As tricky and involved as life tends to be for all of us with bills to pay and responsibilities to uphold, we don’t have the luxury to focus only on our problems and ignore what’s happening elsewhere in politics, business, or society at large.
Turns out living in a society means you’re affected by shit happening to it.
The Crowdstrike disaster is a good example. For most of us, it’s shit that’s happening through no fault of our own to companies that don’t employ us. But we’re affected because taking out just under 1% of all business computing (which is effectively what taking out 1% of Windows means) is going to ripple outward and affect the rest of us.
We can’t ignore the US presidential election, even if we aren’t Americans, because Trump’s friendliness towards authoritarians around the globe directly threatens the geopolitical stability of multiple regions.
The tech industry is also directly affected by whatever happens. The Biden/Harris administration has (correctly, in my opinion) come to the conclusion that the tech oligopoly is harmful to the US economy. That, for most businesses in most industries, tech devices and services are dominated by either monopolies or duopolies harms every company that isn’t one of the oligopolies.
Since “not one of the big half-a-dozen or so US tech companies” describes, well, pretty much every other company operating in the US, the centrally managed stranglehold that these have over global markets represents substantial economic harm and systemic risk.
But being regulated lowers the profits of those regulated, so they generally seem to be supporting Trump. His fascism is clearly not a deal breaker for them.
So much keeps happening in business and politics around the world and, because the world went all-in on globalisation over the past twenty-five years, too much of that affects us directly.
We can’t do anything, but are affected, and I’m honestly fucking tired.
I’ve been trying to find a productive focus for this newsletter and it’s hard when things keep happening everywhere.
It feels like others are doing a much better job than I do of covering “AI” nonsense in general. There’s little I can do or say that Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000 and Pivot to AI aren’t doing a much better job of doing.
Commenting on current events is just more of the same. Both in terms of me adding to the noise and in terms of me disliking the world’s current pace of dramatic events.
What I’d like to do is to look a bit deeper. Instead of writing about Crowdstrike or “AI”, I’d like to find and write down clearer thoughts about the underlying decay that is allowing these problems to become so large. Instead of talking about how React is more often than not a bad choice or how to make a site, I’d like to try to find more cohesive thoughts about some of the dynamics that result in these choices and what it might mean if we flipped the usual “what’s the best way for us, a company, to implement this software we think we can sell” question over and instead asked:
What do we, the people who have to live computer-mediated careers and lives, need from our software and what can we do to make that happen?
I don’t have any answers to any of these questions, and I might never, but they’d make for more interesting topics, I think, than yet another surface-level analysis of “why Crowdstrike happened”.