PunkPunk: a genre of speculative fiction that supposes that the future will have the cultural, social, and aesthetic sensibilities of late 1970s New York City youth culture.
The more tools you know, the easier each tool is to pick up, because there is a vast hidden overlap between all fields that only becomes noticeable when you master multiple. (This is less true of messy languages like C++ where most of the complexity is incidental -- stuff like memorizing accidental inconsistencies introduced by the language design committee forgetting previous features.)
But, at small scales, the effect of anything is less important. So, it's not that Small Computing is anti-quality or anti-craft, but that any failure of quality or craft in a Small Computing context is not multiplied by a million identical installations, so those failings are more acceptable.
One of the reasons I'm so hard on the original macintosh is that the team appropriated fantastic ideas from better projects that they were totally unprepared to do justice to, then delivered warped & broken versions of them.
'Technology' does not have a teleology. *Particular* technologies have biases -- particular behaviors they are a better fit for. We should be careful of naturalistic fallacies & technological determinism: when those biases don't fit our desires, we should replace the tools.
These folks weren't trying to predict our current future. They were trying to create a future worth living in, & we failed to make that happen.
Englebart could do MOAD in 1968 because that was the available tech. It looks familiar not because it's ahead of its time but because we stopped progressing.
1) don't confuse 'the internet' with 'the web'; 2) don't confuse 'the web' with 'social media'; 3) don't confuse 'social media' with 'corporate social media'
And Sterling sits so deep in layers of cynical irony that he makes Doug Coupland look like Mister Rogers, basically all the time. So, it's easy to project an end of history narrative onto things he does -- up until he writes something like Pirate Utopia, which pulls the same trick on the post-WWI melting pot of radical ideologies.