… That’s why I ended my comment with “we should be teaching others and helping them make their own”.

We should stop making software for others.

A prerequisite for reasonable tech use is understanding the amount of energy and materials you need to “burn through” for any given piece of tech to 1) exist and 2) do its useful work. Call me naive, but I really doubt that we’d be accelerating climate change this much if every person contributing to the “X thousand hours of videos uploaded to YouTube each day” was required to write their own video hosting software first. I doubt our social networks would become so captured by propagandists of every user of one had to write their own. (Obviously as an absolute this is a bit too restrictive - it’s more the tone and direction that I’m trying to convey).

Instead, we should be teaching and helping others reach our knowledge /skill level.

Maybe the execs would stop pushing shitty UI dark patterns if they had to code the service themselves (and then use it afterwards!).

One^can^dream…

Don’t joke too flippantly about it to their face, though.

I did once and the dude sat me down and very patiently explained to me all of the ways people still suffered because of that period, like how his friend had to suddenly pay his cancer treatment out of pocket for months and months and would have ended up homeless if not for being able to crash on this guy’s couch.

It just takes a little effort to filter to see and reach the right people’s content. Otherwise, I don’t think completely withdrawing would be very beneficial in my industry and the era I live in.

I have been thinking about this a lot. Wrestling with how much consumption I can allow myself to sustain, and how much I can allow myself to abstain from.

As more and more of the world around me is interfaced with through machines and/or the internet, I can’t just “take a break from computers” for a few days to give my brain a break from that environment anymore. From knowledge to culture, so much is being shared and transferred digitally today. I agree with the author that we can’t just ignore what’s going on in the digital spaces that we frequent, but many of these spaces are built to get you to consume. Just as one must go into the hotbox to meet the heaviest weed smokers, one shouldn’t stay in the hotbox taking notes for too long at once because of the dense ambient smoke. Besides, how do you find the stuff worth paying attention to without wading through the slop and bait? The web has become an adversarial ecosystem, so we must adapt our behavior and expectations to continue benefiting from its best while staying as safe as possible from its worst.

Some are talking about “dark forest”, and while I agree I think a more apt metaphor is that of small rural villages vs urban megalopolises. The internet started out so small that everyone knew where everyone else lived, and everyone depended on everyone else too much to ever think of aggressively exploiting anyone. Nowadays the safe gated communities speak in hushed tones of the less savory neighborhoods where you can lose your wallet in a moment of inattention, while they spend their days in the supermarkets and hyper-malls owned by their landlords.

The setup for Wall-E might take place decades or centuries from now, but it feels like it’s already happened to the web. And that movie doesn’t even know how the humans manage to rebuild earth and their society, it just implies that they succeed through the ending credits murals.

Congrats for sticking it through!