Plan B it is
I have, on occasion, been accused of being a pessimist, but my tendency to take honest inventory of shit that’s happening is a coping mechanism, not a belief or outlook. My default worldview is that of a disappointed optimist. I believe we are capable of great things, but humanity rarely lives up to the belief and pretending we do serves nobody.
Waiting for the US presidential elections I had a Plan A and a Plan B. It’s a fact of life that those of us living in a satrapy or principality of the US empire have to suffer many of the consequences of US politics without having any say in them.
But, even beyond that, anybody working in tech is directly affected by the changing winds of politics as complete deregulation is first plank in the tech industry’s two-plank strategy for postponing its inevitable decline. (The other plank is superstitious “AI” woo and the manufactured deniability that comes with using biased statistical models to bias launder decision-making. If you were labouring under the illusion that “AI” would be used to empower workers in any way, then I hope you realise sooner rather than later just how mistaken you are.)
Plan A was to assume that US institutions would at least last another four years, that regulatory bodies would provide boundaries – if somewhat minimal – to hold back the excesses of large multinational companies, tech industry unionisation would at the very least not be stamped out by the state itself, and that a basic facade of free speech would be maintained.
In which case, my idea was to focus on writing about how to make robust and flexible software in order to lay the foundation for a long-term rebuilding of software development as a practice:
- How to use late binding and loose coupling to enable dynamic and flexible software.
- Maximal interactivity with minimal JavaScript.
- Testing, both of code and design.
- How to make do with smaller teams.
Plan B was to assume that the already fragile institutions of both the US and other countries that depend on it, will be under a constant risk of collapse, that the pre-emptive obedience of dysfunctional platforms might strike at random, that free speech and expression will be outright policed, and that in exchange for their enthusiastic participation in the police state, tech monopolies will be actively strengthen.
(You can tell that I’m an optimist by the fact that Trump winning was Plan B not Plan A.)
In which case, the idea was to investigate ways of building software that would tolerate systemic chaos, failing institutions, and hostile environments:
- Working in an industry whose governance and institutions are at a constant risk of failing.
- Local-first web dev, even if it requires more front-end JS.
- Investigations into peer-to-peer, distributed, and federated approaches.
- Making software that tolerates large-scale failure.
I need to make a couple of adjustments on this site, for example, over the next few days to accommodate the slight shift in direction, but for today it’s enough just to have a direction for what to research, test, and write about.
It’s also going to change what sort of personal notes I write on this blog, but that’s because I process things by writing about them, not because it’s a strategy of some sort.
Plan A would have been more fun. But I guess Plan B is where it’s at from now on.