Maybe "teamwork" is bullshit, but that's only one way to do collaboration. Specifically, it's the hierarchical way. Usually, this is referred to as "participati

Maybe "teamwork" is bullshit, but that's only one way to do collaboration. Specifically, it's the hierarchical way. Usually, this is referred to as "participation" or "corporation", while "collaboration" and "cooperation" are used to describe an anarchist approach. > Collaborating means the failure belongs to the process. This is the way that hierarchy fails to scale. The larger a hierarchy, the more "process" must exist to keep it together. Process in a hierarchy must be defined by superiors, and implemented by inferiors, so it is superiors who must own the failure of process, and inferiors who are blamed for it. > The average knowledge worker maintains accounts across system after system, switching between applications hundreds of times per day. This is the more serious problem that comes from hierarchy. Work done by a team must become its own isolated context: the project. Anything anyone hopes to be able to do with a computer must be monopolized somehow by an "application". Why? An application is the only practical goal that a project can have. Anything more would have too broad a scope to be manageable. --- We don't need hierarchy. There is another way to do work, and despite making incredible the tools for it, we have barely scratched the surface. We have a decentralized internet, email, and git, so why do we keep making applications? Application is not only a reflection of the hierarchy that makes it, it's also a reflection of the environment. No matter how you contribute to the puzzle, your contribution must be a piece. How else could it fit with the rest? Free software has been struggling with this dichotomy from the beginning, but it's only getting worse. Most of the systems we use are becoming ever more consolidated and impositional. Most people don't configure their system by editing each of the unique config files: they open the GNOME/XFCE/KDE "system settings", and expect it all to stay consistent. Most of what we actually do with computers is facilitated by one of two major web browser engine implementations. Want to make a new window manager? Get ready to build a feature-complete Wayland compositor (probably leveraging the bulk of another compositor's code). Sure, you can use shell utilities, but it's not like we are doing anything new or interesting with them: just transforming text with a careful emulation of a 50 year old environment. --- There's no clear way to resolve this situation. Software is useless until it can fit as a piece in the puzzle. If we want a system that is not a puzzle, then wouldn't we have throw away all the precious pieces? Even so, I think we have really lost touch with the original magic of computing. All these isolated contexts are walls that stop us in our tracks. Formats, accounts, applications, frameworks, platforms... all dead ends. Maybe it's time we make a path that doesn't end?