> Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.
I don't think anyone is suggesting the US be covered with broadband, just the bits where people live. That then becomes a comparable problem, insofar as Switzerland has comparable size communities (with the exception of the very largest end of US cities whose population exceeds that of Switzerland)
I'm pretty sure the actual forge we deserve at this point is one that is a membership organisation, eg, owned by its (paying) members.
Members elect the board which chooses the CEO. A cooperative, in other words. The tech is a solved problem, with lots of open source around to do it. Enough members means paid operations and development staff, or outsourcing one or both, or grants to open source devs, etc. The possibility is there.
That's how we prevent cultural drift: by actually controlling the company.
As a westerner (UK) I massively idealise Mondragon and wouldn't find it weird if anyone else did. Cooperatives are fascinating and the question of workplace democracy needs more consideration.
I love it. I think I'm going to have fun with this and possibly learn a bit, too. I'm pondering a container based dev environment at the moment and might throw it in with busybox and see how far I get :)
What I wanted (and to an extent still do) is extreme simplicity and OS level minimalism. I was hoping to understand everything up to the browser, really. My interest in this has been renewed since AI: I have a sense that extreme simplicity may be the only viable approach for security in FLOSS if AI tilts the scales in favour of throwing cash (and therefore tokens) at problems.
The trouble is that we are literally expected to do this everywhere we go. I've personally advocated for approaches which use say, a pair of dedicated servers, or VMs as in GPs example. If you want it outside of AWS/GCP/Azure, you're regarded as a crazy person. If you don't adopt "best practices" (as defined by vendors) then management are scared. Management very often trust the sales and marketing departments of big vendors more than their own staff. Many of us have given up fighting this, because what it comes down to is a massive asymmetry of information and trust.