What I find interesting is that these kinds of arguments are being made now for AI….were similar arguments made back in the 90’s during that era of American tech dominance?

Microsoft had over 98 percent market share at one point. In the 90’s every country in the world including Russia, China, Iran, etc all began using American operating systems developed by Microsoft. Were there arguments back then similar to this piece?

I remember in the 2000’s and 2010’s Richard Stallman would go to counties like India and promote Linux and free software. During those presentations he would mention kind of offhand an argument that Microsoft was engaging in a form of colonialism through its control of Windows. He made the argument somewhat awkwardly in those presentations and the Indian audience received the argument with hesitance. It seemed kind of exaggerated to conflate Microsoft and Windows with colonialism…especially in India.

But that was the 2000’s and 2010’s. Would the argument be received differently now? Were these arguments for Linux considered mainstream by Linux proponents back then or was this some Richard Stallman thing?

And now we have articles like this in the 2020’s basically making the same arguments for AI. People explicitly saying open weights AI can be a hedge against this. China developing their own models.

What I want to know if if there was broad support or even broad arguments for this kind of thing back in the 90’s when Microsoft ruled all computing even in countries not super friendly or even hostile to America. The biggest competitor to Microsoft back then was a small nearly bankrupt Apple which was also American. Linux was a tiny little thing.

Many hacker news commentators were around back then. What was it like in this regard?

I think that arguing that Microsoft's control of Windows constitutes a form of colonialism was really a rather cynical attempt on the part of Richard Stallman to take a common class of Western leftist political argumentation, and leverage it towards the thing he actually cares about, which is free software. For a long time, it's been common for Western (or Westernized) leftists to make arguments of the form that something that the arguer doesn't like and that has some connection to the Western world constitutes a type of colonialism of the non-Western world; and I think Stallman was half-heartedly aping that tradition when he happened to be making his free software case in India, a non-Western country that has a strong cultural memory of breaking free from British colonial rule.

There are definitely still people who leverage those kinds of general colonialist arguments, including perhaps for the cause of free software; there's also many people who are actively hostile to general colonialist arguments, probably more now than there were in the 2000s. But it was a bad argument for Linux then and a bad argument now.

>Were there arguments back then similar to this piece?

In the UK free market ideology allowed the tech industry to slip away and financial services to dominate our economy. It's hard to see us doing anything else when we were relying on security guarantees from the US (which suited the US at the time).

The nineties was a very different time. There was generally a lot more goodwill towards America on all fronts, the collapse of the Soviet Union was framed, and in some quarters accepted, as something that would lead to global peace and prosperity. That America was left standing was deemed to be a validation of its economic model.

There was genuine optimism at the time, we were coming out of the shadow of thermonuclear war. Globalisation was discussed as a global phenomenon, less about America specifically, and more about networks and opening of borders.

Also Linux was unusable by any but the beardiest.

Today, after 30-40 years on top, it's hard to see America as anything other than an incredibly dangerous threat to global stability with an utterly broken economic model. On the geopolitical front, it's squandered this goodwill time and time again, and gets worse with every new presidency. Domestically, we've seen our economies hollowed out, bought up, and skimmed at every turn.

The challenge the world faces now is the question of how we unplug ourselves as this increasingly deranged machine becomes ever more aggressive and hostile.

To put it simply, no. I mean, as a general statement and not a universal.

There were arguments about domestication of data and the risk of compute and data being in the control of Western (mainly US) powers, but that didnt surface in real quantity and force until Snowden, and even then was more peripheral than this sort of article seems.

I don't want to risk coming off as an AI naysayer, but this all feels much more like crypto than the initial Personal Computer or Cloud boom. I think maybe some part of that is due to the sheer magnitude of capital arrayed. Feels…sales-y.

My theory on this sort of thing is if a technology is truly revolutionary and world altering, people (both individually and in a geopolitical sense) will adopt it at a compromise to values of nationalism or control. We are constantly told AI will create a bimodal world, and yet it’s not the countries who don’t have frontier labs yelling about it.

I’m losing the thread somewhat (sorry, haven’t had coffee yet), but the TL;DR is this hasn’t been something I’ve witnessed yet in previous tech evolutions (in my mid-40s), and I’m not entirely convinced by the articles arguments.