> Worse, it’s not clear what we can do. This reflects our current political emergency. Ignorant and wicked people control the government, propped up by chortling billionaires, corrupt evangelical hucksters, and resentful wing nuts; we can work to end the nightmare but the road is long and uncertain. The future of computing now seems to depend on the whims of a few businessmen, none of whom appears to care very much about computing.

http://www.markbernstein.org/May18/DependentDevelopers.html

any time i really think about it, i'm overwhelmed by the sense that to combat corporate control of electronics we will have to reinvent and re-normalize untold swathes of modern technology, but we haven't got the free labor for that, and definitely not to make it broadly accessible. i think about friends whose only computer is a phone or tablet. for all practical purposes, we're locked into this mess.

@garbados At least until the EMP pulse hits and then we all…

@rotatingskull

> haha, remember computers?
< yes, with varying degrees of nostalgia and spite

@garbados ha, okay but seriously notwithstanding the electroapocalypse the real solution is Free hardware manufacture

but for that someone would need to

sieze
the
means
of
something?

@rotatingskull i think about this. i think about establishing lo-tek production lines for open hardware gadgets, like non-phone PDAs, routers, etc; it's the sort of thing that can be done horizontally, with relatively low overhead, even though it's totally perpendicular to mainstream products.