One Weird Trick

I was reading Mike Masnick's piece in TechDirt the other day where he discusses tech optimism in the face of, well, everything that's going on in the world right now. I don't really want to bore you with a repetition of the ills facing society here at the beginning of 2025, other than to say there's a lot of them. Instead, I want to talk about why I'm optimistic, too.

When The Going Gets Weird...

I've often joked that the thing I love and hate about California is that it's where the wave of American culture finally broke. It makes sense, in a way -- once you've hit the ocean, there's no where left to go, so you might as well settle down and make something of it. There's a lot of reasons that Silicon Valley and other locations out west have been a hotbed of computing for decades, and most of it isn't as simple as "that's where the weirdos are", but it's a critical part of the mess. Weirdness is a lot of things to a lot of people, but I like to think of it as a defensive measure against societal strictures. Weird is an autoimmune response, in a way. As an aside, this is why weirdness has been so successfully co-opted by the American Right-wing, but that's neither here nor there. Weirdness manifests in systems as desire lines, which are often shepherded into existence by and for weirdos on the inside of a system.

Part of the reason that I think culture broke in California is that it contained a maximal amount of weirdos and a maximal amount of finance. The confluence of weirdos and finance is 'software'. The weirdos like something that they can shape, the finance guys like to make money out of thin air, it's a perfect balance. Thus, the world has been enjoying decades of economic, social, cultural, and other forms of development based on research funded by the military-industrial complex and then supercharged by return-seeking finance guys. We've built a globally connected network on top of maximally permissive and highly resilient infrastructure, then plugged nearly everyone into it. This is a massive W for weirdos, as it means that we have achieved some measure of equity with non-weirdos in terms of social conduct.

It could be argued that it is also a massive L for organized society, as these digital spaces have been commercialized and co-opted in an effort to further concentrate money and power into the hands of the few at the expense of the many.

The Weird Need To Stop Turning Pro

I'm going to lay out a pretty simple thesis as to what's wrong with online these days, and it's this: we have commercialized it too much. We have traded everything away in an effort to make it accessible to as broad of a population as possible, knowing full well that some day there would be a price to pay. Some predicted that we were creating an all-seeing surveillance state which would strip our liberties; Others predicted horrendous self-censorship. I'm not sure how many people called "the complete and total irrelevance of the information space", but it's probably somewhere up there too. It is this last thing that we have gotten, though, and boy howdy it sucks.

Ironic, isn't it, that unheard of access to the world's information has resulted in the complete collapse of our ability or desire to create a shared cultural or information context?

I'm not really interested in blaming anyone in particular for this, although I would probably sleep like shit if I had ever worked for Facebook. That said, we do live in a society so while we might not bear the blame, we do bear the responsibility for getting through it. With that said, I will now turn to my prognostications as promised.

• The most crucial task before us, as technologists, is to decommercialize the internet. This does not mean that things will not cost money; Indeed, I expect that many things will cost far more than they used to (especially since the default state for things online is 'free', even today) -- but I mean that we must get out of the profit-making drive for online experiences.

• Decommercialization and decentralization go hand-in-hand. We need to expect less from centralized services and focus more on personal data sovereignty, strong cryptographic identity, and private networks for our individual data -- as well as globally indices and discovery mechanisms for our public data.

• Ironically enough, we also probably need to embrace digital currencies on some level to make decommercialization happen. One of the reasons micropayments never took off is because of the nature of payment processing fees; Digital cash unironically helps here. We have to reclaim this space from digital finance bros, take the lunch money from the monkey jpeg nerds, and create genuinely useful tools on the protocols that exist.

• We need to build, rather than admonish. We need to educate and lead rather than wall ourselves up in ivory towers. Like, it's funny to look at the AI slop and say that couldn't be me, it's amusing to look at the extremely cooked replies you get on Bluesky and think that they're bots, but a lot of people are just... like this.

Hope Is Frail, Yet Hard To Kill

It's very easy to look at the world around us and get discouraged. I think it's far more radical to look at it and hope for something more, something better. I don't think optimism is misplaced; I mean, at the end of the day, we do have the tools that we need to build better systems. We can create tools that empower individuals to own their experiences, their data, and their digital identity rather than farming them out to massive third-parties. What we can't forget, though, is that our job isn't just to build walls around our own digital spaces and watch as the rest of the world burns. We must make these tools accessible, and equitable, to our fellow humans.

I have faith that we can do these things, that they are not beyond our grasp. The internet was built by, and for, the weirdos. If this is to be our eternal september, then let's at least make sure we build as many desire paths as we can, so that whoever comes next will find well-trodden ways rather than thorny underbrush.