My bad, I misremembered and should have double checked that.
You are right. It was Nokia buying Trolltech and getting the seats on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation in 2008 that I was not recalling properly. It's been a minute.
Thanks for catching my miss.
We can all continue to rely on the freedom aspect of Qt and KDE, the Foundation was ahead of the pack in protecting the openness through the risks of privatization.
I always viewed social media as a catalyst, not the main cause. We've always have this at smaller scales / more local scales, throughout the human history. Social media just lets bob meet alice in a virtual plane, while they couldn't meet and share ideas before. But the ideas, even if reinforced by tech, were always there.
Earlier than that, this brand of social/economic/racial/sexual/etc aggrievement and reactionary politics was bred via 80s-90s AM talk radio.
The talking points that were ascendent in the Tea Party era to 2016, and are still ascendent today, were honed at that time in that sphere. Limbaugh said words 30-40 years ago that breathed life into a reactionary movement 20 years later and shaped its theory.
You can keep following the thread back, but I think this form of weaponized aggrievement took its shape at that time, its literal memes were potent and virulent back then, they just needed the right environment to really spread.
Knowing what we know now, imagine how much it would have accelerated back then if the elites hadn’t been able to smother out the Occupy movement. Wild to think about
The death merchants need a new enemy to justify their existence otherwise we might start cooperating with China where both countries could prosper with massive clean energy infrastructure.
They are not. It's the eastern imperialists that are causing this. And if it's a choice between eastern imperialists (China and Russia) and western ones, it seems that Iranian people by far prefer the western ones.
For three main reasons.
1. Culturally Iranians are way more aligned with west.
2. Western imperialism results in more democracy. Not 100%, but not this bad.
3. Economically countries under west's influence do much better. Iran is extremely poor right now.
KDE Free Qt Foundation predates the whole Nokia debacle and smartphones by more than a decade.