I think this is a big misinterpretation of that Alan Kay quote, which was in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11941656 - the author of that comment aims to create a programming language with a focus on "data processing".
The entire discussion that this Alan Kay quote is from has always been about the prominence of "data" as a central concept in programming, not about other aspects like privacy or "big data".
>"Big data" is a way that a lot of people are trying to make money today, and it's a favorite of marketing people because it's in the wind. ... But in fact, the interesting future is not about data at all, but about meaning, and Stephen[ Wolfram]'s demos showed you a thought which most people in the computing world haven't had, which is "What if my programming language actually knew something". And, in fact, what if my user interface actually knew something? Not like Siri, which "knows" things, but what if it actually knew about me, and what if it actually knew about the contexts in which I'm trying to do things? That's an example of a leap. That set of ideas is actually old, and it was funded back when a lot of leap ideas were funded, and when the funding went away many of those ideas that weren't realized by about 1980 just haven't been worked on since, and that's something that'd be interesting to talk about.
Not that I necessarily agree with the article's concludions, but if the thesis is supposed to be that Kay disagrees with how we use big data today as a jumping-off point for reexamination, then this and the reference to Likleider's communicating with aliens problem work just fine for me.
I've read the article and the original thread, and I don't see at all how the author is "misinterpreting" Kay.
Maybe there is some confusion in terms of, which of the ideas in the article are the author's and which are Kay's. But the author does appear to understand that Kay's original discussion had a very different context, and does make statements of this nature:
> Kay was likely gesturing to a different reason data might be a bad idea. I’ll address that in a moment.
And overall I'm struggling to see anywhere I think Kay's original meaning is being misinterpreted or misrepresented. Can you point to a passage?
Alan Kay has long wanted to "get rid of data" in programming, as described at http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...
The entire discussion that this Alan Kay quote is from has always been about the prominence of "data" as a central concept in programming, not about other aspects like privacy or "big data".