https://borretti.me/article/no-man-is-an-island
Good post that gets into the futility I feel when I try to do something creative online anymore. I'm less and less motivated to do things like write a blog or build software tools. I've found myself without much of a creative community since 2020 for a variety of societal and personal reasons. My attempts at private intellectual life have crashed and burned. I really do need creative community but I don't want to feed the plagiarism machine. Not really sure what to do.
@darius
I feel the same way, but I exited the biz side a long time ago; these corporate douchebags have always been here (read CYBERSELFISH).
All code is social. But I'm not in the tech biz at all and glad for it. For me code remains social, at times an audience of one; feels like no peer community, for a very long time.
I still very broad intellectual pursuits, (more or less within the history of computing) but have literally one academic friend that cares enough to read or write about it. Few seem to have any sense or concern for where we are and how we got here.
I've said here a couple times, unrigorously, that we need to have vernacular technologies, separate concerns, from industry. Of course we can't be independent from the tech industry (though we may be forced out), since we're using or repurposing its artifacts.
In the past, our concerns were theirs; pushing the state of the art. Tech concerns are now financial, there's little art left.
We are not driving the bus any longer. Amateur radio has gone through this, twice: in the 1920s, 1930s, when they lost the airwaves after pioneering techniques and gear to utilize them; and in the 1970s, when amateurs could actually make things that met or exceeded state of the art; by 1990, you could buy more radio tech for cheap then nearly anyone could make at home.
But my computing needs no longer parallel those of industry; I don't want nor need a fucking router in my house. Stacking up tons of pricey gear has turned this into a cargo cult, aping what a data center/colo has. Why?
Very many Big Chunks of computing are now commodities. New gear and paradigms will happen, but in material technologies few of us have access to.
In the 1970s and 1980s, rank amateurs created, from naivete and skill, the first spreadsheets, on screen word wrap, novel solutions galore.
Coattailing industry for personal life's purpose has always been a losing prospect, it's being made abundantly obvious, very quickly, right now