unix_surrealism

Once upon a time we thought that inviting people to join the Information Superhighway would bring them together and herald an age of unity and shared purpose.

We didn't realize that we were opening the noosphere to subversion and attack.

It wasn't long before weaponized memes were deployed to deepen societal divisions. Old antagonists brought their wars to the digital frontier. Commercial entities outcompeted their FOSS forefathers and to reshape discourse. Engorged vectors emulated human creativity and threatened to forge new underclasses.

Was the utopian dream wrong? Were we naive to believe technology could unleash humanity's potential? Or are these mere birth pains of the future we were promised?

the election has put me in a strange mood and that combined with the nostalgia (good and bad) of the past from things like that poster on the wall is so hitting very hard rn; jfc this is going to be stuck in my head all day today. thank you for sharing.

techno utopianism, the synthesis of defence lab hacker culture and the new left has inherited the flaws of both. the disillusion of the children raised on this heady mix was inevitable. nostalgia beckons, the punch card and mainframe once a symbol of dehumanization is now a quaint museum piece, sublime objects of engineering prowess. i could spend my whole life exploring the intricacies of these old systems. the dream of connecting people through computers is perverted into the goal of connecting to computers. "ah, but it could have been different, if only my preferred programming language or paradigm had won out!" so we tell ourselves, nursing our pet projects. ahhh i'm feeling depressed now

thx for this community. it's not just the Artworks but reading the comments as well.. soothing.

Joining a mailing list wouldn’t be so bad if the mail apps weren’t so bad at doing mail.

It really did, didn't it?

I feel like the capital has taken the internet away from us. Everyone is locked up in shit holes now and the free internet feels like some post-apocalyspe wasteland (Lemmy is cool but damn there are like 20 people here fr).

It was supposed to make us smarter.

I was meant to surf the internet superhighway and instead I'm inundated with hell and misery.

I've recently been watching a recreation of a old .nsv IPTV channel called RantTV. Most of the stuff on there is like from 1999-2005. Very old, even before YouTube. Most of the content revolves around this man called Sean Kennedy. Very fun to watch him yell and rant comedically into the mic. Mostly talks about government control, coperations, how great hackers and internet pirates are for society, "our current culture/society", paranoid-esque shit, etc. (And it has a Bad Religion song at the end of one of the shows, which I love)

Can't help but see how the landscape has changed in 20 years. How newspapers and TV and entertainment used to be so centrally controlled and limited, but now it has become so decentralized, you can literally find anything on the internet. How bunk conspiracies theories are now so prevelant, that QAnon has worked its way into office. How anti-vax rhetoric is so prevelant now that the U.S. government used it as a psy-op against foreign nations.

Anyway, I can't help but think of RantTV when I read this quote. Hits real hard.

The Capacitent Sun scorches the frayed edges of a once-lamenated advertising poster. The disheveled fastenings still clinging ecstatically to the decaying concrete. A rogue piece separates itself, and catches the solemn eye of the wandering hacker. She stares at it, the ancient symbols and depictions reach through time to find themselves in her. "Learn more. Do more. Be more." Each period stung with some long forgotten but deeply ingrained urgency. Directionless, it pounded at the insides of atriums and ventricles like a machine that could no longer stand to be air gapped. Externally, she was frozen. Her brain fought the internal dissonance of messaging and reality. This is what they believed, that they would be alright.