4 ms·

This is part of the reason I feel like I am turning into a luddite, as someone who once considered himself a futurist and built most of his life around computer

by tomc1985 7y ago

This is part of the reason I feel like I am turning into a luddite, as someone who once considered himself a futurist and built most of his life around computers and technology. You have to work hard to find time to slack off -- everyone and everything around me is always creating more work to do. How does anyone like this? A perfect life to me would be spent goofing off and working on art, but achieving that and maintaining the expected level of success is in itself a lot of work. Press articles always talk about how some new innovation is going to make my life easier, but all I see is how it's going to create more maintenance headaches for me (because I care about how it is going to work -- if you don't care maybe life actually is easier?) and how it is going to create more data for someone else (who isn't me! wtf?!) to monetize. I would happily roll back the last 10-to-20 years of technological innovation if it meant I could make software that didn't shackle me with continuous maintenance again, that I could happily disconnect from society at will again, and that social objectives (like dating, or finding friends) reverted back to a model of local scarcity of options rather than this model of app-driven stacked ranking that enhances the top 10% while leaving everyone else fighting over scraps. The world would be a better place if so many of these innovators suddenly died of a heart attack or something; because their model of innovation is almost always figuring out how to take money away from incumbents who built a working, human-scale system that allowed for things like slack time and local maximums, as opposed to this brave new world of globalizing everything and forcing everyone into the top 1-10% (and making everyone not in that bracket suffer)

DelightOne 7y ago
Regarding maintainance: Is your problem the remembering, the time-investment itself or something different?
- tomc1985 7y ago
  It's the time investment. The dream, growing up, was to build some piece of software that made money for me passively, as a single-person shop. This used to be possible, in the pre-SaaS world of desktop software (or at least if you didn't want to release new versions constantly). Today, those opportunities seem to have dried up, and you have to maintain whatever you build, not the least because users now expect a level of support and maintenance that is constantly blessing them with new features and shiny things, whether-or-not the product actually needs it. As usual, competition has upped the pace to a level that locks out all but the most committed, and the democratisation of programming has made it so those committed folks are almost always type-A tryhards who have to turn everything into a business empire
  - mLuby 7y ago
    What you need are royalties, which happily enough come from creating art or inventing. The rest of passive income is exploiting an edge (like an install base in desktop software) or rent-seeking, both of which if left to be truly passive will be captured by someone willing to put in slightly more active effort.
zackmorris 7y ago
I've reached the same conclusion. What we have the past 20 years is phantom technology and phantom wealth. So many tools to distract us and fill our time, but shockingly few tools to liberate us from labor. Only a tiny handful like rooftop solar panels, electric cars and Roombas have decreased our labor measurably. I'm going through a midlife crisis right now where I'm actively rejecting the decisions I made since 2000. I had a falling out with professional programming last year and am looking into the gig economy. I'm not going to buy new anything if I can possibly avoid it. I'm trying to turn my attention from external expectation to what I felt was my life purpose when I graduated college in 1999. Which will basically amount to finding a way to earn roughly $1000 per month doing whatever it takes and then using the freed up time to work on inventions. I'm hoping to resurrect my blog and write about progress or my thoughts on tech rather than devolving into my usual diatribes about politics and how the world has generally gone the wrong direction. My acquaintances are concerned about me, and rightfully so, but I just don't care to live someone else's life anymore. I think you're right though, that when basic needs are met, most people want to work on their calling whether it be art or recreation or simply being human. Which looks a bit like how the aristocracy lived in the Gilded Age over a century ago. There's no reason why we can't have that level of affluence today for every single person by letting machines do the labor, or by taxing profits on that labor and providing cash to all via UBI.
- jfengel 7y ago
  I agree with you in a lot of ways, but keep an eye out on what "basic needs" means. Those are poverty-line wages, which don't give you any provision for becoming sick and little chance to save for retirement. Social Security might still exist by the time you retire, but even if it does, it won't even match that $1,000 per month (in whatever inflation-adjusted terms are available). If you've spent the last two decades socking away some of that sweet, sweet programmer cash, you may well have enough cushion to live the beach-bum/starving-artist life you're talking about. That's great, and go for it. But a lot of people trying to skate by with the minimum will discover that the minimum isn't quite enough, and then they get caught up in a very bad vicious cycle. UBI is one plan which would alleviate a lot of that, and I'd be all in favor of trying. Technology means there's so much to go around that not everybody needs to spend a third of their waking life to get the basics. But until then, people should be aware that they have needs outside of basic maintenance that must be taken into account.
Terretta 7y ago
> some new innovation ... going to create more maintenance headaches Not sure which ecosystem you’re in, but for software maintenance, the Mac App Store / iOS App Store seem to have completely changed the end-user experience. There are apps that are distributed free outside the App Store and cost money in the App Store, where I pay in order to never again think about updates. The backup/restore/migration story is pretty remarkable too. > feel like I’m turning into a Luddite I find that a fundamental point underneath the iOS vs. Android debate. Android is great for tech geeks, while iOS aims to give ‘normals’ their life back, folks with no desire to endlessly tweak and warily maintain. > futurist I think the future tech wins are those where the developer invests extra toil so the users don’t have to, where the tech recedes into the background, just ambiently working.

DelightOne 7y ago

Regarding maintainance: Is your problem the remembering, the time-investment itself or something different?

tomc1985 7y ago
It's the time investment. The dream, growing up, was to build some piece of software that made money for me passively, as a single-person shop. This used to be possible, in the pre-SaaS world of desktop software (or at least if you didn't want to release new versions constantly). Today, those opportunities seem to have dried up, and you have to maintain whatever you build, not the least because users now expect a level of support and maintenance that is constantly blessing them with new features and shiny things, whether-or-not the product actually needs it. As usual, competition has upped the pace to a level that locks out all but the most committed, and the democratisation of programming has made it so those committed folks are almost always type-A tryhards who have to turn everything into a business empire
- mLuby 7y ago
  What you need are royalties, which happily enough come from creating art or inventing. The rest of passive income is exploiting an edge (like an install base in desktop software) or rent-seeking, both of which if left to be truly passive will be captured by someone willing to put in slightly more active effort.

zackmorris 7y ago

I've reached the same conclusion. What we have the past 20 years is phantom technology and phantom wealth. So many tools to distract us and fill our time, but shockingly few tools to liberate us from labor. Only a tiny handful like rooftop solar panels, electric cars and Roombas have decreased our labor measurably. I'm going through a midlife crisis right now where I'm actively rejecting the decisions I made since 2000. I had a falling out with professional programming last year and am looking into the gig economy. I'm not going to buy new anything if I can possibly avoid it. I'm trying to turn my attention from external expectation to what I felt was my life purpose when I graduated college in 1999. Which will basically amount to finding a way to earn roughly $1000 per month doing whatever it takes and then using the freed up time to work on inventions. I'm hoping to resurrect my blog and write about progress or my thoughts on tech rather than devolving into my usual diatribes about politics and how the world has generally gone the wrong direction. My acquaintances are concerned about me, and rightfully so, but I just don't care to live someone else's life anymore. I think you're right though, that when basic needs are met, most people want to work on their calling whether it be art or recreation or simply being human. Which looks a bit like how the aristocracy lived in the Gilded Age over a century ago. There's no reason why we can't have that level of affluence today for every single person by letting machines do the labor, or by taxing profits on that labor and providing cash to all via UBI.

jfengel 7y ago
I agree with you in a lot of ways, but keep an eye out on what "basic needs" means. Those are poverty-line wages, which don't give you any provision for becoming sick and little chance to save for retirement. Social Security might still exist by the time you retire, but even if it does, it won't even match that $1,000 per month (in whatever inflation-adjusted terms are available). If you've spent the last two decades socking away some of that sweet, sweet programmer cash, you may well have enough cushion to live the beach-bum/starving-artist life you're talking about. That's great, and go for it. But a lot of people trying to skate by with the minimum will discover that the minimum isn't quite enough, and then they get caught up in a very bad vicious cycle. UBI is one plan which would alleviate a lot of that, and I'd be all in favor of trying. Technology means there's so much to go around that not everybody needs to spend a third of their waking life to get the basics. But until then, people should be aware that they have needs outside of basic maintenance that must be taken into account.

Terretta 7y ago

> some new innovation ... going to create more maintenance headaches Not sure which ecosystem you’re in, but for software maintenance, the Mac App Store / iOS App Store seem to have completely changed the end-user experience. There are apps that are distributed free outside the App Store and cost money in the App Store, where I pay in order to never again think about updates. The backup/restore/migration story is pretty remarkable too. > feel like I’m turning into a Luddite I find that a fundamental point underneath the iOS vs. Android debate. Android is great for tech geeks, while iOS aims to give ‘normals’ their life back, folks with no desire to endlessly tweak and warily maintain. > futurist I think the future tech wins are those where the developer invests extra toil so the users don’t have to, where the tech recedes into the background, just ambiently working.