A Necessary Return Of Locally Managed Technology
I first joined the tech industry in a different era.
I graduated high school in 1995. I worked retail until 1997, when I started my first job as a member of an outsourced helpdesk. By 1999, I had joined at the ground floor at an MIT startup, and stayed until it became a billion dollar company.
My career was successful because I always tried to find a way to solve the the problem presented to me, and because I had the opportunity to try solving difficult problems for people with a lot of money. I learned to use free tools, developed by other people, in order to achieve these goals.
Experience and expertise are the results of working, and the opportunity I was lucky enough to fall into as a young kid gave me a big lead on other people. The key factor was my moment in time, and my proximity to a tech center about to go through explosive growth.
I worked hard. I learned from others. I learned from experience. But all of this started with someone giving me a chance.
The industry I see around me looks very different than it did when my career began. There’s an abundance of highly skilled people, and an industry that has forgotten that it’s the people who provide the real value.
After decades of the best people working for the best companies, I see an industry with minimal choice and a lot of distant power. Terms of use are defined in unread click-through licenses, subject to change.
Many of the services provided by these national or global companies could be implemented at a local level instead. This would provide a number of benefits for the community.
First, is the level of influence provided. As a business, you will have more influence over a local vendor than you would over Google or Amazon. These companies can, and do, change their terms of services unilaterally. They do not need to intend ill will to a specific business in order to hurt them by shifting the rules.
Second is the value of local spending. Local workers spend in local businesses. If the highest paid employees of a business live in a different community, then your local economy will not benefit from it.
Another economic impact is that the leaders of large corporations tend to act in the best interest of investors rather than customers or employees. How many of the services that we leverage from large companies experience price increases in order to maintain high profit margins?
Next is the availability of local expertise. I am an expert in Linux and large distributed tech platforms. This is because of my opportunity to work. If we pay people locally to learn to manage locally run services, then we will create a new generation of experts in the relevant technologies.
While it may be cheaper to pay a monthly fee to Amazon Web Services instead of hiring the experts required to manage your own platform, computing power itself is cheap, and a Do-It-Yourself mentality is going to beat paying thousands for their offerings. Once you’ve created what you need, you can train someone to manage it, and create a local opportunity to gain expertise.
Finally, there’s the cultural impact on the tech industry. Right now the industry is very focused on money and top down power. Companies are run top down by CEOs with a lot of political, economic and other power. They’ve build empires with our labor and their money.
We can learn how to thrive in this environment, but it’s our expertise that actually shapes what is available to people. Harder choices can reshape the economy, and shift the elements of power.
We can participate, or we can lead.
Distributed, collaborative, local economies puts more power into our hands as employees and customers. We can leverage on demand manufacturing, creative commons and open source to promote local production. We can share the tools between communities, instead of merging power.
We are already starting on the path. The question is who will move early, and who will play catch up.
