This is probably as true today as at any time in the past. What has changed, for the worse, is the definition of "other" identities (those that are not our own).
What did "rural america" mean to "city dwellers" in the 1970s? What does it mean now? I'd guess the definitions most of us carry in our minds have narrowed.
Another ramification... many suppliers/vendors will now be "more directly" competing with their own customers within the amazon marketplace. Whereas before a vendor could sell a large quantity to Amazon and then smaller quantities (at higher prices) to middlemen and let the middleman fight it out, now they'll be a huge incentive to price in such a way that middlemen get cut out.
If this sounds good (hey, no middlemen, better for us) consider this typical situation (I know it well)... Retail company buys toys for sale in store, but uses marketplace for overstock, offsets, and to keep products on shelves fresh... Not a huge profit center, but an important part of "flow" - now the viability of that shrinks as suppliers squeeze prices upwards.
And the cycle continues... retailers have to raise prices to make up for what little "volume" sales they do... people stop shopping retail because it is "too expensive" and down go more independent stores.
If you believe prison is for "punishment" and that prisoners are "fundamentally bad" then the answer is no - don't let them do anything that could improve their lives. However, if you believe prison is for "rehabilitation" and that "people can change" then exposure to current tech, within reason, would be good thing. I vote for the latter, mainly because almost everyone who goes in comes out.
And now for the off-the-rails part of my answer... maybe we could limit prisoners to outdated technology - they might end up with decent jobs maintaining old mainframes or Cobol or Fortran - somebody is going to have to do it and a lot of the old school guys are retiring.
I wonder if it would make sense to roll the entire development environment into it: code, data schema, programming editor/config, key os settings... something along the lines of Time Machine but with "markers" which allow you to flag points of progress that can be examined and diffed later.
It was glorious. It really was. It felt like a childhood Christmas or Birthday every day for months. It was such an exciting time I could hardly sleep. That was 1997-98 after I broke free from AOL and started using Internet Explorer to surf the "real" web.
I created my first website in 1998 simply because I had an idea I wanted to share and it went semi-viral. It wasn't about money or fame or anything else. 10 pages, Front Page 2.0, largest page 3K, $29.95/month hosting. Of course, if you count the 7K logo graphic (gif) the pages were really 10K!
In my adult life only a few things have given me that same feeling of unbounded childhood excitement and freedom. Perhaps that's why I can't give up yet on the "promise" of the web even though corporate control and government surveillance seem to increasing daily.
After plenty of trial and error I ended up using 3-item mini todo lists and a bare minimum of "action" categories. The system worked well so I felt comfortable writing it up as https://easyproductivity.com - it's free and open right now so please forgive the self promo.
My goal was to create a place where it would be super easy to make music or video playlists for quick sharing. I also wanted to create something with a slightly "retro" or "old school" feel to it.
This is probably as true today as at any time in the past. What has changed, for the worse, is the definition of "other" identities (those that are not our own).
What did "rural america" mean to "city dwellers" in the 1970s? What does it mean now? I'd guess the definitions most of us carry in our minds have narrowed.