In the last couple of months people, with modern tech,

* Built really cool Photo, Video, Music editing/CAD software and released it for free

* Reverse engineered playstation 5 and started making more of our games playable on platforms we like

* Helped normal people remove adware, debloat their TVs and made them lot smoother.

These are just some of the fun use cases from people passionate about the topics I am interested in ... When i was younger, there were different passionate people making different cool things.. demoscene, geocities, reverse engineering software, making flash animations, running neural networks on microcontrollers etc... which was the modern tech back then.

Back then my parents didn't know what a filesystem was. Now my college aged nephews don't know what it is - even though they grew up in the smartphone age.

What I'm saying is ... I feel lot more optimistic about the "modern technology" now than back when i had to walk to a library and request a book about the topics I'm interested in and wait a week to get it ...

> I feel that modern tech first took away the passion

As soon as something becomes potentially profitable, the MBAs enter the room, and the fun goes away. The more profitable it gets, the more toxic it gets, too.

+1

There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.

Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.

> than took away the means by making everything cloud,

I think its important to keep in mind, that there was a time when software like compilers were prohibitively expensive.

We dont know how lucky we are to live in a world where you can just download professional quality compilers, db engines, operating systems, etc for free.

> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.

I used to think this, I would repeat that old quote "It's not a conspiracy, the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control"

Then comes stuff like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#:~:text=th...

and

https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...

and

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-plots...

and

https://cybernews.com/cybercrime/meta-fortune-fraudulent-ads...

and

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+inauguration+zuckerburg+musk+trum...

and

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dem-orders-congressional-probe-eps...

and I'm left thinking well, if none of that covers the definition of evil cabal, then what does? How far can we move these goal posts?

>modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product

I find this claim unparseable in logical sense (I see where it goes emotionally, of course). Enthusiasm and "product-ness" are not mutually exclusive at all.

there are still tons of people making projects out of passion that are incredible, but you won't find them unless you seek them out, and the best way to do that is to make your own passion project.

the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere. The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.

Modern tech did not make anything a product, people using the tech did. But not all, many of us do things for fun and passion still, just don’t expect money for it. Not everything is cloud, I still use mostly things that are not cloud based. And I have lots of libraries and little utilities I maintain, none of which are related to cloud, anyone can keep doing that forever, there are lots of other developers and even normal people who still want to use those tools and apps. And come on, AI doesn’t do anything to you, it’s you who chooses when and whether to use AI for whatever purpose, and as a helper for when things get tough, AI is amazing, like a private, infinitely patient and knowledgeable personal assistant. You don’t need to let it do everything for you , keep doing things the way you enjoy it, ai can be just an infinitely superior version of StackOverflow. Or a tutor. It doesn’t need to replace you.

Eutrophy is good! Atrophy is not.

I dunno the leadership of at least US tech has been trying to market themselves as a cabal for a bit now and are doing a more convincing job of it than I thought would be possible

There is the incentive too which LLMs destroy:

- If you embrace agentic development and prompt/produce something, a rando with spare money and a better clanker supersedes your efforts.

- If you ignore LLMs and write and design the product yourself, the LLM corpo says "All the better for me! Moar free untainted datasets for me! I'll make you buy tokens from me in the next 6 months anyway..."

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this

Very bold statement

I think the best has yet to come in open source. Now that language models can translate machine code into human programming languages Pandora's box has been opened.

Steve Ballmer called Linux users a bunch of communist thieves and saw open source as a cancer, however it really ended up being a win-win scenario for labor and business. IT workers could take these tools with them and improve upon them throughout their careers, business benefited from the massive pool of talent and avoided the licensing headaches.

As it turned out the Ballmerists were a bunch of landlord thieves and closed source software was the economic cancer all long :)

> who had the skills and the means to do it.

emphasis on means. The means to spend ~8 hours a day contributing instead of dedicating that time to a full time job or a second job.

But the gravy train is ending...

Personally, I think it's good that volunteers build the internet and do things like that, but fundamentally, the barrier to the web has become too high. In the past, making a website was easier than you'd think, and the legal side was a bit more lenient, but these days, as laws accumulate precedents, there are many things to pay attention to, and starting with security, the number of things you need to worry about has increased.

The problem is that in the early days of the internet, people needed time to grow together. But these days, the barrier to entry is fundamentally higher than before. And even when making one site, you have to worry about various things...

In my view, there is also the point that people forget the fact that as business becomes more sophisticated and technology develops, the basic skills of the people involved need to increase accordingly. The reasons the internet has gotten worse are complex. For example, there is definitely the problem of people trying to make money through advertising and such, but fundamentally, the technical barrier to attracting people's attention has also risen a lot.

The amount of technology a single individual developer has to handle has also increased a lot.

> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.

Don't you believe it.

You don't need a "evil cabal" in the image of a movie caricature. It is enough to discuss with a wink-and-a-nod, shared incentives, product roadmaps, sharing profits from a global pie, circular deals etc. for a concerted group to form and start gaming the system behind the scenes.

The Computer Revolution was first and foremost a "People and Individual Freedoms" revolution. Cheap open PC hardware married to free open software made it happen. Networking and Data-Sharing were supposed to be neutral. Device control was taken away, specifically with Apple's iPhone showing the way, and then Network/Data control by Cloud companies showing the way.

The propaganda is always the same viz. "for the ultimate benefit of the end-user". Don't think/learn too much and just pay us the money to do it for you; You are nothing but just the source of revenue/profits for us.

The same thing is happening with AI where it is impossible for an individual to play due to scale and money involved.

Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, Walter Lippmann, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky would all feel deeply vindicated and proud.

>> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this

There is. It is called Microsoft. The recent dustup over VLC being the latest battleground between the darkness and the light. My experience of the front: work wants me to install MSTeams on my personal phone... which runs GrapheneOS.

(lol, windows wants to spellcheck MSTeams into "MS Teams" but refuses to acknowledge GrapheneOS. Another MS microaggression.)

I agree to some extent; however had I still contribute to Wikipedia and Wikipedia, while it has problems, is still fairly good (quality-wise could be better, a lot of content from discussions should be added to main articles but I usually confine myself to just suggest things on discussions and let others make a decision then).

> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.

Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.

OSM has _just_ managed the balancing act of getting corporate funding without becoming beholden to the funders or adopting a corporate ethos. (The corporates have gone off and founded their own project, Overture, and everyone is the better for them doing so.) But it has required a lot of pushback over the years against people trying to “professionalise” us, and I can’t say we’ve won every battle.

Money is necessary for many projects and people but this hides a lot of the charitable motivation. Circa 2000s, it wasn't clear at all what a good fit for Torvalds was and he talked about visiting Apple and talking to Steve Jobs (and being unimpressed with Jobs' smugness) [0]. There was a stint at Transmeta until, ultimately, a non-profit organization was setup pretty much for him/Linux so that he could focus on Linux development solely.

Many software developers are 'subsidized' by their employer in that they're allowed, or encouraged, to contribute to FOSS development (kernel development, etc.) but I would bet that this is the result of advocacy and desire of the software developers, not so much of the organizations they're part of.

Demand side value of open source is estimated at $8T+ [1]. It's hard to argue what might have been but I think there's a very real argument that Torvalds walked away from being a billionaire and settled for being a millionaire to work on Linux.

[0] https://www.bwass.org/bucket/Just-for-Fun.pdf (pg 150)

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...

Goodhart's law: whatever you measure will improve. And the measurement is money extraction.

Of course, there are still plenty of people who will dive into graffiti, but it is greatly encouraging that there is still a large enough force to push them back in favor of order and beauty. Not all is lost in the world.

And that it's dying and needs high-quality contributors (not high-quantity)

Saw MIT Press and hoped it would be open access. Thank you for the direct link!

Ads and tracking are run by corporations that are part of the establishment. Dont fool yourself that they are independent.

It has been ruined by profit.

It's a minority of toxic behaviours that has ruined it. Most corporations cargo cult what successful corporations do.

I don't get your point about governments, though. I could see an argument about US lobbies pushing the US government to enforce anti-circumvention all over the world, maybe?

> We, the people, built the internet, and as usual it has been ruined by governments (censorship)

Unfortunately, we the people also failed to keep the worst elements of society contained until pressure all but exploded.

The various censorship advocates would have had a far harder game, had Pornhub been more responsive to victims of involuntarily filmed material, Facebook/Meta been more responsive to Russian propaganda, Islamist terrorism, lynch mobs and god knows how much other shit ran rampant on their platform, had Reddit been more responsible in containing hate speech...

And it's no wonder that the EU eventually was fed up. Our attitude generally is, okay, we notice there is a problem, and we offer sometimes years to large actors to clean up shop or else, and only when there still is no action, then we bring down the hammer.

Frankly, I can't even count how many explicit warnings our authorities gave to Big Tech.

Interesting especially since this is written by the MIT press and BSD is obviously associated with Berkeley the histories in the BSD's of making source public.

  "Together, Cranor and de Raadt set up the first public, anonymous revision control system server."

BSD is a technologists lead. This story is a populist lead and uninformed in that same manner as populist news agencies telling us about hackers without knowing what a cracker is.

Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.

And I speak as someone who has been contributing to open source for decades.

No, I am not going to mow someone else's lawn for free, unless they are a friend. And nobody is going to fix the blown head gasket on my car for free. Nor would I want them to.

Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.

Grokipedia being awful doesn't preclude it from replacing Wikipedia anyway, because quality isn't what causes that to happen. Many good things died because they failed to play the game, in many cases they even failed to notice that a game was being played.

This account is an AI karmabot