I thought about this, and my conclusion is that personal computing itself has to be completely overhauled. Personal computing started out as a petty bourgeois hobby. Your average prole wasn’t fucking around with mainframes or PCs during the 70s and 80s. The closest thing to a computer that an actual member of the working class interacted with were arcades in third places.
My sketch of what needs to happen:
Computing goes back to the mainframe-client model. The mainframe would be various servers set up to service a particular physical community (town, suburb, city) and the client is a smartphone.
The community-issued smartphones are all connected to a community intranet that’s handled by those servers and only connected to the community intranet, with exception being its basic functionality as a phone.
Average people are restricted or banned from almost all other computing devices and peripherals (consoles, PCs, printers, smart devices). Exceptions would be something like a software dev being loaned a laptop to hone on their coding skills or disabled people getting smart devices to help with their disability.
“Classic” computing devices will all be stored and maintained within a community center, perhaps in the same place as the community servers. So, people can still play videogames or do film editing, but instead of doing it at home, they would do it all in a third space. Convenience is sacrificed for the sake of deatomization.
The “classic” computing devices will be maintained by hobbyists and professionals. So, instead of building an individual gaming PC for their own individual use, the PC gamer would be in charge of building multiple gaming PCs. This has an added advantage of training people.
The computers within the community center has access to the internet instead of just the community intranet. This is where “classic” social media could still exist.
This sketch isn’t perfect (it doesn’t have a good answer for privacy concerns), but the current status quo has got to go.
I thought about this, and my conclusion is that personal computing itself has to be completely overhauled. Personal computing started out as a petty bourgeois hobby. Your average prole wasn’t fucking around with mainframes or PCs during the 70s and 80s. The closest thing to a computer that an actual member of the working class interacted with were arcades in third places.
My sketch of what needs to happen:
Computing goes back to the mainframe-client model. The mainframe would be various servers set up to service a particular physical community (town, suburb, city) and the client is a smartphone.
The community-issued smartphones are all connected to a community intranet that’s handled by those servers and only connected to the community intranet, with exception being its basic functionality as a phone.
Average people are restricted or banned from almost all other computing devices and peripherals (consoles, PCs, printers, smart devices). Exceptions would be something like a software dev being loaned a laptop to hone on their coding skills or disabled people getting smart devices to help with their disability.
“Classic” computing devices will all be stored and maintained within a community center, perhaps in the same place as the community servers. So, people can still play videogames or do film editing, but instead of doing it at home, they would do it all in a third space. Convenience is sacrificed for the sake of deatomization.
The “classic” computing devices will be maintained by hobbyists and professionals. So, instead of building an individual gaming PC for their own individual use, the PC gamer would be in charge of building multiple gaming PCs. This has an added advantage of training people.
The computers within the community center has access to the internet instead of just the community intranet. This is where “classic” social media could still exist.
This sketch isn’t perfect (it doesn’t have a good answer for privacy concerns), but the current status quo has got to go.