I would like your help changing the tech industry.
I joined the tech industry in 1997, after years in the high school computer lab and running a BBS from home.
The tech industry I joined was fairly distributed. I had a local dial-up ISP account that offered free web hosting and e-mail, and then jumped ship to a DSL provider that allowed me to host my own servers.
My career quickly became centered around Linux and other Open Source software, and I understood how easy it really could be to host your own infrastructure and learn to code.
Over time, the character of the industry changed. The engineering side of things close to me remained centered around ideals of collaboration and sharing tools for mutual benefit. On the user side of the equation, we shifted more and more towards ad funded walled gardens run on centralized platforms with strict user controls.
“Ours is the age of cyberspace. It, too, has a regulator. This regulator, too, threatens liberty. But so obsessed are we with the idea that liberty means “freedom from government” that we don’t even see the regulation in this new space. We therefore don’t see the threat to liberty that this regulation presents.
This regulator is code — the software and hardware that make cyberspace as it is. This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced. It determines how easy it is to protect privacy, or how easy it is to censor speech. It determines whether access to information is general or whether information is zoned. It affects who sees what, or what is monitored. In a host of ways that one cannot begin to see unless one begins to understand the nature of this code, the code of cyberspace regulates.”
— Lawrence Lessig “Code Is Law” 1/1/2000
My vision for the Tech Industry
My goals are to:
- Put power back into the user’s hands.
- Put power back in the customer’s hands.
- Keep money within communities.
- Take power back from investors focused on short term profits.
The way to achieve these goals are by supporting new local tech companies which provide Open Source services to paying customers.
Running an e-mail hosting system in 2024 is trivial. In the past these types of services would have to compete with free Google Apps accounts, but these days more “Free” services have been getting price tags.
The resource requirements for hosting a small business’s handful of e-mail accounts are generally pretty low. Shared hosting for a few companies can make efficient use of resources. The margins wouldn’t be high enough to make Wall Street investors happy, but combined with other services, it could pay a small team a reasonable salary.
Open Source content management systems like Wordpress can be used to host websites for small businesses. Plugins like WooCommerce can add e-commerce capabilities. Local directories can help customers find good local business to take their money.
Encouraging people to shop locally increases the amount of value seen in the community for each dollar brought in. The more we find ways to hire each other to do work, the more money we will each have to spend. Spending on local platforms can help prevent money from leaving the community on each transaction.
Locally run social networks or video hosting services can be funded by something other than paid advertisements. The distributed nature of these platforms put moderation decisions closer to the users, with options for community run instances with moderators as well as user managed instances where you can define your own rules.
Run well, we should see far fewer scams than we do on the large corporate owned platforms. Managing a community of a few hundred or thousand is much easier than managing a platform with hundreds of millions of users. While there are efficiencies to scale, there are also limits.
The same types of services that are currently offered by a major tech company could theoretically be serviced by a smaller company on a local scale with the right tools. Sometimes the tools already exist and are available for free. Other times they will require investment and development. Once it is built by someone, they can offer it to others, showing benefits of distributed collaboration.
But it requires people to take risk, and it requires people to change their behaviors. It will require some money. How much money it takes can be reduced by other people contributing time or other resources.
It needs to provoke a conversation.
A meme needs to spread.
There’s a technical plan, which includes things like virtualization systems, production grade hosting environments for databases and application servers, and then there’s a philosophical change. A different way of thinking about tech services, both from the perspective of customers and from employees.
I don’t expect many investors to change their perspective, but they can be removed from the equation through strategic competition. Why take Wall Street investment when you can encourage the community to invest in itself?
The core idea is simple. Use existing tools through local companies focused on the benefit to local customers, instead of trying to build economic empires.
The technical requirements for local business are often not very high, so they suit themselves well to shared infrastructure. Businesses with more complex needs may not fit on the shared infrastructure, but are a good source of additional revenue for custom engineering projects.
By investing in local opportunities for skill development, we can create a local market for skilled workers.
Or we can continue down the path where tech companies consolidate wealth and power, suffer from massive data breaches, and invest in building tools to remove the employees from their own businesses.
I’ve made my choice, but I could really use some help.
What I Need
We have different options available to us today, but they need advocacy. Some of these options, like Fediverse services, are limited by adoption by other people. Posting messages on a dedicated community social network only helps if other people in your community join as well.
I’m looking for the people who see value in the suggestions I have to offer, and would like to hear more and potentially advocate for them with their communities.
I’m looking for people who are interested in the types of problems I’m focused on, and want to argue about what we should do, and would like to advocate for their own perspective.
I’m looking for people with technical skills who would like to collaborate. The solutions I’m proposing would enable a boom in small tech companies. Maybe one of them could be yours.
I’m looking for people with the experience running a successful business and would like to partner up in some way.
Funding is appreciated as well.
