many mid-20th century French thinkers like Foucault, Debord, Deleuze and Baudrillard spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and technology. Lots of this stuff has turned out to be extremely prescient. (Ellul is another example, but as a Christian Anarchist his critiques of what he called the Technical Society, are a bit of an outlier from the other guys above who, despite a plurality of ideas and perspectives, were all coming from a pretty similar place wrt their philosophical backgrounds)

A pretty easy to digest example is Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control”, which is like 5 pages long and available for free online, written ca 1990 that is pretty spooky in how accurately it predicted the current state of affairs.

The real king here is Baudrillard but his writing isn’t always the most accessible

there’s a lot of mid-century French theorists spinning in their graves right now

IRC continues to demonstrate the superiority of protocols over platforms. Unfortunately, the modern internet is entirely dominated by centralized platforms and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

is there currently any work being done to do that though? It’s great that that is possible but if nobody is doing it, it’s only a cute hypothetical.

the only thing more aggravating than using imperial is having to listen to all the complaining about how metric is better. We get it, bro; it’s out of our control at this point

the thing to do here is to continue referring to it as the DoD. I know that nobody of any consequence will do anything that could be construed as interesting but a person can dream

the short-term plan is to slurp up all the stuff while they can. The long term plan is that there is no place for plebs in the automated future. The unwritten prologue to their sci-fi adventure is us commoners being abandoned to starve on a poisoned and resource-depleted mud ball as the intrepid billionaires go off to explore the cosmos with their robot pals.