what's stopping you

I’ve started to see the software industry as the biggest con anyway. Creating jobs for the sake of jobs. Artificial boundaries around sharing the output and fruits of creativity and labour, because what we need isn’t a better world - it’s more jobs. We’ve all got the means of production in our hands now, but we’re still toiling away trading our time for scraps at some imaginary table. Building another photo sharing app for the share-holders.

and why is that? Why do you feel unfree to strike out on your own?

That’s something to ponder I suppose. Although self employment wasn’t really what I was getting at. We’re making too many things, and with software and media we’re even imposing totally artificial scarcity on what is physically literally nothing at all, in order to both justify and enable more production, more jobs, and an ever growing financial economy to the detriment of - or more accurately a total apathy toward - everything else.

“Striking out” and doing my own photo sharing app doesn’t really cut it. We all need to stop for a while and look at what we’ve already got in the world, particularly in terms of technology.

A petty example, but I’ve got 8 chat apps on my phone and none of them talk to each other. Most of them come from companies with multi-billion dollar valuations each, and they all basically do the same thing. The same thing XMPP and IRC did 20 years ago.

With all the power of modern technology and communication, that’s what we as a people are working on. Not solutions, not even needs or wants. Just products.

That might sound slightly angrier than I think I am. I’m sure our current systems sounded like a good idea to many when they were devised and implemented, and maybe they were from a certain point of view. But I am a little annoyed at progress (and my own, too) and an apparent inability or unwillingness to see alternatives and improvements to our current mode of living. Although I sense this is changing rapidly.

It has come time for new ideas.