To me the future of technology is a lot closer to Bret Victor’s vision of computational public spaces than private and centralized AI black boxes and middlemans, that try to get as much data about us as possible. It’s the complete antithesis to today’s narratives about technology.

I especially enjoyed comparing the values of urban design and computing. It’s also a bold claim, that we will always give up our privacy when computing is bound to screens, but probably true. And lastly, it’s such a good observation that we managed to build a somewhat democratic and civilized society based on very complex infrastructure systems, but never managed to make these systems transparent and visible to us, so that we can understand and therefore govern them.

Our brains haven’t changed in a hundred thousand years, but we’ve built this very complex society around ourselves, and we’ve decided that we want to collectively govern it.

We can’t do that, if we can’t see or understand how any of this works.

📺 Youtube video

Honest cookie banner:

“Our website would like to violate your privacy and sell your personal data.”

Cloudflare now makes it easy and free to add Google analytics behind a proxy, so that it’s harder for ad blockers to prevent Google’s tracking.

This is especially sad, since they could have made it easy and free for privacy-focused alternatives like Plausible and Pirsch instead. They already have documentation on how to do it manually with Cloudflare workers.

Another reason I should migrate away from Cloudflare…

Stop paying to use a service. Start paying to host your service.