Leaving lobster-bucket tech behind

A lot of the smolnet innovations, actual or proposed, get attacked on the grounds that they're too "technical" in some sense: that because some people won't have the technical chops to use them, that might limit their appeal or exclude people (who ex hypothesi wouldn't be interested in them).

It's wrong to say of this, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. But it's why some of us can't have have some things we consider nice.

There are two arguments pinned together here:

• that a technology needs widespread adoption to be (considered to be) successful
• that it is *wrong* for a technology to require more effort to learn than some threshold, regardless of who gets to determine this threshold and how, because it will lead to different outcomes, even if those different outcomes are what the adopters and the non-adopters both want.

If we accept the "some people won't like it, therefore no-one should have it" argument, then the only advances we get are those imposed by Big Tech.