No mention of wanking, cats or racially abusing strangers. 2/10 prediction, would not bang. Also Kate Bellingham looks remarkably like a non-wobbly Rosie Jones, who I definitely would bang.
In all seriousness, I think it's interesting that we did manage to make broadband work over copper, at least for the last mile. Most of us only got full fibre in the last couple of years (or we're still waiting), but we've had high definition wanking for 20-odd years thanks to some very clever encoding strategies.
I'm also curious about the general level of optimism in tech coverage from the 90s. Obviously there was the panic about the millennium bug, but the general tone was one of excitement rather than fear. These days, we're far more apprehensive about new technology, which can be most clearly seen in the fears about AI. We've become much more suspicious about anything that promises/threatens to change the world. I wonder about the cause-and-effect - was it a broader societal shift (post-9/11 etc) that made us generally more fearful, or has our experience with the internet taught us to be careful about opening Pandora's box?
>>28612 While I'm quite happy to blame 9/11 for most things that have gone wrong, I belive the internet has fostered enough ill will of it's own. Basically the only half-decent thing we got out of it was Wikipedia and even that's massively flawed. Compared to the power it's invested in certifibly evil people and organisations, the insanity it's brought upon others and the really quite miserable consequences for employment and the economy, it's possible Tracer Tong had a point? Obviously I'm taking a very negative line here, but over recent years I've become aware of just how pervasive lies are online. I'm not just talking about people tweeting about politics in bad faith, but from the entire "influencer" economy to trying to reviews that only exist to get you to press an Amazon affiliate link, there's a level of dishonesty online that's kind of ruining the fun of the place.
The early internet was full of that pioneer spirit, where it was all enthusiastic amateurs and boffins at university research departments showing us wonderful glimpses of what may someday be. Then that day came, and it turns out they just wanted to sell us cable TV all over again in a very slightly modified package, and place a microphone up our arse 24/7.
The average person has seen the way corporate interest moves in and just gobbles up whatever potential goodness existed in an idea, and spits it back out in form that's basically worse by every metric except profitability, in a way that was harder to see before it happened with the internet.
>>28615 A new world run by hobbyists with no desire for profit is what I personally wanted. I’m not the person you’re replying to, but the Internet got bad once money was involved. This site and Wikipedia make no money and they’re great. Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, they’re all evil. I think Twitter is truer to the original online philosophy than Facebook is, and they had to sell it to Elon Musk so he could troll everyone and pwn the libs with it. Money and the Internet are fundamentally incompatible, and that’s what I say the problem is.
