The internet revolution is not the future anymore. It’s here I guess. I couldn’t get my 2nd grandma on it before she passed away. Not being connected was surprisingly problematic, and despite our best efforts, her unwillingness to engage with the internet left her lonely in her final days. I guess that’s a measure of ubiquity if there ever was one.

What scares me is that we stopped dreaming about how technology can change us, how it can subvert systems which abuse power, and how it can shape our future. In short, we don’t have enough Cyberpunk Dreamers.

We understand already that things never quite live up to all we dreamed they would be. Imaginary things require no compromises, and the slow settling of them into reality undermines that. I’ve seen it often enough. Nobody plans flaws into their grand vision, so before it exists it can be perfect. Then, slowly, as it is actually implemented, the list of things it can become narrows and the list of things it actually is becomes longer, and eventually people feel an important priority has been rejected or a value has been undermined, and they lose interest. I saw it first happen with a hackerspace I helped with for many years. Within a year of founding, a staggering percentage of the folks on the founder’s plaque were no longer a part of it. I never even met a fair handful of them in person. They felt they’d bought into something grander, and while there wasn’t anything explicitly wrong with the place that they’d protest openly, they had hoped for so much more. In less than 5 years, a series of extremely practical tradeoffs had all but weeded these idealists out completely. Maybe it’s part of some natural cycle.

What weirds me out is how content we suddenly are with our visions of the future being compromised, and how we don’t seem to fight as hard anymore. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein, widely considered the first science fiction book, in 1818. For almost 200 years we’ve dreamed of what freedoms the future can give us and what that will cost us. Now, despite the fact that we live in a reality where a man has fled his country to protest government surveillance, the societal discussion in English grappling with these subjects seems to have all but dried up. Sometimes we go the Post-Apocalyptic method and grapple with the fallout of our choices, but rarely do we discuss the actual process of paving the road to hell.