|
That misses the danger. We have to view societal inefficiencies as a targeted way of offloading pressure from expedient, one-size-fits-all "production quotas" and "final solutions". Technologies are levers - they produce leveraging forces, and we have to learn ways of using them appropriately in a holistic sense. They aren't the same as going up a level in a video game and being able to do the same thing plus one, because the dependencies of technology create new constraints: in a world with books, illiteracy becomes disabling. Now, we can say with confidence that some inefficiencies don't work and are just inducements for everyday waste and corruption. But the majority of those aren't hyped technologies, they are longstanding norms. The hype and investment is, rather, a hope that the new problem saves us from the old problem in some respect - that, you know, maybe you can use all this new stuff to manufacture your own dishwasher, exactly how you want it, and it doesn't need a middleman company to make it "smart". If you want to write software that is "nice" in the sense of longevity, you have to target archival materials, which isn't within computing's mainstream, but is a major aspect of retrocomputing: certain elements have proven to last, and within their context, you can just pick them up and use them again and again, for the rest of your life. You can reasonably hope to target VGA, PS/2 keyboards, 6502 processors, etc. If you leave the software open to using new I/O, new protocols, you are engaging in speculation. Speculation needs financial motivations to fill in gaps: you can't get everywhere you want to go by working on the fun parts. You build a company because you are trying to fill in a gap. It is not pretty and sometimes you break some hearts, minds and bodies by being the person doing that, but it's quite a bit better than an armed struggle. |