About Me
I'm a father, husband, musician, and software architect with a focus on building large scale distributed systems. I'm an empiricist who pursues minimalism, sustainability, and democratization.
I'm a father, husband, musician, and software architect with a focus on building large scale distributed systems. I'm an empiricist who pursues minimalism, sustainability, and democratization.
This site will have a range of topics that seem like they may be of interest to others (or for myself for external reference). I'll be incrementally building out the site content and design.
As part of my most recent revisiting of which Web solutions to adopt, this Web site is hosted on my home router.
The modern era is one in which technology has granted individuals significant freedom. Much of this is enabled by the Internet, but unfortunately while the Internet was conceived as a democratizing force (and many are still trying to move it in that direction including TBL) it has instead become a channel through which power can be consolidated more than ever before.
While the underlying design of the Internet allows for decentralization, the use in practice has led to certain sites becoming entrenched brokers of information. This was started by companies that provided better solutions which was subsequently fed by network effects, convenience, complacency, and lack of technical knowledge. The end result amounts to data monopolization; something which falls outside of the radar of what is typically monitored for market health.
The Internet itself allows for individual empowerment which is manifested as individuals being able to more easily run their own businesses (gig work) and more easily distribute their work (content creation). This is certainly shifting power into the hands of individuals, but given the centralized brokerage of that information that is offset by the benefits afforded to those brokers. While having a more traditional job may seem more restrictive, it also represents a significant investment on the part of the employer. This is perhaps most glaringly obvious when it comes to content creation where the work produced (and therefore the teams involved) ends up reflecting fairly directly on the company itself. This leads to a symbiotic relationship between the employees and employers where each is exposed to notable costs and benefits. The dynamics are certainly variable and there may be pathological imbalances, but such imbalances are far greater when companies are able to tap individual contribution without commitment, and where there is a readily available pool of such work and therefore the individuals themselves are fungible. This is even more pronounced given that the process itself tends to be indiscriminate and automated: the system amounts to the creation of controlled marketplaces where often the vendors are highly reliant on the specific marketplace but the marketplace is indifferent towards the vendor.
The underlying assertion here is not that the shift fundamentally flawed, nor to suggest that the some of the above concerns displace previous models (there will always be a spectrum). The concern is two-fold: the first being that what is often packaged as personal empowerment may have the opposite effect, which feels like a pretty standard grift that has become more normalized deviance (most baldly packaged as something like firing someone with the message that you're allowing them to pursue something else). The second being that these drawbacks are a function not of the Internet itself, but how it is used and that it can be counteracted by more conscious use: particularly given that technologies allow us to achieve equivalent results without centralization.
There is unlikely to be any particularly new ideas in the above, nor do I think that the majority of people will care enough to leave behind familiar conveniences, but it seems worthwhile to try to re-balance the scales as much as possible.