Now What?#

Maybe you can feel it. The enshittification. The suits breathing down your neck to adopt a broken technology meant to replace you and deny you access to information save through their filters and their control. An assualt on the craft and creativity that used to be part and parcel of being a weirdo tech enthusiast.

OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad was an unwitting(?) tell - give us all your curiosity, all your attempts at learning, all your triumphs of insight, and we’ll give you back a chat box. That’s all you need. That’s all you are. It does everything you can. Better. Faster. More obediently.

Fuck it. Fuck them.

It’s a lie, and you know it. I’ll talk about it more later on, I’m sure. But they’re desperate to own you and discourage you. They wouldn’t know creativity if it pissed on them and the only thing they actually make themselves is what they flush down after their morning constitutional.

So what the hell do we do about it?

I don’t know.

But we have to try.

I think the best chance is going small and peer-to-peer. Getting weird and ungovernable. Unmonetizable. Resurrecting the dream of the web from its early days. Maybe it’s just Cypherpunk Manifesto Mk. II, but we have hints it could work - torrenting works and as much as they want to, they can’t really shut it down.

What if we did more like that? What if we took back decentralization from the cryptobros? Bittorrent over Bitcoin.

Can you make a distributed, peer-to-peer search engine? Maybe there’s too much data. Maybe not. Maybe you can be smart about what you leave and what you take. The pieces exist: Byzantine consensus, MapReduce, PageRank. The model exists: peer-to-peer. The inspiration exists: Linux started as one man’s hobby project task scheduler.

Monopolists and infofascists want to squeeze everyone out of any way of doing things they don’t own. Build software NewSpeak. But they will never touch royalty. The blade that cleaves their event horizon must be swung from the center of our chests.

That’s all abstract, I know.

What to do now? Here?

Build. Small, ugly, broken, doesn’t matter. Build something with your own hands and your own mind. A program, a circuit, a table, a pot, a story. It will be precious, because hands have touched it. Your hands.

Meanwhile, I’ll be here too. Sharing my own fluttering, half-broken creations. Raging into the void. Hoping to build some part of a better world while aspiring to be your Hunter S. Thompson in this dissipated era. Except instead of drugs, I’ll be running on furry smut and boutique coffee. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, so hold on to each other.

Stay Weird.