Shifting The Focus Of The Tech Industry
I first joined the tech industry in 1997. I had gone from high school graduate to retail associate to remote help desk worker for a major investment banking firm.
After a childhood obsession with computers, the job came easy to me. Given the timing within the industry, two years later I landed a role in an MIT startup that would go on to become a top employer in Massachusetts. The money was good, the challenges were interesting, and I met a lot of amazing people.
It wasn’t until years later that I saw a different picture of my industry. The people displaced by high paid workers. The costs driven up by competition for space. The tendency to operate in same cities, while removing jobs in other communities.
The real impact of “move fast and break stuff” is better seen from outside of the industry itself. The profitable consolidation had a real cost. The breaches hurt people.
The culture I had known looked different from that. My focus was within Open Source software, where the tools we need to do our jobs are freely distributed. It was a community of peer support and collaboration.
In reality the industry is both. In my opinion, it is due to the mindset of the people that we are willing to work for. Sometimes we share their values. Sometimes we were just willing to do the job we were paid to do.
However, the powerful thing about Open Source software is that the tools are free to use. The developers who currently use them to build global brands can make new choices. If they don’t, then the next generation of developers can make that choice instead.
A lot of the functionality provided by the tech industry is useful to the individual in the short term, but harmful in the longer term for complex reasons. There’s the amount of money leaving the community, the data breaches, and there’s the focus on what the company wants, rather than what our communities need. Over the past few years I’ve also learned more about how targeted advertising has been abused to manipulate the population.
So let’s re-implement those services on a local scale, and re-consider some of the choices that led to the creation of so many billionaires.
I’m an infrastructure guy.
When a new developer is starting out these days, they’re almost certainly looking to deploy their new website or service to a cloud provider like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure. My role has typically been to run the types of infrastructure that those companies provide.
The average “Enterprise” software stack (the computing infrastructure for major corporations) contains roughly 75% open source software. Most of the value that a company provides is going to be in that upper 25%. Your web application is a lot more valuable to your business than the infrastructure that it runs on top of.
Over time, Open Source is coming for their value as well though. Just ask Twitter/X. The company is built on top of a lot of Open Source technology, and is now facing stiff competition from the new open source services leveraging the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon is the best known example at this moment, but it is merely the tip of the iceberg. The collection of services that run the ActivityPub protocol are often called “The Fediverse”, which is short for “Federated Universe”.
In the tech world, “federation” refers to a group of service providers working together through common protocols.
Even Meta/Facebook is pledging to embrace ActivityPub with their new twitter competitor called Threads.
I think Meta is missing the point though.
The power of ActivityPub is the ability to decentralize the tech industry. It gives us the opportunity to embrace locally run and managed services *instead* of using a platform owned by a global advertising company. Centralization of user bases is very profitable, but I would argue is very much not in the best interest of the users themselves.
Even while Meta embraces the ActivityPub with Threads, they face competition to Facebook in the form of Friendica and Diaspora*, and Instagram faces competition from PixelFed.
Let’s look at what I think the industry *could* look like.
Infrastructure
I remember a time when geeks ran their own mail servers from home, instead of using Gmail. When companies had servers in their datacenter managed by skilled engineers with a vested interest in the company’s success, instead of sending monthly checks to Amazon. Amazon may be the more cost effective approach, but they leverage that fact to compete against their own customer base.
I’m currently in the process of building a community cloud using Open Source software (Ubuntu, libvirt, kubernetes, argo-cd, mysql) and existing server grade hardware. My cost here is electricity and my time.
That’s not to say this is easy. I am still working through setting up the right levels of fault tolerance and backups, but these are all solvable problems.
By running infrastructure within the community, we’re able to keep more of the money within the community. I’d rather see businesses support a local tech company than continuing to shoveling more money to the same handful of businesses.
In communities that run their own ISPs (like Shrewsbury Massachusetts), there can also be performance improvements when users are located close to the services that they are dependent on.
Most small businesses require very little resources, and modern DevOps practices allows for very efficient usage of the computing power on hand.
Instead of incentivizing maximizing the usage of computing resources, the goal would be to enable local commerce as cost-effectively as possible. This means enough to cover expenses, salaries, and a reasonable profit margin.
Businesses with more resource intensive requirements can still benefit from the same tools, but may make sense to isolate to dedicated equipment that they own or rent.
Services
Let’s look at how local services could operate, if they were focused on the community instead of the industry.
Retail
Amazon provides one of the biggest retail platforms in the world. They also leverage that platform to compete against their retail customers and manufacturers.
There’s a few ways I could imagine online retail working in a locally focused industry.
The historical approach would be to replicate Amazon at a local scale. We could be the local online retailer. We could provide a local alternative to Amazon by capturing local “eyeballs” and using them to compete against local businesses.
I think a better approach would be to offer infrastructure that does not have to be centralized.
In a community focused on supporting itself, Amazon could be replaced by a locally run platform that connects all of the local retailers. The role of the tech company in that instance is to provide a service to local consumers and retailers, rather than to own retail as a whole.
This could mean a central store run by the local tech company, as a service to actual retailers.
It could also mean per-business online stores, with a local aggregator that makes it easy for people to find what they want in town. The online stores could be managed by the retailer, or they could be run by one or more tech companies. ActivityPub integration could allow for easy alerts for products or categories of products becoming available.
I’ve been starting with a combination of Wordpress and WooCommerce, but there’s a world of existing Open Source options, and a constantly evolving landscape of tools for building custom solutions.
The key is to use Open Standards.
The Gig Economy
Our community has an abundance of people with expertise in a variety of fields.
While the “Gig Economy” has often been a code word for competing against regulated industries with a crowd sourced workforce, it could also describe tools for helping people in a community work together to improve their situations.
Coming from a tech background, I can relate to the expense of having to hire full time employees with expensive talents when you’re first getting started. There’s a tremendous benefit in hiring specialists on a project basis, but it’s often easier to hire experts from across the world than to find the right talent locally, even if it exists.
I can also understand the frustration of trying to find a full time job when the entire industry has decided it’s time to prune again. I know that my abilities are useful to the community, but it’s hard to connect with the people who could use your help.
A local gig board would make it easy for people with a need to connect with someone who can fill it.
Even gig jobs like Uber/Lyft or food delivery services like Doordash and Grubhub could be improved by running a competing service locally. For some industries, partnership with local taxi or delivery companies could re-enforce the idea of tech as a service rather than a tool to gain ownership.
Community Inventory
We can create an inventory of assets within the community for lending or sale.
Have you ever been in the middle of a project and realized that you need a specialized tool in order to complete the task?
Assuming it doesn’t just make sense to leverage the gig economy to pay someone to complete the task for you, it’s possible that the tool you need is available nearby.
Why buy when you can borrow or rent?
Social Media
I believe that Social Media is pretty key to our needed changes in the industry.
The Cambridge Analytica revelations really opened my eyes to the dangers of centralized social media funded by targeted advertising, and the recent conflicting ideas around Free Speech, disinformation and online radicalization has changed my perspective.
One of the reasons that I like decentralized social media is that the ability to filter is distributed as well.
Right now with the Fediverse there are a lot of large central instances (or pods), often managed by volunteers. These individuals publish their terms of service, and would be responsible for enforcing it. They can also choose what other instances their users can communicate with. If you don’t agree with their way of running it, you can choose a different instance. Compare this to Twitter, where policy decisions often come top down from the world’s richest man.
If there isn’t an existing instance that meets your needs, you can choose to run your own. You should be able to federate with the rest of the instances, assuming you aren’t rejected by other instance owners for the content that you allow.
While the Fediverse does not promise you an audience, you can have your own podium.
I see a benefit in a social media platform that doesn’t use an algorithm designed to generate engagement and ad revenue. Organic traffic has more value than purchased views.
While there is interesting technical details in the various open source components here, the key difference I’m proposing is a mindset shift.
Our communities do not need to accept the benefits of technology on the terms of a handful of extremely wealthy companies. We can make new choices that can yield new results.
We can embrace the power that the tools provide, instead of the short term convenience that the existing industry offers.
I can see how it works, but I need more time, which means funding. I need enough money coming in to pay my expenses while I continue working on building the tools we need.
If you’d like to contribute financial, I have a Patreon set up. The more beneficial step is to reach out. Let’s see how your business fits into the bigger picture I want to create, by talking through how you currently do business, and how that could change. I want to learn how to help you.
We’re currently wasting opportunities that are at our fingertips.
Let’s fix that.
