Reading back through the history of how Firefox’s Australis came to be, I realize all over again just how delusional the Firefox developers were and are, and how much demyelinization must have had to occur for their IQs to fall to such stunning lows.

This historical exploration is part research for another, longer post that will be more like the old newspaper articles I used to write rather than a blog post.

The conventional wisdom is that the personal computer is moribund.

That “wisdom” is utterly wrong as PC sales are stabilizing and will likely even rise when Microsoft releases Windows 9 in 2015.

Any “dying” product category out there wishes it could sustain unit sales of ~300 million per year.

The much-predicted death of the PC has been an ongoing bogeyman for nearly two decades now, well before tablets became a thing. People have such short memories. (And tablets were a thing before they were a thing. That tablet is running Windows XP!)

Tablets have been the excuse – I don’t think they are the actual reason (more on that in a different post) – for the interface apocalypses of late such as Gnome 3, Unity, and Australis that are extremely user-hostile and are really more about UI/IX designers continuing to receive a paycheck than anything else.

What the world will look like in a decade is that a smaller number of home users will have PCs, businesses will continue using PCs at the same or greater rate, and people will still be predicting the death of the PC.

There’s just no replacement – nor will there be soon – for a big-ass monitor, a mouse or other pointing device with pixel-level control, and no worries about having enough memory or power.

I first started seeing prediction of the imminent death of the PC in 1994. I am sure I will still be seeing these prognostications and pronouncements in 2024, and they’ll still be wrong.

“All kinds of illegal” is a great phrase.

This article reminded me of it.

It also reminded of one time when the police came to search my uncle’s house. This was the same uncle who liked to keep ammunition in the drinking cups in the kitchen cabinets.

So I asked him, “Uncle Wayne, why’re the police searching your house?”

His reply: “Well, could be any number of reasons.”

Ah, North Florida. There is nowhere else like it. For which we should all be thankful.

In an era when it’s likely that most Americans commit three felonies a day, and where there is ubiquitous and inescapable surveillance, there can be no justice and no safety.

The tragedy of Aaron Swartz’s state-assisted suicide is the best illustration of how doing anything interesting or unusual accomplishes nothing these days but making you into a target. Or rather, doing anything to help society paints a bull’s eye on you because it might hurt a corporation’s profit or embarrass a rich person – both great crimes now.

In an age of dramatic economic and political inequality, Swartz’s death is proof that it does not matter how talented you are or how hard you work—American meritocracy is a sham. If Swartz, a rich tech genius with an unparalleled network of powerful friends and a remarkable track record of success, couldn’t live an ethical, dignified life, then who can? Our contemporary culture is crippled by increasingly Soviet-style barriers against all who challenge the status quo. It has criminal statutes so broad that basically everyone is a lawbreaker, and selective prosecution has become a mechanism for ordering our politics. It demands deep moral compromise just to live with minimal interference from authority. It requires that, to be a ‘success’ like Karp, you must have not only the talent to build appealing social systems, but also the lack of a moral compass involved in using those social systems to manipulate others. The ethic of this approach is designed by those who fear only those risks associated with human freedom.

Those who dislike this culture, who think that success is the opposite of killing or spying or greed or ass-kissing, saw virtue in Swartz. Swartz had character, and he was killed for it.

I was talking about similar topics with my partner recently and while these ideas aren’t exactly novel, as we discussed it to us it was striking to us how there are a few ideas you can’t question these days:

1) That profit is an unalloyed good, and making a profit/money excuses anything a corporation does.

2) That technological change is also and often by extension of the above always positive, no matter what it destroys.

3) That questioning the mantra of “disruption/change” brands one a Luddite, a communist or worse – a terrorist.

Techno-utopian Randian libertarianism merging (contradictorily) with the pervasive surveillance state sounds like a stygian nightmare, but the thing about nightmares is you can wake up. And I don’t think that is going to be possible.