A Post From The Past, And Future

I haven't posted here since 2017.

It's impossible to fully express how much has changed since then.  The most relevant at the moment is that my entire perspective on the tech industry has shifted.

I've been fascinated by computers since my childhood in the 1980s, and I've worked professionally in the tech industry since 1997. I started phone support, and I've worked my way up to lead Software Engineering teams.

Over the years, I've seen amazing shifts. I've often lived on the bleeding edge of what was coming.  I was hosting my own music collection before Spotify was an option, and added my movie collection to the mix when Netflix was still DVD only.

The world of tech keep me busy for decades.  There was always more to learn. There were always new problems to solve.

Since my last post I've shifted my attention more broadly. Not just the technology itself, but what the technology is directly and indirectly accomplishing. The shortcuts for wealth creation. The surveillance economy. The censorship. The propaganda. The weaponized drones.

I still see the good, but now I see more of the bad.

I also see more of the assumptions I had never questioned before about how Internet has become structured over the last few decades. A new threat model has emerged in my awareness.  Not a threat against our business, but against our Freedom.

I wish I had read Lawrence Lessig earlier. 

"Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Our founders feared a newly empowered federal government; the Constitution is written against that fear. John Stuart Mill worried about the regulation by social norms in nineteenth-century England; his book On Liberty is written against that regulation. Many of the progressives in the twentieth century worried about the injustices of the market. The reforms of the market, and the safety nets that surround it, were erected in response.

Ours is the age of cyberspace. It, too, has a regulator. This regulator, too, threatens liberty. But so obsessed are we with the idea that liberty means "freedom from government" that we don't even see the regulation in
this new space. We therefore don't see the threat to liberty that this regulation presents. This regulator is code--the software and hardware that make cyberspace as it is. This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced. It determines how easy it is to protect
privacy, or how easy it is to censor speech. It determines whether access to information is general or whether information is zoned. It affects who sees what, or what is monitored. In a host of ways that one cannot begin to see unless one begins to understand the nature of this code, the code of cyberspace regulates.

This regulation is changing. The code of cyberspace is changing. And as this code changes, the character of cyberspace will change as well. Cyberspace will change from a place that protects anonymity, free speech, and individual control, to a place that makes anonymity harder, speech less free, and individual control the province of individual experts only."
 -- Lawrence Lessig "Code Is Law" 1999 

My new understanding of our shared reality is a lot less naive than it used to be.

It is a lot more hopeful as well though. The decisions that were made around centralization versus decentralization are not settled.

An industry built on Open Source software, inexpensive hardware, and the efforts of motivated engineers can shift easily.

Software stacks to run services for a local community could fit on inexpensive hardware, or a cloud provider. Your footprint is smaller when you're trying to support the needs of a group of people, rather than trying to generate as much demand as you can.

A motivated software engineer stuck in a dismal job market could turn their attention to their own community, and their needs.

It feels to me like everyone believes that change needs to come from politics, but I see much more power in our daily choices.

While it's hard to ignore the impact of government and elections over the past few decades, I've seen an awful lot of change during that same time that were the direct result of engineers with employers.

Code is power.

Code is law.