> Worse, it’s not clear what we can do. This reflects our current political emergency. Ignorant and wicked people control the government, propped up by chortling billionaires, corrupt evangelical hucksters, and resentful wing nuts; we can work to end the nightmare but the road is long and uncertain. The future of computing now seems to depend on the whims of a few businessmen, none of whom appears to care very much about computing.

http://www.markbernstein.org/May18/DependentDevelopers.html

any time i really think about it, i'm overwhelmed by the sense that to combat corporate control of electronics we will have to reinvent and re-normalize untold swathes of modern technology, but we haven't got the free labor for that, and definitely not to make it broadly accessible. i think about friends whose only computer is a phone or tablet. for all practical purposes, we're locked into this mess.

@garbados i went and did a quick spot check a few weeks ago to see where libre phones are at now, and all i could come up with is "...the same place they were 7-10 years ago", which is to say, not very far

@shoutcacophony yeah

and yet what would it take to reinvent the classic ipod? an RPi, an SSD, a battery pack, and a 3D-printed case.

sometimes i feel like we're closer than we think to serious alternatives.

@garbados see, *this*. the iPod is a really good example -- with the exception of how unopen (and wasteful) they were even back then, its proof that in some if not a lot of cases, "things are even worse now" has a flip side, namely, that things back then were actually better

not perfect, but better. the iPod for all its flaws was sort of a wonder, the more recent iPhones in particular, not so much (or at all)