<aside> 🚧 I plan on publishing this soon so please don’t share widely. It’s still a work in progress but most of the ideas are there.
</aside>
Imagine a world where you can build anything. Not some fairytale superhero world where you already magically know everything, but a real world where the knowledge and tools are available to you so that you can create anything.
When you're faced with a problem, you aren't helpless; you're excited for the opportunity to learn something new, to search your memories and combine them into new inventions, and to bask in the satisfaction of solving your own problems.
You're eager to be able to invest your own sweat and toil, both mentally and physically, to improve your life and the lives of those around you. And you feel like life is vapid and depressing when your abilities sit idle; you know that the world could be so much better, and you could make it so if only your circumstances did not hold you back.
In this world, every individual is empowered to manifest their own destiny. And people are optimistic; no more cries for help; no need for luddite fallacies when you are capable of creating solutions to new problems; and no need to follow mindlessly down the wrong path because you can pave your own.
Now imagine a world where building anything is extremely difficult. In this world, you only use the tools that others build for you. And most of the time, you can't even own any of your tools, you can only rent them. That's because companies can make more money that way and they get away with it because creating an alternative would require too much time and effort.
In this world, every tool is a black box. You have no idea how they work and they're impossible to take apart. You're told "this is how you use it" and that's all you really learned how to do. So even if you wanted to create an alternative, where would you start? Maybe you can start by modifying the existing tool to suit your needs, but there are ways of preventing you from doing that, by voiding your warrantee if you open it up, suing your for violating the terms of service, or only allowing you to rent it.
Tools in this world consolidate wealth and power because they are designed to be technology traps. Rather than focus on advanced capabilities, toolmakers aim for ubiquitous adoption because a ubiquitous tool will crowd out the competition. Users would be helpless without these tools giving leverage to the companies who build them.
It's hard to be optimistic in this world; people are pessimistic and cynical because everyone feels like their hands are tied. You can try to build a better alternative, but the ubiquitous giants can simply copy you. If your business fails, they will revert. So all we're left to do is complain. We cast our doubts on people trying to build a better alternative and employ our government to rein in a bastardized "free market".
This world is stuck in a mild dystopia where tools are available to you, but not on your own terms. And Marshall McLuhan still rings true: "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us".
Today, we can find examples of both of these worlds living side by side.
Go to a hardware store and you'll find an assortment of tools that you can own, modify, and use in whatever way you'd like. Buy a service manual for your car and you can learn how to take the whole thing apart and put it back together again.
But keep looking around and you'll find more predatory products. You'll find printers and coffee machines with proprietary cartridges. You'll find tractors and cell phones that void your warrantee just for opening them up to look inside.
The more complex and poorly-understood the product, the easier it is for companies to avoid public scrutiny, justified by a notion that users are dumb and will break the thing if they are allowed to tinker with it. And the more complicated the product, the more users will submit rather than demand appropriate documentation and learning materials.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the software industry. Most of the software I use today is a black box with a proprietary format that is rented to me through a web browser. The cloud is totally unnecessary for most of these apps and only serves as leverage for monetization. And they can get away with it because software is incredibly complex and programming literacy is still nascent.
But the world doesn't need to be this way. It's an uphill battle, against the tide of laziness; a battle for virtue so that our descendants can thrive in the world of the Good Life.