“Hey Kevin, I thought you abandoned this blog!”
Did you? Considering it’s (at the time of writing) January 2026 and the previous post was from April 2025 I can understand that. But no, I prodded Docker once again to shake the dust off and get the hamster running on the wheel because in this brand new year, the time is long past due to go back to the future.
Pop culture reference out of the way, we can move on.
Back in April we all knew it was going to get bad. We still hadn’t been able to account for all of the ways that tech oligarchs would find to make absolutely everything exponentially worse for literally everyone except them and their cronies. It starts with tech being sewn to fascist governments, human centipede style, and degrades from there. The smoke & mirrors of “AI” being stuffed into every crevasse resulted in the RAM crisis, which is making not just PCs but anything that uses RAM or NAND (ie, literally everything in tech), beyond the pricing of the average human. At a time when cost of living is skyrocketing and income is stagnant, our system has metastasized Capitalism to it’s final form: Pay or Die.
Good and depressed? Don’t be. That’s what they want. They want you to feel hopeless, powerless and resigned. Capitulating to the whims of fascists and Nazis has never worked in the people’s favour, including now.
I think Gamer’s Nexus has really hit the nail on the head with the end game: it’s moving the ability to use any form of Compute out of the hands of ordinary people, and into the hands of tech giants who will dole it out on a subscription basis. They want as all reduced to Oliver Twisting ourselves with empty bowls begging for just a few more minutes of access to our own data.
Those of us ancient enough to remember the early days of computing will instantly recognize this as the very antithesis of the computer age – we were sold a dream of empowerment, where information and a voice would be available to everyone, globally, and many of us Olds acted upon that. Then the money happened and the bubble cycles began, and it’s all degraded to this point. We built a world dependant upon Compute, naively assuming it would always just be there, only to let scam artists and abusers worm their way into the infrastructure and then lock us out.
The early cyberpunk literary genre gave rise to a philosophy of tech empowerment, and also a warning what would happen if we let that power become the exclusive possession of giant corporations. Then we built The Torment Nexus.
But really it’s a simple choice: A guy comes up to you and tells you to give him your phone, and you can have it back for a limited time and for a fee. And then get a new one every now & then for a larger fee. Do you do it? Right now, at this exact point in history, we can give him the phone or we can refuse. If we refuse, this may be the last phone we ever own.
I don’t know about you, but fuck that guy and I’ll just use my phone for as long as possible, thanks. And that’s the position we have to be in; we have no choice, they aren’t leaving us with any choice. Pay or die. If we want a third option, we *have* to make it ourselves.
The onus is on us now to make our tech last as long as it can, to escape the control of the oligarchs and claw back even a sliver of self determination. The upgrade treadmill is dead in the grave along with Moore’s Law. Instead of boasting about how powerful our PC is, we need to start being proud of how *old* it is and how much Open Source software is on it. Retro tech will no longer be a quaint hobby, it’ll be a survival tool.
The time has come for cyberpunk to grow up. It’s not just about looking cool and having cool tech, it’s about who controls that tech. They won’t give it. You must take it. The time has come for a new digital counter culture, built on the foundation of those pioneers of FOSS. It must escape the old trap of being an elitist Straight White Dude club. It must be kind, patient, welcoming, and *fun*. We won’t escape the treadmill by walking backwards, but by leaving it entirely.
“Many things have been taken from us, it’s true. But fortune favours the bold, and there ‘aint none so bold as people with nothing to lose.” – Nora Night, Warframe in-game DJ
Very much agreed, if newer tech becomes more and more locked down we need to keep the older stuff running for as long as possible. But we also need to figure out how to create our own vibrant spaces online because if we don’t we may find the old tech effectively isolated and neutered.
One interesting thing I’ve watched evolving on the Fediverse has been the various co-operative models that have arisen for funding instances (e.g CoSocial.can has a membership-based approach, Aus.Social is supported via Patreon / Kofi).
This seems to me like an important part of reclaiming control over tech – it means that not everyone needs to have the skills and infrastructure to self-host. Building and colocating a few servers can cost a few hundred dollars, that’s cost prohibitive for a person, but well within reach of a moderately sized community.
If looking after your tech is the first plank, working together to make things happen (pooling resources, sharing knowledge, etc) probably needs to be a second plank.