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There’s a documentary that’s in post-production named “Message Not Understood: Profit and Loss in the Age of Computing” that chronicles Xerox PARC’s research on graphical user interfaces and personal computing and how modern personal computing and the Web have deviated from the visions of Xerox PARC researchers. I’m highly interested in watching it once it is released.

In my opinion, what we’ve lost from the early days of personal computing is a sense of empowering users by giving them tools that not only they can use, but they can extend and even modify. Sure, today’s hardware and software are more capable than ever, and these extra capabilities do empower users in the sense that their tasks are made easier. But what about the ability to shape their environment? All too often software these days is locked behind walled gardens and binary code. Users generally have to accept their software packages as is. If Slack or Zoom or Photoshop changed its interface, too bad; you gotta just cope. Even FOSS can be an impenetrable mass of hundreds of thousands of lines of C and C++ code that even a seasoned software engineer would have to spend a week or two studying the codebase before making modifications, a far cry from the much simpler AT&T Unix from the late 1970s or the Lisp machines of the 1980s.

Even more frustrating than the complexity of modern software is the increased commercialization of personal computing. Ads, subscriptions, and tracking is everywhere. Data is increasingly locked in cloud services that often don’t respect users’ privacy. In short, personal computing back in the 1970s and 1980s was about taking power away from mainframes and giving it to the people, but it seems that the past two decades have been efforts to bring the power back to large corporations who dictate the terms of our computing experience.

What can be done about this? I think the FOSS movement has been a wonderful start, but there has to be an effort made to make a simpler software stack that makes it easier for users to extend and modify their tools. I’m also very interested in idea of community-driven, non-profit cloud services as alternatives to Big Tech. Computing is too important for society to be controlled by a tiny handful of corporations.