---
title: >-
  Technocomplacency
date: 2011-10-14 17:54
modified: 2011-10-14 17:54
lang: en
authors: rysiek
tags:
 - ancient
 - musings
status: published
pinned: false
---

I am amazed and saddened by the apparent and growing technological complacency we, technology people, find ourselves in. Ever more often we're fascinated by blinky-thingies and [shiny toys](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone#Restrictions), falling out of our engineering mindframe that used to induce us to hack together great things -- thankfully, in that regard the [Warsaw Hackerspace](http://hackerspace.pl/) is a shining exception.

A simple example. Not long ago [Telecomix](http://telecomix.org/) released 54GiB (!!) of [Syrian Internet censorship equipment logs](http://tcxsyria.ceops.eu/95191b161149135ba7bf6936e01bc3bb). A moment before that Apple had yet another of their conferences. Let's compare those, shall we, taking Slashdot comment numbers into account?
 - [News From Apple's iPhone Event](http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/10/04/1714238/News-From-Apples-iPhone-Event)  
-- **392 comments**;
 - [Telecomix Releases 54GB of Syrian Censorship Logs](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/05/1249209/Telecomix-Releases-54GB-of-Syrian-Censorship-Logs)  
-- **51 comments**.

A shiny new toy *versus* release of extremely important and complete, up-to-date information on human rights violations and Internet censorship in Syria, and on technology utilised to that end, gathered "red hot" in an area of a social conflict that's most probably a defining moment for this decade, all that during an on-going discussion about implementing Internet filtering in Europe.

Shiny new toy wins with an almost 8-fold advantage.