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"Ah, but there's some of it that was built for profit" oh, you mean the pieces that deliberately diverge from existing standards with the specific goal of creating a walled-garden captive market and breaking the ability for any future competitors to do a better job? Or do you mean the bits designed with the sole purpose of throwing copyright-infringing adverts in my face at any possible opportunity?

@kkarhan @jsbarretto so, if we're being pedantic, anything with an ARM processor then?

@kelpana @jsbarretto OFC...

And a lot of other tech...

@berlinfokus I think that's a fair criticism, although as mentioned: a lot of this is because the market is almost designed to make it difficult for competitors to enter. Regardless, I think we'll see a lot of non-profits (or non-profit-adjacent, with bylaws/goals that diverge significantly from your typical vendor, like Fairphone) entering the market.

@jsbarretto

hmm

Maby "entering the market" alredy is the problem here.

If it would be possible to attract more (especially poor people that have no "market-value") to maker-spaces, repair-shops, etc. and they can walk out with non-commercial devices that operate in an open-source environment (without ads and scams and all) .. that would be really something (dangerous).

@berlinfokus I think there's an inherent tension here though: a non-profit, user-oriented phone market that internalises externalities (such as labour rights, environmental cost, etc.) wouldn't look much like the setup we have today. Phones would be designed for longevity and repair. Their manufacture would not be lucrative and would happen at a lower frequency. It's just a different definition of 'success' to that which existing manufacturers, driven by the profit motive, operate upon.

@jsbarretto

Yea it's difficult, no question.

I just remember the 1990s and early 2000s (in Berlin) when you had a lot of underground-spaces where very "normal" people went to seek help repairing their broken radio .. and got the help there from the very nerds who not only did that, but constructed their own (very crazy sometimes) devices, started coding and made experimental music.

These connections did a lot good. And they are all broken now. (Also money destroyed all the physical spaces.)

@berlinfokus @jsbarretto

the same also happened in UK, Netherlands, France (I was part of this scene in late 90s) - we didn't even call them "hackspaces" or "makerspaces" as such, they grew out of the squats/raves and finding a lot of abandoned hardware in buildings that were used for parties, a lot of which we got working again - my then hometown was Reading in SE England, which had a lot of tech companies but also much "boom and bust" that led to many going bankrupt

@vfrmedia @jsbarretto

Write your stories down & post them somewhere.

Next gen definitely needs some input that doesn't come from crooked #billionaires and their Igors.

(Also, I should do the same I guess. )

@jsbarretto @berlinfokus

A train of thought in my head recently is that the computer revolution to date has, I think fairly unarguably, ridden on an unsustainable train of progress. It hasn't arisen from a stable state. It's happened because of continuous industrial revolution and advancement that has depended on a throw away culture.

I am quite curious to what degree a requirement to live in a sustainable way might be incompatible with endlessly increasing computing speed, storage density, and general astonishing revolutions.

I think I feel that these computers we have now are about good enough? :-) Maybe we can be fine with this hardware. I think there might be huge software improvements to be made though, particularly in terms of improving the software ecology, user ownership of their data, and accessibility in many senses.

But it is still a rather curious thing to wonder about. What does living in a sustainable civilisation actually look like?

Eg, as a hypothetical example: could a culture living sustainably develop VR or software defined radio, or would it have to say "that might be nice, but it is beyond our sustainable potential"?

I don't know

@jsbarretto @berlinfokus Or another example is small electric vehicles. These seem wonderful – they can give mobility to so many more people, perhaps give children more independence, and help a population away from cars.

At the moment there's tremendous development with these and lots of prices are being pushed down. It looks like a lovely technology to have access to in some happy sustainable future.

But what if we hadn't developed that and gone through the learning curve?

Can a sustainable culture incubate and support a (modest and localised) revolution like that? Perhaps it can, but it takes longer? I'm quite curious about that.

I'm reading and enjoying some solarpunk at the moment, but I haven't really seen this question thought through yet.

In the books I'm reading they have some tech we don't have now, but there isn't a hint that, in the present of the book, people are radically innovating. They seem to be living in a contented stable state. Perhaps that is a very good ambition, but it is an interesting and different kind of culture.

@rmblaber1956 This is a random mastodon post I made while eating my breakfast while thinking back to a conversation I had more than a year ago, not a dissertation paper. "Libertarian" meaning "libertarian right" is pretty common parlance on the interwebs. Libertarian-left people tend to refer to themselves with other terms (anarcho-, democratic*, etc.) or otherwise specify the 'left' part.