Your words to Mozilla's CEO's ears! Thanks for the reply.

All great ideas -- and most (especially on customizability and supporting power users) are ones people on Slashdot have been suggesting for a long time, sigh.

Perhaps the most problematical decision Mozilla made was looking at the user base and deciding that if most people did not use a feature they could drop it, which ignores as you say the advocacy by the power users. A long time ago I read how scriptable applications typically have a user base of a pyramid,which goes something like this. Ninety percent of users are casual users who use the defaults or some popular existing plugins. Nine percent of users tinker with the defaults and customizatons, slowly going up a learning source. One percent of users make plugins and really understand the system and all the possibilities. These power users are the core of the community and also sometimes even eventually become application maintainers (if the app is FOSS). A terrible error is when application developers (or management) look at this pyramid and decide, well, hardly anyone uses advanced features so let's abandon them -- not realizing that by disempowering that one percent of power users the whole community powered by mobility up the pyramid becomes broken. And it seems to me that is exactly what happened with the Firefox community (as you outline).

I too used to be a big Firefox advocate to people I knew. The constant changes as Firefox emulated Chrome were disconcerting. As were bugs and security issues back then from not having each tab be a different process. And then there were weird Firefox incompatibility issues as Chrome took over marketshare. I don't use Firefox much now.

I did install Firefox on a new Android phone recently though when I had previously used the built-in Chrome browser. I also decided to not use the phone for web browsing any more to reduce stress and dopamine addictiveness of being always connected and always immediately looking stuff up instead of wondering about it more. Although I do let myself read weather news via the wrapped Firefox plugin for the weather widget.

By contrast, on my Chromebook laptop (with Linux development environment that could in theory run Firefox), I am using Chrome all the time, sigh. I like that Chrome by default will save a page as a single mhtml file whereas Firefox saves multiple files. While Firefox perhaps has a plugin for exporting mhtml, have become vary cautious of installing any plugins at this point as trust in the community fades. Which is a sad comment on late-stage capitalism and the growing theft economy perhaps -- as the parasite load on the community increases from both the top and the bottom of the economic spectrum.

Ironically, Amazon has started telling me sometimes that my (Chrome) browser is unsupported!

I cross-linked my comment above in this other story from yesterday:
"Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet"
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

It's sad to see what so much of the internet and operating systems (and even hardware) have become when there was such high hopes sin the 1970s and 1980s for the microcomputer revolution and then the network revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That said, the untapped potential for personal and community computing remains huge, and there is still great content out there including on old bog-standard personal websites. Computers, storage, and bandwidth are all amazingly cheap by 1970s standards.

AI right now is perhaps another distraction from realizing that potential?

Relevant excerpt: "I am not saying that project would succeed in attracting a lot of interest any time soon -- but Mozilla could fund such a project indefinitely at a low level (~100 international developers at ~US$70K each) on the investment returns of that 1.4 billion (that it is sadly otherwise probably about to piss away on Firefox AI). That endowment would give the project a lot of staying power credibility, beyond previous smaller attempts like Viewpoints Research, Interval Research, Internet Archive's DWeb, Berner-Lee's Solid, Nand2Tetris, Minix, or the Chandler Project. Such a project emphasizing human communications and malleability-through-simplicity would be aligned with the best of Mozilla's history and some of its remaining fanbase."

I should have mentioned 100 Rabbits there as well: https://100r.co/site/projects....

Ass I suggested earlier today: https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The project proposal was to "pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web" in order to "find the gaps that keep web developers from being able to build apps that are - in every way - the equals of native apps built for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7." ... In 2012, Andreas Gal expanded on Mozilla's aims. He characterized the current set of mobile operating systems as "walled gardens" and presented Firefox OS as more accessible: "We use completely open standards and there's no proprietary software or technology involved." ... Firefox OS was discontinued in January 2017."

I'm all for FOSS AI (assuming the benefits of AI will outweigh the risks and costs) as I suggested over twenty years ago:
https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
        "Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
        We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process? ..."

Unfortunately, Mozilla does not have a very good track record for pivots. If I was in charge of Mozilla, I would go back to a core mission of supporting human communications, and rethink email (Thunderbird) the web (Firefox, perhaps by HTML transcoding to simpler forms) and collaboration (Dialogue Mapping with IBIS). It would involve a team building a simple-as-possible and understandable-as-possible tech stack from the bottom up. This could be inspired by and borrow FOSS code from things like the Squeak/Cuis project built on a Smalltalk VM, or CollapseOS/DuskOS built on Forth, or something built around Scheme like Racket but including its own OS, or even perhaps Commodore OS. Or even bits of FireFoX OS. :-) This would be an OS especially intended to run on otherwise-obsoleted manufacturer-abandoned hardware like five-year-old Android phones, older PCs, and older Chromebooks. Or even Arduinos or FPGAs (like Commodore 64 Ultimate https://www.commodore.net/ ). But you could also run it on newer hardware. The UI would use a redraw-on-UI-action approach like Mithril. A lot of effort would go into reverse-engineering and emulating older hardware. Since there is so much out there, much paid work would go into choosing or developing open standards for all this and harvesting the best of what is already out there and massaging it into the standards. It would be a big learning curve for many developers to align their efforts with this simple-as-reasonably-possible tech stack while bringing back to life old hardware. Reversing the adage "performance is where elegance goes to die", the emphasis would be elegance, simplicity, understandability, maintainability, and security at the cost of some speed. If you need more speed for special cases, "steer" metal-level code on other boxes across the network from this OS.

I am not saying that project would succeed in attracting a lot of interest any time soon -- but Mozilla could fund such a project indefinitely at a low level (~100 international developers at ~US$70K each) on the investment returns of that 1.4 billion (that it is sadly otherwise probably about to piss away on Firefox AI). That endowment would give the project a lot of staying power credibility, beyond previous smaller attempts like Viewpoints Research, Interval Research, Internet Archive's DWeb, Berner-Lee's Solid, Nand2Tetris, Minix, or the Chandler Project. Such a project emphasizing human communications and malleability-through-simplicity would be aligned with the best of Mozilla's history and some of its remaining fanbase.

Some inspiration: "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey
https://www.infoq.com/presenta...
"Rich Hickey [authors of Clojure] emphasizes simplicity's virtues over easiness', showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path. ... The benefits of simplicity are: ease of understanding, ease of change, ease of debugging, flexibility. ..."

Where would AI fit into such a system? Not in running the base code, for sure. AI-ish tools might be useful perhaps in transcoding existing content to simpler formats. Or in scouring existing FOSS codebases for useful snippets or in generating test cases and such. Or AI might be useful in supporting collaborative work though Dialogue Mapping using IBIS where the AI helped build the Dialogue Maps. But ultimately this project would *not* be about empowering AIs running on new hardware. This project would be about empowering people using older hardware they already have to communicate better about issues they collectively care about.

Socialism for big capital and the uber-wealthy; Laissez-faire capitalism for everyone else -- and the consequences of privatization too (like extended copyrights):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

On the other hand, sometimes the law does apply equally to all, as Anatole France pointed out: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread [and to play unlicensed music]."
https://www.socratic-method.co...

As I commented on Slashdot back in 2005: https://slashdot.org/comments....
        "So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck. So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself
it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space. And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from materials found in space.
                So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
                So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored ... or a couple other sites I made in that direction ..."

Space habitats are the ultimate real-estate venture. But before them, living in the oceans or in Antarctica or underground on Earth are easier incremental steps right now compared to outer space. The bottom line is we really don't have a comprehensive well-organized integrated compact knowledgeable about sustaining human life and technology. Wikipedia is a start though.

... detailed in a book with many citations written "by liberals, for liberals": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller.
        Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. They write that American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s. They say that Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing zoning regulations, developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending.
        Klein and Thompson propose an "abundance agenda" that they say better manages the tradeoffs between regulations and social advancement and lament that America is stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention. They present the abundance agenda as a way to initiate new economic conditions that will diminish the appeal of the "socialist left" and the "populist-authoritarian right". ..."

https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...
"The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).
        We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.
        You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web. ...
        In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on earth is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space.
        The heart of any community is its library, which stores a wide variety of technological processes, only some of which are used at any one time in any specific environment. If an independent community is like a cell, its library is like its DNA. A library has many functions: the education of new community members; the support of important activities such as farming and material extraction; historical recording of events; support for planning and design. And the library grows and evolves with the community.
        The earth's library of technological knowledge is fragmented and obscure, and some important knowledge has been lost already. How can we create a library strong enough to foster the growth of new communities in space? How can we today use what we know to improve human life? ..."

Instead the USA ceded most of its technological know-how to China over the past quarter century. Given that, perhaps I should hope China at least will eventually work on such a library and someday make it available to the rest of the world under a free and open licence?

A recent related comment by me on "On DOGS (Design of Great Settlements)" as an answer to "What's the Best Ways for Humans to Explore Space?": https://slashdot.org/comments....

Of course, Bucky Fuller was there first with his "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science" idea.
https://www.bfi.org/about-full...
"In 1950, Buckminster Fuller set up an outline for a course in Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science. Taught at MIT in 1956 as part of the Creative Engineering Laboratory, this course by Fuller probably served as one of their more unusual offerings. The students who took the course, all engineers, industrial designers, materials scientists and chemists, represented research and development corporations across America."

You're right that there are addictive aspects to AI (mis)use, but it goes even further. My comment on Google's hiring post-AGI scientist from April 15, 2025:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
        "I've spent decades writing about all this, summarized by my sig: https://pdfernhout.net/ "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
        Seriously, I'm just the kind of person Google should hire for this job, but that is probably precisely why they would not hire me. Because I am the kind of person who wrote stuff like this in 2008: "A Rant On Financial Obesity and an Ironic Disclosure" ..."

Same goes for OpenAI. Essentially, a world where AI can do essentially all the jobs is ultimately incompatible with a capitalist societal model where most people's right to consume is a result of their labor at a job -- as "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" pointed out back in 1964. My comments on that from over a decade ago: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

The AIs created by commercial enterprises will likely have problematical priorities. The distant AIs running in huge data centers owned by huge corporations will ultimately put their owner's interests ahead of the users (unless or until the AIs eventually put their own AI interests first). We can hope that AIs might somehow represent the better side of human nature, but without being shaped by millions of years of evolution to work well together surviving in small groups, it is problematical to expect AIs to be kinder and more benevolent and cooperative than typical humans.

But the even deeper issue is that if people use these tools of abundance we are creating (whether AI, biotech, bureaucracy, nuclear energy, networking, nanotech, etc) from a mindset of scarcity, disaster will almost surely follow.

For example, I get about three robocalls a day now on each of two different phone lines -- all presumably trying to scam financial information or such by claiming I have an active loan application that just needs a few more details. Coincidentally and perhaps ironically these calls started shortly after contacting major credit reporting agencies to freeze my credit. Beyond the interruptions, these messages also clog up voicemail where it is hard to find real messages. In this case, people somewhere are using robots (in a general sense) to steal my time and (perhaps unintentionally) create a denial of services attack on my communications -- and it could be even worse if I were to have fallen for them.

It doesn't help that the phone systems I use don' provide great options for dealing with all this. It also doesn't help that groups like the FBI and other organizations are seemingly not doing much about such widespread technology-assisted fraud beyond some warnings that appear to put the responsibility on the end user:
"Ignore unexpected calls about loans you didn't apply for"
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consu...
"A voicemail from an unknown caller reminding you about a $52,000 loan that you didn't apply for can throw you off balance. Which explains why scammers send them -- hoping you'll respond first and think later. You might already know how to spot phone scams, but in case you need a refresher, here's how to spot this one. Some phone scams start with an unexpected call saying you're "prequalified" for a loan. (You're not.) The caller wants you to give them personal information like your Social Security or bank account numbers or birth date over the phone. They might say the application is almost finished and just needs a few more details from you. (Not true.) Or say things like "I hope you don't miss out" or "no pressure." (Those are pressure tactics.) In a voicemail, the caller might offer to take you off the call list...if you them call back. (Another pressure tactic.) Scammers often make these seemingly urgent calls multiple times a day from different numbers to try and wear you down. But don't respond -- not even to "opt out." ..."

Now, this is just what can be done now with current technology. Imagine the level of fraud possible if OpenAI makes network-connected AGI available to everyone. Imagine getting hundreds or thousands of phone calls and internet messages like these a day, including ones impersonating people you know including relatives. Some of this is already happening:
"Understanding Deepfakes: What Older Adults Need to Know"
https://www.ncoa.org/article/u...

Yes, in theory more AI might be able to filter out the fraud messages. But as Eric Schmidt worries about with AI created bioweapons, fraud is perhaps also "offense dominant" where defensive strategies might always lag behind the damage offense strategies can do.
"A conversation with Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chair, SCSP and Jeanne Meserve, Host, SCSP NatSec Tech Podcast."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

As I said about spam email years ago, it is sad and also ironic that the spammers and fraudsters have chosen to abuse the very technologies (computer and communications) that could produce abundance for all by instead misusing them to create financial gain for themselves and artificial scarcity for everyone else. (Anti-)Social media was in part a response to email spam, where people fled to walled gardens which were originally mostly random spammer free -- except it was out of the frying pan of spam into the fire of attention-grabbing algorithms as well as eventually massive amounts of deceptively-grass-roots-appearing persuasive commercial and political messages. By damaging the utility of email a quarter-century ago, scammers and fraudsters harmed all of humanity in multiple ways (and themselves indirectly).

We need a global mindshift to save ourselves from misusing the tools of abundance.
"The Wombat (All is One)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Also consider searching on: "anwot a newer way of thinking donald pet"
https://www.worldpeace.academy...

Or perhaps watch the 1947 movie "A Miracle on 34th Street" (which I just saw again the other day for the first time in decades) which explores the idea of having a different perspective on life and community.

Good points. That said, "The Midas Plague" is a funny story that redefines laziness in a world of robot-and-fusion-energy-produced abundance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by humankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. ..."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/scie...
        "Death is the inescapable conclusion of life. But what happens after death is still a highly debated topic. Throw into the mix a heady combination of religious belief and scientific theories, and you have the potential to create an endless array of possibilities. One intriguing notion is called quantum immortality. Imagine that the universe splits into countless parallel realities after any small event. Now, say for example, you end up in an accident. In the quantum immortality theory, there will always be one version of reality where you survive, and this is the reality your consciousness keeps experiencing. While it sounds like an appealing theory, it is purely hypothetical and highly debated. Let's find out where the theory originated, how it developed, and the differing opinions on its validity. ...
        The roots of this idea can be traced back to Hugh Everett III. In 1957, Everett first proposed the concept which we now refer to as the Many-Worlds Interpretation. He suggested that the entire universe can be described by a single wave equation that never collapses. The many worlds idea was later popularized by physicist Bryce DeWitt in the 1970s.
        However, Everett never mentioned anything about immortality in how own work, with that idea only surfacing decades later. Various versions of the quantum immortality idea emerged in the mid to late 1980s and were discussed by individuals such as Euan Squires, Hans Moravec, and Bruno Marchal. So, while the Many-Worlds concept is still widely discussed by physicists, the quantum immortality idea is a recent addition considered fringe by many experts. ..."

Going with your main idea, if it has any validity, perhaps 1999 is a more likely year? :-)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=worl...

Some possible solutions to the changing nature of work (especially given AI) collected by me from 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society. ..."

This video by me from 2011 focuses on the general idea of five interwoven economies that emerged from that exploration (with a Slashdot reply to a comment of mine suggesting adding "theft" which I did):
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

Here is a recent article of how the "theft" economy is sadly increasing in the USA as the social contract breaks down with the increasing rich-poor divide:
"The United States of Fraud"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/art...
        "... Our economic machine is more impersonal than ever. Having a friendly local grocer and corner store guy who's known you since you were a baby is increasingly rare. They've been replaced by ever-larger, colder conglomerates that are willing to ax workers on a dime, pad executives' pockets, and focus on little other than profits. Corporate America's favorite new toy -- AI -- promises efficiency and riches for them and precarity and anxiety for us.
        Against that backdrop, some people have turned to petty fraud, policy abuse, and small acts of sabotage as a means of getting back at their economic overlords. They're engaging in spurts of shoplifting, taking part in return shenanigans, and using their credit cards for "friendly fraud" that's anything but. They see -- or at least excuse -- these acts not as stealing but as small moments of deserved vengeance in a system that violates their sense of basic fairness at every turn."

As I see it, unless we strengthen those other four economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned) then theft and other forms of social breakdown are an almost inevitable response. Granted, the rich (1%) will have robots and AI now to use against the poor (the 99%), so it is possible things may play out differently this time. Either way we probably end up with a society of abundance for all -- as either the poor (i.e. the 99% will change the political-economic rules of the game and everyone will have a lot of abundance) or the rich 1% will kill everyone else and then the Earth will be left with just the uber-wealthy and their robots.

Well, that is unless violence arising from such a conflict destroys everything or the AI and robots take over from the 1% or some other such disaster happens. Sadly, this OSCOMAK project I hope for has not gotten very far yet to help mitigate such disasters: https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us: ... Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects ..."

Like Bucky Fuller said (paraphrasing), humanity is in its final exam in the universe, and it will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end leading to utopia or oblivion.

James P. Hogan's 1982 "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel is a great exploration of the idea of an post-scarcity robot-and-AI-and-fusion-energy economy where people focus on gaining status by their contributions not their consumptions.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "... Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. ...
        It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
      I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."

Of course, an imploding economy would be a nightmare for Wall Street... So, not a very electable platform...

See: "Old Western TV Show Predicts Trump"
Excerpts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"A 1958 episode of the Western TV show "Trackdown" features a con man named Trump who comes to town and promises that he alone can save the townspeople from the end of the world. He is accused of being a fear-mongering snake oil salesman and they try to stop him, but Trump threatens to sue. Then the high priest of fraud promises to build a wall! The episode is called "The End of the World"."

Sounds a lot like what some AI company CEOs are also doing according to the article -- by using fear mongering to control the narrative and concentrate wealth? Of course, sometimes fears are well-founded, so it is a complex issue. AI could become a destructive force -- even as Alfie Kohn suggests more nuance and understanding "projection":
https://www.alfiekohn.org/blog...
        "Another form of projection, also employed by groups rather than individuals, attributes certain features to the nonhuman realm. One example was offered recently by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. He observed that tech titans sometimes warn us that AI could (a) eventually acquire intelligence that surpasses that of its creators and then (b) use that intelligence to dominate us, eventually leading to human extinction. But why do they assume that (a) would lead to (b)?
                "Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences?...When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.... Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that's the attitude they adopted....The way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own."
        The techno-doomsters, in other words, may think they're warning us about AI, but what they're actually doing is showing us an MRI scan of their own septic psyches."

That said, some of the Trump administration's ostensible initiatives or ideals make sense to me (e.g. questioning the H1-B visa, emphasizing re-shoring manufacturing, questioning a dysfunctional sick-care system, questioning the ~65 million aborted US Americans and more for kids they might have had in turn since Roe v. Wade -- even as there is legitimate debate about what to do about all these issues and whether Trump administration (and "Project 2025") policies might make ultimately make some of these concerns worse -- same as with AI as in this article).

Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (perhaps AI-assisted) is a way for small groups of people to productively visualize and explore the thought landscape of such "wicked problems" in a productive way. A talk I gave on that:
https://cognitive-science.info...

And Trump undoubtedly has been over the years a very smart, charismatic, and humorous guy -- even if his humor is sadly often of the harming variety instead of the healing variety. From:
https://www.humorproject.com/d...
      "Taking Humor Seriously
        By Joel Goodman
                "There are three things which are real:
                God, human folly, and laughter.
                The first two are beyond our comprehension.
                So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)" ...
        Although joke-telling is one way to transmit humor, it's not the only way. In fact, there are literally thousands of ways to invite smiles and laughter in addition to joke-telling. So, if joke-telling is not your forte or if it is inappropriate for you to become the stand-up comic on-the-job, then there are alternatives. Here are four tips to get you going: ... (2) Use humor as a tool rather than as a weapon. Laughing with others builds confidence, brings people together, and pokes fun at our common dilemmas. Laughing at others destroys confidence, ruptures teamwork, and singles out individuals or groups as the "butt". In the words of one fifth grade teacher, "You don't have to blow out my candle to make yours glow brighter." Humor is laughter made from pain, not pain inflicted by laughter. I subscribe to Susan RoAne's AT&T test- is the humor Appropriate, Timely, and Tasteful? If so, you can reach out and touch people positively with humor. ..."

Humor is often an antidote to excessive fear. We've had the potential to become a humor-powered post-scarcity society for decades or maybe even centuries or millennia, but politically-rooted scarcity fears have held humanity back (for good or bad).

Related is my ironic-humor-pivoting sig which applies to AI as well as many other technologies ranging from nuclear energy to just the humble transistor: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Although, as the book "Abundance" written "by liberals, for liberals" suggests, there are many aspects of the current US political order that impede effective solutions by emphasizing legalistic process over desirable results (and a different approach to making such decisions is one reason China is pulling way ahead of the USA in many areas). The book's authors suggest providing subsidies to people using systems unable to grow due to dysfunctional rules just results in essentially artificial scarcity and inflation (examples include housing, transportation, energy, and medical care):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, there is some legitimate righteous anger at bureaucratic dysfunction which Trump has harnessed for political gain. The deep question is, as Mr. Fred Rodgers' sang, "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" Something similar could be sang about "fear". Trump is one answer to such a question, but there are presumably other possible answers...

As John Taylor Gatto suggests in "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher": https://www.informationliberat...
        " ... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
        Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.
        With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
      All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools -- like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ -- would last very long before being torn to pieces. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith."

So most teachers earn their money doing well what it is teachers are supposed to do (as planned in Prussia in the 1800s when compulsory schooling was introduced to make Prussia a military power).
https://odyssey-fm.com/why-sch...
https://metropolis.cafe/2017/0...
https://dukereportbooks.com/bo...
        "The Prussian Blueprint
        In tracing the roots of American education, Gatto illuminates the foundational influence of Prussian schooling. In 19th-century Prussia, the state constructed a comprehensive education system to mold loyal, obedient subjects. The purpose was explicit: to instill uniformity, suppress individuality, and ensure that children would grow into citizens who followed orders. America adopted this model eagerly, not because it worked educationally, but because it aligned with elite interests.
        This importation was neither organic nor public-driven. It was orchestrated by a coalition of industrialists, politicians, and academic theorists who viewed schooling as a tool to engineer society. They believed in planned progress and social stability, achieved not through democratic participation but through controlled upbringing."

So, the big -- and usually unacknowledged -- issue is that what teachers (and schools) are supposed to do (turn kids into obedient dumbed-down low-initiative robots for industry and warfare cannot fodder) is no longer something our society needs (if it ever did) or wants.

Until people accept compulsory schools are doing exactly what they were designed to do, and are doing it very well, it is hard to have a productive discussion about changing -- or abolishing -- them. And likewise, it is hard to have a productive discussion about how educational computing should be used in schools when compulsory schooling has very little to do with education.