Upon the American world in the late 90s, his work was a mind bomb. Its unknown how many people read it, but it spun out into the grid, in full, on major newsprint. It was like someone dropped an anchor on our bouncy castle.
Linux is something else.
Ted's ideological critique, his own, was extraordinarily prescient to the coming spectacle. The psychic living space was still very much analog, digital capability ubiquity was absent, and Big Brother and the Military-Industrial Complex was yet to be galvanized by a magnitude with big data. The modern era as we know it, was nascent, the brain spider of the masses was just starting to get into everything, the web. The finety was, not there yet.
And now theres people that go off-grid, practice privacy and self-sufficiency, theres been an exodus, and not from the urging of some guy that said that preposterous stuff two decades ago, but by necessity for their own thriving.
The government only had your driver's license, medical, DNS and HTTP records from a home-based computer, and any other entrenched, official paperwork. Now, you generate 100 times more data, think about what those are, they have all of it, in triplicate, at multiple agencies, in triplicate. And theres more people, and more people with those additional data points, and a larger government, with more data points, with a trillion more dollars to spend.
Ted saw the rise of, and fallout to, the accelerated distribution of technologies that had the capability to control our living management and the development of weapons specifically against the brain. And that has arrived, any government can now switch your living off easier and quicker than ever before, without paperwork and phonecalls, without latency and warrant for search, its for homeland security. They can either disable your data, electricity, job, car, debit card, but that aint their style, this aint China, so theyll keep you blissfully on-grid and surveilled in case you and others, in non-OpSec alliance, are a threat to the aboveground part of Continuity of Government. Knowing how the government is, you are a threat to any and all government agents because you exist, so you will be regulated and ruled, and technology provides that invaluable, and now centralized, insight into who you are, as well as an instrument that will be used to control you should the occasion arise. So it must be done to everyone.