deal with the massive cultural changes that entails.
Google is talking about disabling side-loading on Android, making users unable to run their own code on their own devices. Social networks are closing access to non-account users. New PC games are even talking about requiring Secure Boot, which limits what you can do with your own purchased hardware. And as you mention, payment processors are swinging their weight around to control what we do online.
I remember reading RMS' short story "The Right to Read" (written 1996) probably 20 years ago. Stallman is a controversial figure for a bunch of reasons --- I suppose all prophet figures are --- but it feels disturbingly prescient in a way that I remember thinking "oh, that can't all happen" at the time, but subtly thinking "oh, this is normal" in 2025. I'm not sure I like the changes, even if I can see why they're taken: security (keep your devices updated, required Internet connections), copyright (although Netflix, Spotify, and iTunes did manage to diffuse the Copyright Wars of the 2000's), or limiting unfettered access to obscene and abhorrent content ("think of the children" hits different once you have kids).
I suppose I'd be interested in reading "closing of the digital frontier" cyberpunk science fiction, if anyone has recommendations.
Onboarding normies and recently indians and other thirdworlders onto the internet has been an unmitigated disaster, infinite endless waves of Eternal September. The kind of people who used the internet and discussed things on forums and made little hand crafted websites are largely displaced and drowned in a sea of shit and vapid pedestrian nonsense.
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Cyberpunk 2077 has this having happened as its basic premise: The new internet is mostly just a bunch of closed corporate systems, and there's a strict cordon sanitaire against the old one, which was a wild and free place but is now supposedly full of dangerous AIs. But if there are any actual books from the setting, I don't know them.
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Everything ebbs and flows. Lenny Bruce made a career on censorship and now far worse things are being actively promoted by the large media networks.
The next frontier for pure computing is crypto. I don't mean the financial instruments like bitcoin, but all of the superscale distributed information sharing protocols. Interplantery Filesystem comes to mind.
This will, like everything in life, be both good and bad. Good in that actually free, I-control-all-of-my-own-shit computing plus actual anonymity (until quantum is a thing). It will also be bad in that the bad people will have access to all of this too - there's already cheese pizza on the main crypto blockchain for instance. But how new is this? Modulo math and cryptography have been around long enough that anybody who really truly wants to send out "bad" data (bad in a moral or ethical sense or w/e) has been able to.
There will be a period of transition. I think we're already in it. People who have to learn how to use computers again, at a lower level. It is amazing the number of college undergrads who begin a compsci class and have literally never heard of a "directory structure" before and have never, ever popped open a terminal of any type.
And that last part is the real shame of it. The gamification / subscriptionification of personal computing has destroyed what was (and will be, eventually) a fundamentally liberating technology. A few weeks ago, my Dad (late 70s) bought a new laptop with Windows 11. He was an early user of COBOL (!) back in the day. To see - and help - him trudge through all of the surveillance-ware screens was deeply sad. It was like watching a delta blues musician see Mick Jagger shimmy to "Brown Sugar" at some chintzy Las Vegas mega venue. His simple comment was succinct; "computers aren't fun anymore."
But I remain an optimist, although not one that believes "the good" comes for free or without some metaphysical combat. The bifurcation, I think, will be people who are content to let Corporate BigAI into the very depths of their minds and hearts simply in exchange for a daily (hourly?) dose of DOPEamine. On the other side of that line will be folks who value the human spirits role in intellect, epistemology, and information / knowledge / wisdom cultivation. I think this later group will engage in some sort of "dark-techno-renaissance" where some really hardcore but compelling Linux distros pop up. Perhaps to the point that a crypto-first layer of the internet emerges. A kind of BBS / IRC version .... 2030.0?
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I am very much not a Richard Stallman fan. I think he's unpleasant as a person, is an ideological zealot, and frankly hasn't done much to deserve the rep that he has in the tech community. But every time companies keep pulling these stunts, all I can think is "dammit, Stallman was right again". It's like the "pol was right again" meme, but for tech.
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At risk of being slightly off topic, Cory Doctorow’s novel “Little Brother” was a major influence when I was younger, early high school maybe? I have no idea how well it holds up now (probably poorly, it was YA), but I remember it opening my eyes to some big ideas about privacy vs security trade offs.
The MC is a kid who gets whisked off to essentially a black site prison in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, after which he gets released but government surveillance gets cranked to 11. He tries to get groups to fight back with stuff like flooding their surveillance of encrypted traffic with false positives via a network of hacked Xboxes, disrupting checkpoints being used for location tracking, stuff like that with a background of the classic debates like “why does privacy matter if I have nothing to hide” like I think the dad thinks.
But returning to your broader point I think that’s a great analogy. It’s been pretty incredible to see the simple idea that “it’s yours, so you can do what you want with it” be undermined so thoroughly and universally in almost every tech adjacent sphere. I get that the increased ease of distribution is a thing that creates some notably unique economic realities, but I think we need to grapple with those new realities directly rather than randomly flail around.
I think copyright more generally needs an entirely new re-imagining in the tech space. The old paradigms just don’t work, are too easily subject to regulatory capture, enforcement is a mess and inconsistent, there are so many problems. Software patents are also frequently bullshit.
I personally don't think it held up well at the time, but I also was something like 10 years older than you when I read it. The book is full of bad writing - first, it is generally written like Doctorow wanted an excuse to explain technical concepts like public key cryptography, not because he was trying to tell an interesting story. Second, the characters are all insufferable teenagers, ranting about how you can't trust anyone over the age of 30 with any chance they get. Third, and perhaps worst, the main character is continually thinking in leet-speak - which nobody does. It was super cringe, and I have no idea what Doctorow was thinking.
You might feel differently than I if you reread the book, though. Personally, I thought that the book always sucked; it made enough of a negative impression on me that I remember specific criticisms I had (which is unusual, I normally remember a vague sense of "I didn't like it" when it's been longer than a month or two). But YMMV.
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One problem is that most computers these days is basically a monitor attached to an Ethernet port. Even excluding licenses and EULAs, almost nothing important is happening on hardware you own.
I mean, yes, but also, you can fight it. I switched to Linux at the beginning the year in anticipation of Windows 10 hitting end of support, and it's been fantastic. AI features aren't constantly being shoved down my throat, it's not constantly defaulting to cloud storage, ads are constantly appearing on every UI surface. Most applications have a perfectly fine Linux version or equivalent. Those that don't usually run in Proton or Bottles. And for the few that can't do that either, I can run Windows in a VM easily enough when I absolutely have to.
It's not all upside. There is currently a bug in the Nvidia drivers causing a pretty sizable DX12 performance penalty in many games. And a lot of their Nvidia App features don't have any Linux equivalent. And it's a pain in the ass to get gsync working. But these problems are on the margins compared to the annoyances of windows that were increasingly part of the core experience.
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Only for being too correct. The baseless character assassination he suffered was purely to sideline him so that Google and Microsoft could get the foundation he formerly headed to be more "reasonable" and/or diminish their influence in total.
I think he probably is someone that's hard to deal with in person. I saw him speak once in college, and the most memorable part wasn't his own presentation, but when he showed up at a symposium the next day and started asking questions about copyright licenses in a presentation about algorithms (I honestly don't remember what sort) and not accepting "we haven't gotten to the point of releasing any code, and haven't decided on that yet" as an answer.
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