In the late 90s and early 2000s, in the time of the open web, with independent free operating systems on the rise the ruling elite of billionaires and their pet governments saw the very real risk of losing control over the masses. Just imagine: Everybody from young Timmy to Grandma Esther could learn (and was encouraged! I fondly remember an HTML course in an “old people newspaper” my grandpa read) to learn programming, build their own website connect and speak their mind on a net was completely uncontrolled by states. No algorithms that burrow your tweet, no way to ‘cancel’ unwelcome opinions. And the same was true if you used free software: The ability to - at least in theory - look at the sourcecode of the tools you use, check for backdoors and make changes and even recompile everything afterwards is extremely dangerous to authorities.
They followed the good old “embrace extend extinguish” playbook. Give people ways that are seemingly more accessible and easy to publish online - no need for writing HTML! - push those services and let people forget what empowerment they had. No, they didn’t ban private websites… they just taught people to stop creating or looking for them. On the free operating system front they first donated to some key projects, give people prominent in the community well paying jobs, let them work on open source projects in their work time… openly endorse specific open source projects and steer the community slowly, very slowly into a direction where key elements become more and more complex. Too complex for a single person or a small team to fully understand or maintain. Now you need more infrastructure, more manpower, more funding. And who has the funding? Just guess…
The next step is to make the software that the user needs more controllable. Just remember: Not that long ago you could walk into a computer store, buy a Floppy / CD / DVD with software and install and use it as long as you had a physical copy of it. No online activation, no accounts, no way to remotely disable it. With ever more stuff moving from installed software on your computer to services running online, with the rising need to have some form of subscription and account to simply use the software they regained control.
Now they are coming for the open source applications. With ever more Linux programs being dependent on Systemd and with corporations having control over the development thereof it will get harder to port this software over to other systems (say BSDs) or even Linux systems not running Systemd. With the upcoming age-verification laws all over the world this has… nasty implications.
If you couple all of the above with the already compromised hardware we all are using we are approaching truly dystopic territories: Do you think you really have control over your computer? Well, if so, i would suggest researching what theoretical can be done with the nice combo of the Intel Management Engine (or its equivalents), AMT and TPM…
Perhaps i am just an tinfoil hat wearing paranoiac, but the state of the digital world in the year of our lord 2026 is something i would not have envisioned in my darkest nightmares from 30 years ago.
In a way it was a brilliant plot by the “elites”.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, in the time of the open web, with independent free operating systems on the rise the ruling elite of billionaires and their pet governments saw the very real risk of losing control over the masses. Just imagine: Everybody from young Timmy to Grandma Esther could learn (and was encouraged! I fondly remember an HTML course in an “old people newspaper” my grandpa read) to learn programming, build their own website connect and speak their mind on a net was completely uncontrolled by states. No algorithms that burrow your tweet, no way to ‘cancel’ unwelcome opinions. And the same was true if you used free software: The ability to - at least in theory - look at the sourcecode of the tools you use, check for backdoors and make changes and even recompile everything afterwards is extremely dangerous to authorities.
They followed the good old “embrace extend extinguish” playbook. Give people ways that are seemingly more accessible and easy to publish online - no need for writing HTML! - push those services and let people forget what empowerment they had. No, they didn’t ban private websites… they just taught people to stop creating or looking for them. On the free operating system front they first donated to some key projects, give people prominent in the community well paying jobs, let them work on open source projects in their work time… openly endorse specific open source projects and steer the community slowly, very slowly into a direction where key elements become more and more complex. Too complex for a single person or a small team to fully understand or maintain. Now you need more infrastructure, more manpower, more funding. And who has the funding? Just guess…
The next step is to make the software that the user needs more controllable. Just remember: Not that long ago you could walk into a computer store, buy a Floppy / CD / DVD with software and install and use it as long as you had a physical copy of it. No online activation, no accounts, no way to remotely disable it. With ever more stuff moving from installed software on your computer to services running online, with the rising need to have some form of subscription and account to simply use the software they regained control.
Now they are coming for the open source applications. With ever more Linux programs being dependent on Systemd and with corporations having control over the development thereof it will get harder to port this software over to other systems (say BSDs) or even Linux systems not running Systemd. With the upcoming age-verification laws all over the world this has… nasty implications.
If you couple all of the above with the already compromised hardware we all are using we are approaching truly dystopic territories: Do you think you really have control over your computer? Well, if so, i would suggest researching what theoretical can be done with the nice combo of the Intel Management Engine (or its equivalents), AMT and TPM…
Perhaps i am just an tinfoil hat wearing paranoiac, but the state of the digital world in the year of our lord 2026 is something i would not have envisioned in my darkest nightmares from 30 years ago.