Its just a pattern I see repeated. The innovators find a playground, its cool for a while, then it succumbs to grift of some kind or another, and the innovators move on.
There was a time when "pamphlets" were an edgy new social medium, now its just a certain kind of ad. Same thing happened with radio. And now it has happened to the web also.
Why should this be the last time?
As for threatening the existing powers... I don't see what power they have if all they're guarding is a pile of stuff that nobody wants anymore.
It may be a bit inconvenient, but if you really need a device with radios that you can run arbitrary code on, you can get one for something like $4 and you can use your existing phone to drive it over something generic like http (There are plenty of people on meshtastic doing this).
I don't have the answers re: next steps but I know that its far more difficult to prevent people from communicating in novel ways than it is to come up with novel ways to communicate. I figure we've been playing this cat and mouse game with authority for millennia: they always win eventually and we always find a new way to make that victory irrelevant.
We lost. OK. What's left to do but invent the next battleground? We're hackers, its what we do.
> There was a time when "pamphlets" were an edgy new social medium, now its just a certain kind of ad. Same thing happened with radio. And now it has happened to the web also. Why should this be the last time?
It feels like the last time because the pace of world-changing innovations is slowing. Printing and radio are simple from a physics point of view, the internet was built at the basis of what was known technology at the time (computers in general). To me it seems that we're butting against the limits of simple stuff, and that the pace of rapid monumental innovations has slowed drastically. A new, revolutionary type of communications probably isn't impossible, but it would likely require inventing a whole new kind of communicating between people, or a new type of computing (I'm assuming you're taking the 'new kind of tech' choice from my previous comment - just reforming the internet on its infrastructure probably won't work). And neither of those seem like things that we're remotely close to. It may take decades if not more.
> As for threatening the existing powers... I don't see what power they have if all they're guarding is a pile of stuff that nobody wants anymore.
It's not about what you want, it's about what you need. Do you ever access your government's services? Do banking, pay people with anything but cash, or invest into anything? Hold a job or are looking for one? Learn remotely? If you need to do any of those things, you will be obligated to use the future internet. That's where the power is. Uprooting all this will be difficult if not impossible, barring some catastrophic internet-wide event.