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While on one hand I suggest revisiting the old Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge on the other I've noticed that what's really missing everywhere is IT education. I come from a Computer Engineering background and I saw absolutely NOTHING regarding IT except for a few mentions here and there; I had to teach myself. Those coming from CS see even less (at least speaking for EU universities, I don't know about the US but I suspect it's not much different). There's an attempt to deny the need for IT knowledge and expertise at every level, Big Tech does it out of self-interest, while most others do it out of ignorance. They often claim, "Oh, it only takes a few minutes or days on your own; just a couple of clicks and you can do everything." Yet, those who say this don't actually know what they're talking about and refuse to even try to prove their own theory. The outcome is even worse: nowadays, doing it yourself is a struggle even when you have the right skills. All recent software is built to be unmanageable because there's no operation/infra vision. Don't even get me started on documentation; everyone talks about the need for a "documentation culture" yet what actually gets documented ranges from nothing to total garbage (basically text that's useless unless you feed it to an LLM and hope it can make some sense of it). To make matters worse, standard hardware is getting more and more expensive, first it was graphics cards, then RAM, and now NVMEs, with the result that many people simply don't want to or can't afford to buy, so they're literally living on someone else's computers even if they don't like it. This is especially true for students, who are at the best stage of their lives for learning and who won't have the time or energy to do it later on. To complete the picture, the business model just isn't sustainable; no matter how much is invested, a real digital evolution isn't possible while living on the computers of four giants limited by their own services, and this implies that a social collapse awaits us regardless. For me, the solution is managing to have enough leverage so that we can push for mandatory FLOSS and open hardware de jure in response, in order to limit the damage and geopolitical upheavals who push anyone to relocalize, which necessarily implies starting over on a small scale. I see something coming: Nostr, Meshtastic, the Fediverse, the rise of self-hosters and their average age show that there's still an active group of people who want a different world. But they are few and far between, burdened by significant technical debt in a world that's becoming increasingly hostile,and that's exactly where things need to change. The problems caused by centralization, from various companies getting burned by relying on giant third-party providers, to banking scandals driving crypto (not stablecoins), to the need for resilience that requires cutting down on SPOF might actually make a difference. I hope it'll be enough, and I hope anyone who gets it does their part to spread that understanding while we still can. |