[hp50g]

Unfortunately technology's progression via marketing has turned it into a king of magic that is impossible to understand and is out of reach of them (past consumption). Look at most consumer IT products these days - black boxes for milking people.

DRM, the cloud, closed source software, unified communications (commercial and government internet control) and surveillance already are enslaving us.

[wladimir]

I'm fully aware of what is happening, and how things appear to be going the "wrong" direction, at least according to the tech news. Don't let that despair you.

What I proposed was something we (as in people with intimate knowledge about these things) could do to make this better. A lot of technical people are content with being high priests, and a lot of "consumers" content with not understanding what is going on. It may be possible to change that, albeit slowly.

Looking beneath the surface level hyper commercialized pooha, there are quite active developments by in distributed protocols, mesh networks, cryptocurrencies, and people working on technology that is open and can meet basic human needs (for example see http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...), and so on.

Another thing is that centralization makes things fragile. Even though centralization may be more efficient at first glance, once centralized systems collapse enough, people will look for more decentralized solutions.