That’s why I think computers should be like in year 2000. Not because I’m some luddite, but because you can’t increase complexity indefinitely without laws of the market changing. Today’s general-purpose computer systems are so complex that they encourage behavior that wouldn’t be competitive then, because then there were more choice and the industry was much easier to get into.

There are things one can live without.

Especially funny, because new cultural phenomena involving computing are as applicable today as they were in year 2000. What was added since then seems to be about, well, that amount of gaslighting, propaganda and primate instinct abuse made real by centralized social media, and about everyone carrying surveillance devices.

Not everything is progress, some things are just experience. I think wisdom may be in losing that.

This also won’t be unprecedented, supersonic passenger airliners are not operated today, and creation of an actual space colony seems much further than it was even 20 years ago, and unification of the Earth into one huge federated state has not happened after Cold War ending, and we don’t carry around devices with nuclear batteries.

Such airliners were in operation. Such a colony was being seriously devised. Such a political project … I guess, was more of a propaganda device both on the Western and on the Soviet sides, but many things done and attempted hint that it wasn’t all dreams. Nuclear batteries exist.

So. Computers produced in a few enormous God level foundries, with technology far harder to achieve than nuclear shield, centralized to a few companies, with processes approaching theoretical physical limitations, being the necessary element of our daily lives. I don’t think that’s a good idea by any measure, if you forget what you know about our world and just read this sentence and imagine some alternative one.