"The true torchbearers of the future aren't the ones building digital fences. They are the ones inventing new ways to leap over them."
Small, poorly articulated rant. I've come to a realization over the last few days that seems obvious in retrospect, but it wasn't something that I was previously thinking about. Some of you will know that I'm a huge fan of the "spirit of tomorrow" from the atomic age, which has vanished and is now seen as a relic of its time. The future used to be exciting. This is concerning my pessimism for the modern day and for the future.
When I was a kid, my grandparents would often take me to EPCOT Center. The whole front of the park, then called Future World, was built to showcase the wonders of modern living, imagine what tomorrow would look like, and to allow people to step forward in time to inspire future pioneers in engineering, communication, agriculture, space travel, biology, paleontology, transportation, and so on. It doesn't look like that anymore, but at the time, it was really special. The original EPCOT (and to a lesser extent, Tomorrowland) represented the human spirit.
Much of the work and effort put into the original EPCOT has since been bulldozed and replaced with Moana and the Guardians of the Galaxy. In a way, I see that as representative of the modern day, with hopefulness and positivity replaced with corporate cashgrabs that look like modern day comforts. Modern connectivity doubles as a tracking and surveillance mechanism. Our communications with other people happen most often through screens with invisible cameras and microphones. Transportation is licensed, tools are licensed, entertainment is licensed. Nothing is owned, and the traditional life goals of the "future man" of the past (a home, a car, a career, the ability to support and help others, leisure and comfort) have become mostly unattainable. Even nostalgia is now manufactured. The world revolves around profit over progress.
However small it is, my realization was this: the future was never about gadgets. It was about bettering the human experience. The more I think about it, the more I realize that leaving the internet behind (outside of work) probably wouldn't be all that bad. If anything, I could treat it like I used to treat dial up: connect, grab something, disconnect. Spotify is bullshit. Netflix is bullshit. I don't need my phone to connect with others. I don't need my TV for entertainment, or my ereader to read a book, or my music player to listen to my favorite song. And even if I want to keep some of them (which I do), they certainly don't need to remain connected to every other device on the planet for them to retain their functionality. If anything, the more time that I spend disconnected from the entire rest of the world, the more time I'll have to myself. Not just for leisure and comfort, but to be inspired again and learn about the things that used to excite me. Dinosaurs, outer space, marine biology, etc.
All of this is essentially to say that your devices don't own you and neither does the internet. Every time I see some sort of horrible news about attempts to ban VPNs, or to start verifying my age and identity to use a service, or about how my wireless carrier was giving my realtime location data to bounty hunters, I come closer and closer to "do I really need all of this?" Is this the future? I don't think it is.
BleepingComputer
Catalin Cimpanu
Nate Bartram
De_Minimis