This bleak-ass sorry outlook & the fixed ness on looking at the bleaker parts of it, to me, isn't actually about the sad bleak people. Its about the sorry ass conditions & technosocialcultural bankrupcy that let so many people down, that didn't give them good hooks to start digging in & try enjoying their own powers. It's also about being overwhelmed and emotionally unserwater by unrewarding crappy rentier-capitalism.
The belief system of humanity in itself needs nutrients, needs to seed and grow positively people. Open source is by far one of the strongest currents about for that.
Right now open source is a mess & bogglingly complicated. Technology in general has gotten vastly less accessible year after year, the on-ramps to understanding detoured into ever more appliance-ized experiences & neofuedal cloud empires happening in other people's computers. Far fewer are primed for the esoterics of software, know the basics, or have positive rewarding experiences tinkering and tweaking. Humanity has been shoved into superficial & coopted/dishonest experiences. Heck yes, a lot of things are against the possibility of the good.
But we unlike almost all other relationships with the material world, we can directly improve things, can keep enhancing things practically without material constraint, limited chiefly by imagination & will (ML excepted I guess). We can grow the pot, open up computing & it's softer side progressively, create better on ramps & more learnable, observable, experience able authentic experiences.
Over time I hope the barriers to being interested might be less severe. The other material conditions dragging people down & shutting them off from engagement might persist. But I think there can be a very tangible source of hope here, a demonstration that people, when they are doing their thing, creating as they might, when they are empowered, are cool. Are good. Are a role model. And that - with hope - will keep us iterating & improving, will hopefully lead to more efforts to keep redefining & expanding general purpose computing & soft systems in less deeply technical terms.
I have a really strong reaction against projecting the users of today & their sorry chained-to-the-cave-wall state to what people might be if there were some honest shakes out there. Open source is far from a perfect liberator today, 100%, but this is part of the journey, is part of why we need to be practicing & trying, so we can create & iterate towards alive interesting systems that welcome people in.
The belief system of humanity in itself needs nutrients, needs to seed and grow positively people. Open source is by far one of the strongest currents about for that.
Right now open source is a mess & bogglingly complicated. Technology in general has gotten vastly less accessible year after year, the on-ramps to understanding detoured into ever more appliance-ized experiences & neofuedal cloud empires happening in other people's computers. Far fewer are primed for the esoterics of software, know the basics, or have positive rewarding experiences tinkering and tweaking. Humanity has been shoved into superficial & coopted/dishonest experiences. Heck yes, a lot of things are against the possibility of the good.
But we unlike almost all other relationships with the material world, we can directly improve things, can keep enhancing things practically without material constraint, limited chiefly by imagination & will (ML excepted I guess). We can grow the pot, open up computing & it's softer side progressively, create better on ramps & more learnable, observable, experience able authentic experiences.
Over time I hope the barriers to being interested might be less severe. The other material conditions dragging people down & shutting them off from engagement might persist. But I think there can be a very tangible source of hope here, a demonstration that people, when they are doing their thing, creating as they might, when they are empowered, are cool. Are good. Are a role model. And that - with hope - will keep us iterating & improving, will hopefully lead to more efforts to keep redefining & expanding general purpose computing & soft systems in less deeply technical terms.
I have a really strong reaction against projecting the users of today & their sorry chained-to-the-cave-wall state to what people might be if there were some honest shakes out there. Open source is far from a perfect liberator today, 100%, but this is part of the journey, is part of why we need to be practicing & trying, so we can create & iterate towards alive interesting systems that welcome people in.