I’ve spoken plenty about my love of Ed Zitron’s commentary work on the current state of tech and tech culture. Just today (at the time of writing) he released a new episode of his pivotal podcast Better Offline, where he interviews Kyle Robison of The Verge and Mike Isaac of the New York Times about the (largely unfortunate) state of tech journalism.
What I think is interesting about Ed is he represents someone between worlds. He’s clearly someone who both understands and loves tech and is deeply pissed off by what the techbro/VC movement in Silicon Valley has become, and yet is still kinda in it. He’s not an old tech greybeard like me, who looks at it from outside. He’s critical of what has become the mainstream of tech while very much being a part of it, which is why his voice is particularly needed. He’s among the very few in that space that haven’t drank the Kool-Aid.
A good bit of that interview they discuss where it all came from, blogging, weird little subcultures built around niche interests, and the excitement and fun that used to be in tech. And they speak of it in wistful, nostalgic tones like some long lost golden age. And yet that’s only from the perspective of the mainstream — all new things in culture rise from the underground and counter-culture. And while they may get forgotten, they never actually leave the underground. They’re still here, in many cases thriving, just out of the spotlight. They find new audiences. They may not be even on the radar of the mainstream brain-trust but in many ways that’s what allows them to thrive.
Things like the new return to blogging as personified in Bring Back Blogs, the talk around the “indie web” and of course The Fediverse are all part of that. Yet the fate of Bring Back Blogs also illustrates one of it’s stumbling blocks — it doesn’t scale. It was a project created by two people that blew up and then become too much to manage, so it just lingers in limbo. Mastodon and the wider Fediverse got a spotlight during the Great Twitter Migration but then subsided once again into the shadows when the narrative became “it’s too complex” and people went skulking back to Elon’s House of Discount White Supremacy because it was the easy choice.
If I sound a little bitter, yeah I probably am. So many of the things that are rotten in tech are solved problems, except they take a tiny bit of effort on the part of the user to implement, and that’s always where it falls down. We have all been trained, many of us since birth, that anything requiring effort is bad. We expect everything to be one button press, “It Just Works”. We don’t believe in our own ability to understand how anything works — that’s the job of the “tech people”.
As a result we give up control, and have… well exactly what we have. Monolithic platforms that use people as fuel for their money machine when they grow so large that we’re afraid to leave for fear of being alone in the wilderness.
Well, welcome to the wilderness. This blog is as tiny as tiny can get, read by only a handful of people. And yet I can’t help but feel it nevertheless represents in some small way that hope, that enthusiasm, that spirit that made tech so engaging in the first place.
There’s a reason the stereotype of “the nerd” lingers. It should. We’re not normal. We shouldn’t be normal. As William Gibson wrote, “The street finds it’s own uses for things”. The most interesting part of tech is always in the little spaces, the back alleys and dive bars. And it always will be. That’s where I started, and that’s where I’ve ended up. And you know what? It’s good here. Most important, it’s fun here.
Stay weird, y’all.
Well written. The whole expectation that things “Just Work” really struck a chord with me. I’ve spent the last few years doing a job that involves a heck of a lot of helpdesk, and the amount of people who have said to me that they’re either “not technical” or “not good with computers” boggles the mind. We all have the capacity to be able to use computers by and large (just as we all have the capacity to draw, and those who say they can’t are lying to themselves… but that’s a discussion for another day!) – but because so many people have been conditioned into believing that tech is this black box where mere mortals dare not enquire, it creates a bit of a fear culture around computers.
I’ll stop there before I ramble on too much…