I’ve given my friends the spiel about how cool it is that I can use the EM spectrum to send my voice through the air to the other side of town. And how other people have put up repeaters which mean my voice can actually go a lot further than that —- maybe across the country!
And their response? “Sure, but I can already do that on my phone”
After losing a lot of my curiosity the past few years, it’s coming back and my confidence is growing and I want to explore various fields and technologies deeper [and for the first time].
Do you think people don’t know about this beautiful stuff because inventions and products have become overly corporatized and use intellectual property and patents, which stifles curiosity?
I can’t help but dream of a fully open source world where we don’t dominate each other by keeping information about the inner workings of things artificially scarce like we do today - as evidenced by Aaron Swartz, Library Genesis, corporate fight back against right to repair etc.
Story of my fucking life.
I share it occasionally with friends to remind them of this. Computers are just tools. The really interesting question is what those tools can do for us.
I distinctly remember being a teenager and learning how bittorrent worked, thinking it's the coolest thing I'd heard of and laboriously explaining how it worked to a friend that sounded interested. At the end of the explanation he asked "So how do you download music with it?"
And I realized all he cared about was using it to pirate music.
It's really easy for programmers to get lost in how cool some code or technology is and lose sight of how the rest of the world views it.