When I was a kid technology was new, cool and exciting. Computers were a tool of the mind, and if you could think of it they could do it. Fairly quickly the internet became a thing, allowing you to connect to millions of people. As computers and the internet became more adopted, they became even more useful, eventually integrating into every facet of our lives.
This computing revolution allowed me to make an early online multiplayer video game called ARC with a friend while in college. From there we worked for Sierra Online in their internet group WON.net, where I made it easier to download customer skins, maps, and mods to games. After that I was part of starting PopCap Games, eventually being part of the creation of games like Bejeweled, Peggle, Zuma, and Plants vs. Zombies. Afterwards I spent years at the bleeding edge of Virtual and Augmented reality.
My whole life has been shaped by computers, to the point where it’s near impossible to imagine my existence otherwise. My life has been very fortunate in that way, allowing me to meet people, visit places, create things and quite frankly, do so many unimaginable things.
The problem is, technology and tools exist within the culture and construct of the society that created them. Our society is organized around economic growth, software exists to serve that purpose. The expression “software will eat the world” is commonly thought to mean that it will integrate into all aspects of our lives, but in reality it just means that computing will just accelerate the destruction of the earth that started over the last hundred years or so. While this will provide immense power and wealth for a few this path will come at ever increasing suffering for the majority of all life.
I propose we start to look critically at the software and services we use. Ask us how they benefit us, how they ourselves and others, and find alternatives so we can avoid a society that burns itself to the ground. Alternatives may be less convenient in the short term, but also less destructive. Driving more adoption and support will make them superior over time. Alternatives need to exist outside of mantra of growth, outside of maximizing shareholder value at all costs.
Most acceptable alternatives exist within open source communities, are built on non-capitalistic principals, with distributed power structures, and based on open standards. Any reasonable alternative will almost always avoid advertising as a business model. Non-open source alternatives will be part of the solutions, but won’t be ran by companies packaging a bunch of disparate tools and fund completely unrelated R&D.
Over the coming week I plan to break down different popular services, provide examples of what the problems are, and then highlight various alternatives. I’ll try and lay out what the trade offs are to the alternatives and hopefully paint a picture of different ways for the software ecosystems to work.
PS: Happy Birthday Matt
