Tom Foremski:

In 2005, Mr Engelbart confided to me: “I sometimes feel that my work over the past 20 or so years has been a failure. I have not been able to get funding and I have not been able to engage anybody in a dialogue.”

Power to be people…

His funding was based on the use of large computers connected to personal workstations that looked very much like PCs, a computer architecture called time-sharing. But the microcomputer and its promise of being self-sufficient, unconnected to anything, was thought to be the future at the time. And the counter-culture with its hatred of “the Man” and centralized systems of power and oppression, rejected the time-sharing mainframe based computer architecture that underpinned the work of Mr. Engelbart and his colleagues. Big centralized systems were out.

The promise of the individual, power to the people, the ideals of self-sufficiency that ruled the counter-culture movement became enshrined in the promise of the stand-alone Personal Computer. It’s an example of how popular culture can affect something as seemingly distant and unconnected as computer architecture.

Associated Press:

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that “whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that don’t go through American servers.”
Friedrich says German officials are in touch with their U.S. counterparts “on all levels” and a delegation is scheduled to fly to Washington next week to discuss the claims that ordinary citizens and even European diplomats were being spied upon.

Bad for US Tech firms and political leaders to sell out on privacy. Big Government + Big Tech firms = Big Contract$. Not necessarily good for global business.

Slavoj Žižek:

In his early writings, Marx described the German situation as one in which the only answer to particular problems was the universal solution: global revolution. This is a succinct expression of the difference between a reformist and a revolutionary period: in a reformist period, global revolution remains a dream which, if it does anything, merely lends weight to attempts to change things locally; in a revolutionary period, it becomes clear that nothing will improve without radical global change. In this purely formal sense, 1990 was a revolutionary year: it was plain that partial reforms of the Communist states would not do the job and that a total break was needed to resolve even such everyday problems as making sure there was enough for people to eat.

Where do we stand today with respect to this difference? Are the problems and protests of the last few years signs of an approaching global crisis, or are they just minor obstacles that can be dealt with by means of local interventions? The most remarkable thing about the eruptions is that they are taking place not only, or even primarily, at the weak points in the system, but in places which were until now perceived as success stories. We know why people are protesting in Greece or Spain; but why is there trouble in such prosperous or fast-developing countries as Turkey, Sweden or Brazil? With hindsight, we might see the Khomeini revolution of 1979 as the original ‘trouble in paradise’, given that it happened in a country that was on the fast-track of pro-Western modernisation, and the West’s staunchest ally in the region. Maybe there is something wrong with our notion of paradise.