Thoughts on "The Future Will Be Technical", part 1

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