so I just started listening to A People's History of Computing, which I'm sure will be a good book, but which opens with some very irritating paragraphs
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
the PC revolution was deeply hostile to time sharing systems as a whole because they historically meant centralized control of the computer. the archetypal form of this control was the batch processed mode of use where you'd give your punch cards to some operators who would..
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
..then run it on the machine, but even the terminal time-shared systems, including PLATO, were still deeply centralized, and the PC revolutionaries were hostile to that too
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
a lot of this hostility came from the limits that this entailed for people's access to the computer
not just the literal access, where you would have to have a terminal wired up to connect to the remote computer, which typically meant terminals in computing centers not your home
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
it also meant in the more abstract sense of being able to get your hands on the computer itself to poke at it, to learn about it, modify it, etc.
time shared computers were not for tinkering, experimenting, and learning, not even PLATO
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
these time sharing systems were tools, and the administrators of them definitely did NOT want people fucking with them in unauthorized ways
you had more _time_ access but it still wasn't YOURS to do with and play with as you pleased
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
this is the classic hostility that the PC revolutionaries had in the early to mid 1970s
but there's another hostility that ought to have existed latently amongst the users of the _social_ time sharing systems specifically: hostility towards government oppression and censorship
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
now this is one of those things that the critics of cyberlibertarianism will roll their eyes at, but this is, as always, a completely dopey response
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
PLATO is an extremely good example of this, in fact, because government censorship was a REAL problem with PLATO at one point
in the early 1970s, during Nixon's political troubles, there were lots of rich conversations happening on PLATO about Nixon specifically
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
and at one point, some people were organizing a political rally on PLATO to support impeachment or something to this effect
Nixon heard about this, and because PLATO had federal funding, was able to threaten PLATO and get them to ban that conversation and all future ones like it
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
this is not a hypothetical bogeyman of government censorship, this is one of the most corrupt presidents DOING censorship because the system was partially government funded and therefore could not be associated with partisan organizing, etc.
this is a textbook case of censorship
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
and the thing is, this actually isn't all that unusual, when you think about it
those of us who are old enough to have grown up with computers in school prior to the widespread ownership of laptops and smart phones kids have today since birth have intimate knowledge of this
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
millennials, and maybe some gen x folx, are VERY aware of the risks of government censorship of computer systems because some of the first actual computer censorship we encounter comes directly from governments in school
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
schools, at the direction of the local school board, often install very conservative censorship programs onto school computers and networks, generally banning all sorts of things but importantly banning searches for queer issues, abortion, and so forth
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
when the anti-cyberlibertarian crowd mocks these concerns, they treat it like people are worried about a fantasy world, as if we live in Orwell's 1984 or Stalinist russia, but that's a total fallacy
we live in a country with rampant christian whackos who routinely DO censorship
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
and this is a fundamental problem with time sharing systems, and why it's important to be precise about why they're NOT networked: they are inherently EASY to censor, so much so that we had literal government censorship of time shared systems LONG before they got to networks
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
and historically, in the US at least, networks like the phone and postal networks, have been subject to extreme anti-censorship laws that made it quite difficult to censor, hence why networked sociality on the internet was such a major thing for cyberlibertarians
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
there was political precedent for saying that centralized computerized communications systems were VALID targets for political repression, but networked communication systems were NOT
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
but I also think that the technical distinction is of continued importance today still partially because of government oppression, because those same christian whackos are now starting to build actual lists of people who get abortions using the access they have to computer data
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
they never went away in the last 20 years, they've only gotten more powerful, and the cyberlibertarian concerns are only more relevant
but there's another reason why the technical distinction between timesharing and actually networked computers matters
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
and thats because the world we live in is one in which the problem of centralization of software into corporate "platforms" precisely mirrors the risks of of timeshared systems