Disillusionment in tech or realism?

Old abandoned cabin in the woods. From iStock.

I have to admit, I was a strong fan of software creation as way to solve a problem. I actually believed I would be able to change world if I will do the a usable software.

But I never was able to create anything as I either did not had time to do it, or did not have enough skills to finish any of my projects.

What I discovered over time, that literally any software has been created so far, and likely that will be created, have not only some declared use case and purpose but also have some negative impact that is so awful that it seems that overwhelms any positive effect of mere existence of almost any software.

Private messaging software

Generally speaking, private messaging software such as Signal or Element was a nice thing. But few years come and it:

• used by Russian & CCP operatives to coordinate their destructive activities. Mitigation by state: deploy undercover operatives as possible targets for their network recruiting
• used by various terrorists, both far-right Nazi and so called (mistakenly) “far-left”, such as Trotsky fans, and anti-Semites to coordinate their destructive operations. Mitigation by state: deploy undercover operatives to get an eye from within of a terrorists organization.

Centralized social media

Social media such as X (former Twitter) or Threads or Instagram or TikTok allow communication of people worldwide en masse with ease. But:

• Nor Kremlin disinfo, neither antisemitism is not cleared away by moderation properly. Instead, these posts got boost by rage they cause.

Mitigation personal tactics:

• manually ban anything any disinfo and antisemitism. Drop a word to friends that this or that page or account spread lies and hate.
• Leave centralized platform if possible.

Decentralized social media

Decentralized Social media such as Mastodon has been created to solve centralized corporate social media issues, such as centralized censorship, control, and lack of users impact on any decision making, except if users will run away en-masse, as it happened with Twitter.

Problems of Fediverse I seen so far:

• One way or another, after the Hamas attack the amount of antisemitism literally skyrocketed in Fediverse as well. Not at that strong level as at centralized media, but phenomena present there as well.
• Somehow, Fediverse become platform for whining championship. If you not picky enough about your feed, all you will see soon is outcry about some strange issues that may be not relevant to your day to day life.
• Moderation is very problematic just because often small and medium instances admins just don’t have time or other resources to do proper moderation, or software do not provide proper tools for that, because anything fediverse is quite new and “nobody thought it will be that big”.

Personal mitigation tactics:

• Personal mitigation tactics same as for centralized platform. But Fediverse provide more flexibility on what to ban and how. Ban either accounts or domains if you see that posts with disinfo or hate dominate there. You can hide keywords most often used in posts with disinfo or hate.
• Regarding whining championship that is opposite of vanity fair you can see in insta, being exposed to it for a long time can cause distraction from real problems you have at hand. Personal mitigation tactics: carefully pick who to follow, do not follow too much of accounts who are too far from your location, or move to instance where you will not see too much of users from United States UK, or Western Europe. Or move to location where posts are more related to your place or problems at life.
• Moderation issues seems to be solved in 2 ways: 1) by using all tools of feed moderation you already have, such as block account, block domain, or hide keywords, or 2) by providing resources for beginning admins to exaplain how disinfo and hate looks like, and why important to remove it as quick as possible, and how solve personal conflicts between server dwellers.

Blatant Fiascos of Tech

Among positive tech with some negative impact, we can see blatant fiascos among tech, where positive effect lacking or is a side effect happening just because people love to hit the nails with microscopes.

Cryptocurrency

The idea of money appearing out of nowhere (from the fact that someone processed a transaction in case of crypto) motivated people to buy mountains of expensive hardware, spend whole countries of electricity, and all that just to see some number (balance on wallet) would grow a bit. And all that of course annihilated the main premise of crypto — decentralization. For any given cryptocurrency there are just few, literally 1–4 clients, 1–4 node (“mining”) software, and a few large players controlling main pools or other large processing networks.

Negative cryptocurrency impacts:

• criminals of all kinds use cryptocurrency to circumvent sanctions and other restrictions and pay for illegal services or activity. Not only drug dealers but Russian special forces operatives as well.
• Wasting phenomenal resources such as electricity, hardware, and sometimes even water on cooling.
• Scams such as “cloud mining”, “super profitable investments” and all sorts of other schemes of quick enrichment.
• You, having crypto, do not have something that allow buy everyday goods like groceries, generally speaking. Only in some countries some services like utilities in Sweden can be paid with cryptocurrency.

Unexpected positive effects:

• Donations to Ukraine can be done in crypto as well. Just donate to an institution or organization you trust. Such donations with proper precautions can be done even if you are located in Russia.

AI

This technology negative impact is monumental:

• Wasting phenomenal resources such as electricity, hardware, and sometimes even water on cooling.
• Industrial production of hate and disinformation by botnets controlled by AI
• Automation of scams and deepfakes generation
• Art as way of living is in danger.

Mitigation:

• If you do any art for living, you need to find other source of income, by complete change of profession into something that can not be automated with ease. (well, it was a good advice before AI, but now it is an urgent!).
• Do not share news, links, or articles or social media posts, if content triggers rage. Take a deep breath, and make sure you can provide such context that will mitigate negative impact of such content. If not, do not share and do not comment.
• Do not use AI at work, for work, and other context, to the most possible extent.

Conclusions

To summarize, now went path from believing that by making some software I can change world and make it a better place to conclusion that it is impossible to improve world by creating a new software, such as new OS, new programming language, new peer-to-peer network, or new private messenger, or new decentralized social media.

Reason is simple — whole IT sector is very centralized and depends on few entities, few corporations, few billionaires such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Pavel Durov, Jack Dorsey, or Jeff Bezos. Strong centralization spans from software to hardware. Combined with monumental complexity of all this stuff, all these protocols and millions of lines of code, it makes complexity and centralization of anything of IT even huge.

To say simple, you today can’t buy a cheap 3D printer and print own processors (CPU or GPU or both). You can’t create anything from scratch yourself if you don’t like something in all that.

Compare it to e.g. how you, generally speaking, can build a small hut yourself, using tree logs, or even with bottles and sand, if you have a piece of land for that.

Yes, you can write basic code for a social media prototype in few weeks, but you will need to host it somewhere, likely in the a cloud or VPS in some hosting center.

You can’t host properly even a email server at your garage today. Well, you can, but residential IPs by default considered as sources of spam, plus many ISP do not provide so called “white IP” service — public static IP for your computer at home.

Some ISP configure their equipment even in a way that it can not be used for LAN setup even for WiFi or if device has plenty of Ethernet ports.

Changing world into something better today done via real-life actions, real-life connections, real-life interactions, not via writing yet another piece of software.