Technology

Anti-capitalist regulations, I imagine.

All power to the users. And I do mean ALL. Complete control over cellular modems for one. Control over every little bit of hardware in the consumers hands.

That includes warranty promises, that includes schematics, source code for firmware, everything. For all current, past and future devices.

Once capitalism is dead.

Technology is great, it's just naturally being used to exploit.

Taking patent, trademark, and copyright laws to what they were in, say, 1790, might be a good start.

Regard today's billionaires with the same contempt that one does of criminals.

Wait at least 5 years before buying a new computer.

Don't pay by credit card.

We stop the acquisitions. We work out ways to foster innovation and protect patents only in the short term.

We need more than a couple phone manufacturers, we need more than a couple of food producers. All of these monolith mega corporations keep smaller upstarts from coming up and competing.

If people stopped using tech to exploit people they would stop feeling exploited by it

I'll be optimistic about technology when the last techbro is strangled with the entrails of the last angel investor

The use of open, decentralized platforms such as the fediverse is one small step in the right direction at least.

Raze Silicon Valley to the ground and start over?

Break up the mega corps. Enact user privacy-by-default laws. Market dominance via "free product" followed up by bait and switch tactics should be outlawed.

Concrete goals, and reasonable steps to achieve them.

I feel like lately we've hit a weird speculative investment period in tech, where we have a bunch of tech that's created because it can be, but not because it's needed. Do LLMs, crypto currency, or NFTs have actual uses? Very possibly, but nothing concrete enough to satisfy the bubble that formed from them.

We live in an age of unreality. Give us something achievable and genuine, we get excited. It doesn't have to be complicated, just real. Hell, I'm excited as fuck over solid sodium batteries, and that's boring as shit.

Repairable technology with encouragement to repair things that break by designing them to be fixable.

Open source technologies becoming the rule, rather than the exception (this is already the case in some ways, but I truly mean EVERYTHING).

Open Standards that make interoperability easier by removing walled gardens (iMessage, G-Sync, etc).

Should we?

I’m a developer posting on Lemmy so maybe take this with a huge grain of salt but I think we need to focus less on STEM/finance and more on humanities education. Definitely in the United States but probably most of the world considering India and China focus on tech too.

When I was learning to code (in the 90’s and 2000’s unless you count a 9 year old making BASIC do loops), my mentors basically all had majored in something besides computer science because there wasn’t necessarily even a computer science major available if your college didn’t have “Tech” in the name. It was a lot of hippies who spent their weekends making pottery and got into IT or software development almost by accident; it was a job to fund their non-lucrative hobby or passion.

Basically, we lost something when being a programmer became a goal and not a way to reach some other goal. I’m not sure we can return to a time when it was tinkerers and hobbyists coming to the field with different backgrounds but more creatives should learn to code and more coders should be forced to make art.

Get rid of the billionaire tech-lords. The ones that create the only new tech we’re allowed to have: fees, ads, and enshittification.

Uh, NOT put surveillance and extremely questionable AI into everything? I don’t need my toilet tweeting how healthy I am

We cannot even play music from a device without needing some sort of patent license, usually paid by the hardware vendor.

Producing products that the users wants, and that solves tje users real problems. And not trying to make products as addictive as possible, to harvest as much user data as possible to sell.

I, for one, have become a lot more optimist about Tech ever since I've replaced the closed solutions that deny me control from corporations looking to squeeze every last cent of value from me - from smartphone OSes to TV Boxes - with open source solutions were it's me who holds the keys.

Decomodify software. Refuse to respect copyright laws for software, or mandate that all software must be GPL or an equivalent restrictive license.

Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.

If you are a public institution of any kind, you should not be using corporate, proprietary software, no exceptions.

Closed source software and hardware is largely what allowed massive corpos to take over the software and hardware scene, and it's what creates the incentive for silicon valley tech bros to create new technology solely in the hopes of being acquired for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars by some massive megacorp.

Corpos and private equity scumbags wouldn't be interested in acquiring these companies if they knew all the code and technology was under a GPL-like license, and anybody could take that tech, modify it, redistribute it, fork it, rebrand it, etc.

Open source.

"AI will make all of your work obsolete, there's nothing we can do about it. Shame..."

I'm fine with losing my job, it's tedious anyway. I'm not with losing my income though. Let automation and programs do the work and share the fruit of their labor to the people. Get rid of CEOs.

Then we can talk about optimism.

Automate terra forming against climate change. I want big machines and swarms of drones doing 24/7 regreening and planting forests in the desert.

When I see technology actively making the world consistently better rather than constantly trashing the ecosystem that literally keeps us alive, I'll have optimism about it.

Opensource (specifically Libre)

Worker and community cooperatives.

Right to repair.

Public money, public goods.

Privacy by default.

Decentralization > Federation > Disconnected > Centralized

Treating addiction as a disease and people intentionally seeking to exploit it at a mass scale should be charged for harm.

Organizations should be held liable for user data exposed to malicious actors both intentionally and through neglect of security.

Well first we kill all they ~~lawyers~~ Investment Bankers.

Then all the lawyers.

Anarcho-transhumanism, or ig more open source innovations unsullied by the profit motive would-be nice.

Get rot economists out of tech companies and return to private ownership.

I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.

Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.

Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.

How did we get here?