Considering that politics is about the exchange of ideas between people so a society can be governed (by whatever system applies) and laws can be enacted to make that government functional, I would consider political basically the political process itself, laws, philosophy, maybe history (which informs the other ones and usually has some inherent biases), maybe literature (the same) and a few other disciplines. Mostly things that are by nature subjective and can’t be measured in an objective way (like math, or engineering in general can).

That doesn’t mean that the latter can’t be “contamined” by politics, especially the disciplines which are a mixed bag of objectivity and subjectivity, like architecture or the economical sciences. But that’s why the key word here is “inherently”: those disciplines are not inherently political, they’ve been co-opted by interest groups precisely because of that subjectivity.

Don’t agree. Computing is no more inherently political than a knife is inherently a murder weapon. It’s a tool, and can be used for many things, including political use (or misuse, nowadays).

There’s some truth to the fact that anti-intellectualism plays some part in the backlash to both vaccines and AI.

But there’s a difference: vaccines were pushed by medical science and governments around the world as a solution to a real problem (disease), with pretty much no side effects at societal scale.

Generative AI is being pushed by greedy companies (and governments that don’t want to lose this artificial “arms race”) as a solution to nobody’s problem, and with a lot of side effects (global warming, raising power bills, raising the cost of electronic devices, filling the internet with crap, making the internet less secure, lowering open source incentives, making it easier for bad actors to influence democracy, etc. I could go on).

I don’t dislike GenAI, and I think it can be a good technology when well implemented: narrow AI, or general AI with open training datasets and open weights that anyone (or at least a small company) can run locally. Instead we’re getting super general AI controlled by an oligopoly of companies that see you as the product, partnering with governments that want to surveil and control you.

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Those came later (late '90s-early '00s), and ran mostly on Windows; believe it or not, at that time there were people that used Linux or Mac (I dual booted, Wintendo for games, everything else on Linux).

And most malware came from shady sites. Again, if you were careful, you rarely got it (rarely, not never). If you were not careful, well, it usually was obvious because even if your Windows was not infected with a virus or trojan, your browser would be full of toolbars and the PC would run like crap.

I also used gopher, usenet, uucp, archie and all that in the early '90s. And if you were just a little bit careful, catching a virus or trojan was very rare.

Now, everything is monetized. You’re under constant surveillance on a scale it was unimaginable at that time, and being careful amounts to nothing (unless you’re super paranoid) because your security depends completely on how others secure your data, assuming that they’re trying to secure and not sell it.

In this respect, now it’s much, much worse than it was, even if in some other ways it’s somewhat better.

Peak internet was around 2005-2010, IMHO.

They never learned the lesson about the Torment Nexus.