shibco on Nostr: There's for sure a moment in time where the timeline diverged away from data ...
There's for sure a moment in time where the timeline diverged away from data ownership. If I were to point to a single data point, it would be when Apple abandoned their incredible zero-conf Airport Express wireless routers.
This isn't nostalgia, these things were absolutely *boss.* They were the size of a large Apple power charger, and had a Ethernet, usb and line out port. You plugged the thing in, named the device and added a WPA2 passphrase. Then, 10 seconds later, you could plug an external disk and any set of speakers into this thing have LAN-wide remote storage and instant, reliable audio streaming.
It was a totally different philosophy. As tech got smaller and more battery efficient, everything was turned into hardware terminals with flaky bluetooth and unreliable voice-powered interfaces, pushing shitty paid extractive services like Spotify and Apple Music and Google Drive, etc. The Airport Express is the perfect encapsulation of the fork in the road that was the trajectory of tech at the time. We really went down the most boring path, imo.
Imagine what we could do today! M.2 disks, microSD cards, RISC-V or Pi controllers, faster wifi, better connectivity options. There's so much potential here; mesh networks, zero-setup personal data stores, distributed backups, the possibilities are endless. 🥲
This isn't nostalgia, these things were absolutely *boss.* They were the size of a large Apple power charger, and had a Ethernet, usb and line out port. You plugged the thing in, named the device and added a WPA2 passphrase. Then, 10 seconds later, you could plug an external disk and any set of speakers into this thing have LAN-wide remote storage and instant, reliable audio streaming.
It was a totally different philosophy. As tech got smaller and more battery efficient, everything was turned into hardware terminals with flaky bluetooth and unreliable voice-powered interfaces, pushing shitty paid extractive services like Spotify and Apple Music and Google Drive, etc. The Airport Express is the perfect encapsulation of the fork in the road that was the trajectory of tech at the time. We really went down the most boring path, imo.
Imagine what we could do today! M.2 disks, microSD cards, RISC-V or Pi controllers, faster wifi, better connectivity options. There's so much potential here; mesh networks, zero-setup personal data stores, distributed backups, the possibilities are endless. 🥲