How and why did we get to where we are now in terms of choices and uses for the devices we  have on …

How and why did we get to where we are now in terms of choices and uses for the devices we  have on our persons? Was it always in the cards that these devices and our uses of them would fall so neatly into the  realm of consumption? 

What do we have? We have faster and more capable computing devices in our pockets than  we had on our desktops a few years back with enough storage to make  our younger selves weep like kids being given the keys to the candy factory.  

Yes we do have cool stuff and useful stuff….but most of the stuff makes our devices and us by extension  end points on a path controlled consumption. We watch videos we snap  photos we read books we play games.
In some cases we even do these things together, or in the newspeak of the day, via  social networking,

But even these  bits of not being pure  consumers, of being  parts of a sum , are more often than not facilitated on closed  system, walled gardens, curated pens… fancy digiterific  places in the brave new world but at the bottom of the bird cage  eGhetoisation.

Very few  of our uses of these devices, by choice or by design, are  about  bringing together bits of our selves to form  pools of sharing, summations greater than the parts and in short what I am sure those who know me will call Tom's continual pitch for the utopia of the emonks.

So sure, maybe it is. the utopia you can keep though as those never work out. 

But what if we decided to want our devices and our use of them to be less an affair of consumption and partly bits of a greater state of sharing. Librarybox gets to this somewhat.  I tried running Piratebox on one of my old droid ogs…close. Remember the mesh aspects of OLPC? I have even taken a few pokes at a small device specifically for a shared environment   over the summer (https://github.com/tomhiggins/anyfesto) but quickly got devcycled downward. 

But these are outliers. .

The bulk of devices and users have, often rightfully, been crafted with the fear  of sharing.  Who can blame them with the viri industry stoking the flames, MS  pushing out  an ever more byzantine platform, Apple  steering folks into their walled garden of pre approved  use and uses, and even holes in the stalwarts  like sshd and bash.

What could be done to promote and proliferate environments and tools  that share in open and safe manners?  How do we get the masses to , at the very least, support  being a part of safe sharing (cpu cycles, drive space, etc etc) and at best being active participants in the process. 

We have such powers in our pockets (oh do behave) that could create such networks that the current gatekeepers would be none to happy to have to accept. We could facilitate all manner of  services such that  no school would ever have to wait  for today's tech to trickle down to them years latter, no communal meeting space would be without its own Library of Alexandria, no communication between users would ever have to be snooped on or tracked.. and all of it locally hosted without gates or keepers or sanction of  a governmental  security apparatus.