Thoughts on "The Future Will Be Technical", part 1
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A few weeks back, somebody on my Mastodon timeline posted a link to an
article entitled "The Future Will Be Technical"[1], along with a few
excerpts. The excerpts made me think that I find the article very
enjoyable and agree with lots of what it said. In actual fact, I
found the article (which is, perhaps, better characterised as a
loosely organised collection of brief snippets of writing all loosely
on the same topic - the author calls it a "modular essay", which I
think is basically bullshit) a real mixed bag. I agreed with and
enjoyed some parts, was underwhelmed by others, and in a few cases
felt outright alientated. However, the topics the article revolves
around are dear to my heart and, I imagine, will likely be dear to
many of my readers' hearts, so I've decided to write up my thoughts
on various chunks of the article in my phlog, broken down into chunks
so that they are not *too* long. I will try to alternate positive
and negative responses as best I can. I don't know how many posts
will be in this series, or over how long they will appear.
As a bit of background, the article came out of the author's
experiences in thinking long and hard about how to increase adoption
of Scuttlebut[1]. If you're not familiar with Scuttlebut (which is
often refered to as "ssb" online, the extra "s" standing for
"secure"), it is a decentralised, peer-to-peer networking system which
can be used, among other things, for messaging. I have been aware of
it and interested in it for a while now, but have not yet actually
used it and am not super knowledgable about it. I believe that it is
a very delay-tolerant, store-and-forward kind of network designed to
work well over e.g. intermittent radio links, which I think is very
cool.
Anyway, this first phlog entry in the series is in repsonse to the
essay module (aka "section, but I put brackets at the end of the
section title so it looks like a function call") "future dinner
party()"[3]. It's short enough that I might as well just paste it
here:
> In the future you will hold a dinner party, and all your
> (geographically) close friends will come. You will be stirring curry
> over your stove when the monitor on yr wall pings. On the screen you
> see a map, with pinpoints for the friends who have left their houses,
> and an ETA for when they'll arrive. Yr friend Sol just posted their
> coordinates, along with the message “I'm coming from the northside,
> can I pick up anything?” You can see that the pin they dropped is near
> one of your favorite breweries, so you send them a message asking if
> they'd mind picking up some beer. They send back a thumbs up, with an
> updated ETA.
> You are comforted by the simplicity of this interaction, but also by
> something deeper. The message you sent was on an encrypted channel,
> readable only by Sol. This map is one that only your friends have
> access to, which is why they're comfortable sharing their location.
> Even the icon of yr favorite cider shop was personal, and loaded into
> the “favorite places” section of the map by you and your friends. Your
> technology feels as intimate as your dinner party, because y'all built
> the whole thing yourself.
This is, obviously, supposed to get us all excited about the amazing
possibilities that come from designing and building our own secure,
non-commerical and decentralised network and devices, and encourage us
to get involved in the technical side of the Scuttlebut community.
Ultimately, laudible goals.
But when I read this, I have to confess, I felt deeply bored and
unmoved and if I were a cartoon character I would have yawned and/or
rolled my eyes in an exaggerated fashion while reading it to convey my
inner mental state.
I don't think there is anything *wrong* with people who want to do
things like this doing things like this, if it is done in a secure and
private and decentralised way. It harms nobody, and I am a firm
believer that if something harms nobody, then more power to whoever
wants to do it. To each their own. But I am supremely unmoved by
this. I see this as trivial "tech for the sake of tech" stuff which
might be fun, but at the end of the day it is a solution to a
"problem" which is not really very much of a problem at all. I lived
through the final years of that terrifying, chaotic period in human
history wherein people routinely made plans to meet somebody at a
particular place and time well in advance and then headed off in that
direction with no capacity whatsoever to communicate with the other
party until you eventually met up. I turned out just fine. I don't
mean to deny that having a system like the above would be more
convenient, but if this is the siren song you want to use to get me
stirred up coding and soldering for a better future, well, you're
going to have to try harder.
But this phlog is not just supposed to be about me putting on my
"prematurely grumpy old man" hat and dismissing some toys. The *real*
focus is this quiet niggling doubt I feel about the authenticity of my
response to this. In an earlier entry[4] I mentiond I was unsettled
by Jandal's quip about Mastodon: "It's just another microblogging
platform. Perhaps a better, healthier one, but still a vacuous one.
It's like environmentally friendly farts". I was unsettled by this
because I could easily imagine myself saying exactly that, with
conviction, a month before I started using Mastodon, but now that I
occasionally use it quite heavily, I perhaps felt otherwise.
The basic problem is that I am self-aware enough to know that I have
spent many years now actively refusing to use various items of
technology which I find disagreeable from some kind of
ethical/philosophical/political whatever perspective, to the extent
that I have come to think of this as "a thing that I do". I am
starting to worry that I actively look for problems and exaggerate
those I find to make myself feel better. Or, even if I am not doing
that, I worry that being such a technological refusenik clouds my
judgement in some way. Some of the things I refuse to use are
actually very tempting and I have no doubt that I would enjoy them or
that they would prove to be quite convenient. It's hard to remain
resolute and refuse to use those things. In the face of this
struggle, I think it's very easy and natural to convince yourself
that not only are you refusing to use X because you want to oppose
surveillance capitalism and support decentralisation of the net, but
that, in fact, X isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway. If you come
to think of X as full of problems of its own, or just as being,
say, vacuous, then it's not such a hardship to conscientiously object
to using X.
The result of this, of course, is that when somebody later comes up
with an alternative to X which serves the same function but side-steps
the various moral objections you had to the original, you don't say
"At last, an acceptable way to enjoy the benefits of X!", and
enthusiastically adopt it. Instead you say, "Eh, keep your libre
vacuous crap, I don't need it!". This means your technological world
basically remains frozen in the state that was dominant before the
net was conquered by the surveillance marketing complex.
I wonder, and worry, whether this has happened to me. Do I *actually*
think the idea of GPS tracking my friends on their way to my house is
fundamentally frivolous and indulgent crap that is not worth the
carbon footprint that comes with it, even if I can trust that all of
our data is protected and all the software and hardware involved in
making this work is free and open? Or have I just convinced myself of
that because the only practical way to achieve this for most people is
to become a serf of Apple and I find that repugnant? Can I know the
answer to this without actually trying the tech?
Have I simply gotten old? If you'd asked me when I was 18 how I felt
about the tech described above, it would have been far too plain
Jane for me. A *screen on the wall*? Pfft! I want the real-time
map of my friends' locations transmitted directly into my optic
nerves by the tiny computer implanted in my titanium skull, thank you
very much! I never thought for a second back then about the
socio-cultural-political aspects of technology (talk about boring!).
Now I worry that I can't see past them and have just traded one
extreme for the other. Instead of blinding accepting every new bit of
shiny tech that comes along as "cool" without question, I now reject
out of hand almost everything that happened after the mid-naughties or
thereabouts.
Douglas Adams once said the following:
> 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and
> ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
> 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and
> thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can
> probably get a career in it.
> 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural
> order of things.
I'm not quite 35 yet, but assuming you put plus-or-minus 10% wiggle
room on all those ages, then this matches my own experience very well
indeed. Have I just fallen prey to some quirk of human psychology?
Or do I just happen to be approaching my mid-30s at around the time
that everything is going to shit? There is, of course, going to be an
entire generation of people who do exactly that, any time humanity
makes a technological mis-step. How will they know whether they can
trust their judgement on such matters?
Who ever said that existential angst was the domain of adolescents?
[1]
https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/index.html
[2]
https://scuttlebot.io/
[3]
https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/dinner-party.html
[4]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/thoughts-on-mastodon-and-decentralisation.txt
