Degrowth in Technology

First up, degrowth is a bad name. I agree with the sentiment expressed but past this post I will never sign on to anything called “Degrowth” and neither should you. The name is already boxed in and the opposition handed free marketing. Viability is what we are after; to survive and live successfully. Do we need to grow our level of consumption to survive? No. If you live in the majority of the western world you do not.

In fact you consume more than you need to and a lot of that consumption goes to waste. Using something like “Viability” instead of “Degrowth” is the responsible thing to do. Discussing viability with a young family living in a trailer park in the southern US, henceforth “trash”, won’t get you sneered at. Try telling them about the virtues of “Degrowth” and its tantamount to telling them to starve and their living conditions are already too great. If your desire is to just piss them off and shut down future discussions with their ilk; great, all done but it’s faster just to spit on them.

Now, LA house wifes can sign on to something as catchy as “#degrowth” and admittedly “viability” is less marketable but at least we haven’t capitulated the argument before we’ve had it. I’m all for pandering to LA house wifes but if I can’t make a sound argument in the “trash” test then are we being intellectually honest about who we should care about – you know the average person; who is currently living at, below, or at the threshold of what is needed for their daily substance. People in the US and gasp out of it as well.

This all comes back to why should we give the image of destroying infrastructure when so much of our existing infrastructure is already crumbling. It’s certainly not the intent of the movement to just smash up roads.. Well, maybe a few, but the desire is to track something other than GDP to measure how we’re doing in society. In viability discussions it’s recognized that using GDP as the sole metric represents unfettered growth, that is poised to kill and/or maimed the planet, and surgical removal of the worst parts of this growth in our society is our best chance at survival. This is also known as Cancer. See the opposition to “Viability” is “Cancer.” Marketing success 🎉.

So what would we use in place of GDP? Well GDI of course. Now, don’t bother learning what GDI stands for as it’s extremely pedagogical, back to “trash” litmus test, to replace one initialism with another 💩. Let’s instead talk about how we should define our world and how it advances around eudemony – happiness. Big word, I know, but all “trash” test kids want to be astronauts which is an even bigger word. I think they’ll do fine in understanding once it’s explained.

Now onto technology,

If Marc Anderson is an Techno-Optimist I am a Techno-<this is really bad guys>. Dear reader, my worldview and yours likely required a great deal of transduction before we can have a discussion about the state of technology.

I grew up with the web. I was 5 years old in 1998 when we got our first real computer. I spent the first few years playing Age of Empires and then Age of Empires II. My brother and I learned how to login to the web via AOL and dial up and went straight to MSN Gaming Zone. We explored the early web as most 90’s kids did.

At some point around age 10, I became interested in programming and during a bout of homelessness I managed to visit a library where I stole a C++ Programming Book. I proceeded to spend the next two years offline and in some state between homelessness, schools, and uncertainty but what did have was that C++ book. I read that book a lot and struggled alone with references and pointers on pen and paper. When my early teenage years did settle down and I was adopted by a grandparent I spent an enormous amount of time on my computer, on the web, and doing my best to learn programming by myself.

I remember sometime around 2006 or so getting a DHTML programming book that contained references to XHR/AJAX and that began my first adventure into web development. Shortly thereafter my early days on Cybernations pressed me into PHP development making tools for administering alliances. Forums, IRC, and programming were my family. By this time I had already discovered Linux and Ubuntu specifically (6.06 FTW) as I found it incredibly hard to compile C++ on Windows without DevC++. gcc and Linux in general was so liberating. Geez, I even liked Apache.

All this to say, I’m incredibly sentimental about the web and open source. It has been foundational to me and I’m sure some part of this can resonate in you. All those experiences you and I have had are valid but they can be blinding. My experiences, for me, absolutely were.

On the other end of this timescale, I’ve spent several years working in FinTech/developing marketing websites for top 100 companies/volunteering in Code for America and devoutly preaching FLOSS. I maintained my interest in low level development while writing PHP/NodeJS/and later on Elixir as a principal architect. I’d spend my nights using ReasonML/Elixir/Rust and reading about PLT on lobste.rs, /., reddit, and Hacker News. I decided to really try and build my own SaaS products and make a living off of it. I figured I knew how to deliver value. Now let me try and find something that I can make that is valuable to others and to society as a whole.

I spent my time like most anyone would. Reading Hacker News, trying to find papers on CRDT’s, and listening to podcasts on any niche I could find. Formulate. Plan. Investigate. Read. I did. As much as I could tolerate and more. I looked out across what currently is and naturally I began to look back at what was. I went far enough back that I decided to go at it from the beginning. Before all of this, I remember jesting to a co-worker that it felt like we’re just reinventing the 80’s some times, during that time I was learning Erlang and had just come across Sagas as a pattern. How naive I was.

I went back to Lisp machines, AGOL, Forth and my myopic view was smashed by the time I got back up to Smalltalk and Oberon. The years of hearing about Plan9 and image based languages and never really getting it… started to click. Then came the questions that we’ve all either have had or heard started to come into focus:

Why are mainframes still in use? How can there be so much Cobol in production? Fonts are a turning complete language, that’s weird right? When were the first WYSIWYG editors? What does the history of various data structures look like?

The the less so subtle stuff:

Why was it said the F35 was a failure for adopting C++? Surely, Ada is bad and Rust would do better now? Yikes.

Wayland is better than X-Window, right? Oh.. NeWS, Fresco, Arcan…

Hardware is fine right? But RISC-V is safe? branch prediction? – En-fuck.

Flash was just a security nightmare and buggy POS, right? Oh, competes with iOS and Android as a platform and made the early web a viable market.

Web is kinda frozen around 2016? What’s happening? Es..erm

Why isn’t WASM in wider use now? It’s been 5 years right? Neutered.

The Web represents the best outcome of the internet right? The alternatives were worse? Right? …Right?

At this point if you have no conception of the viewpoints above we can’t have a discussion about what degrowth in technology looks like. You don’t need to know everything but if you have only experienced the history of computer science from the progression from the web on there is no way for me to communicate an alternative future with you as you do not have a perception of what the past looks like. Just like I didn’t. I simply could not imagine it. You likely can’t either. If you were around in the 80’s, I can’t speak for you, but I doubt you’re viewpoint is much different if your starting point was the Commodore-64 and Basic as a first language. Progression from there seems relatively straight foward but that’s not where the industry started.

Ask some of those same questions as above… Or don’t, and be continually surprised when the same software gets ported to a new platform and then bitch on social media about “enshittification” when it doesn’t have X, Y, Z feature and it steals your data like this is all somehow new.

So. What does degrowth in tech look like?

For that I think we need to ask a lot harder questions. Let’s think through the lens of a “Viable” Project Cybersyn:

What does minimum viable corporate cybernetics look like? Email, Trello board, Phones, Database

Could you build the modern world on the technology of the 60/70/80’s given adequate computer power? If not, when was the last lynchpin data structure invented? BTree 1960, 1971 Email, TCP 1974, r-commands 1981, PaxOS 1989. You’d be right to flame me about cryptology here.

What percentage of applications today can be expressed through the data structures known in 1989?

90%? Easily

95%? Still talking about just cooperate logistics and general cybernetics – Probably

99.9%? I mean if you were really trying – The People Republic of Walmart could operate on Sneakernet

Now, how about 1980? Teletype and platform shoes; sneakernet

Given Wirth’s law just how much hardware is thrown at unoptimized and idle cycles? monkaS, as the kids would say

There were 15,000 software developers in the US in 1980 and 30 million globally today – just how much of them are spent on churn? I don’t know but it does seem like a lot. An unjustifiable amount.

Is the modern web just a digital pacifier meant to service our entertainment needs? Sheesh.. Luckily our billionaires are all investing their gains in getting off the planet.

Now I know what you’re thinking, but what about healthcare! Space! Self-driving Twitter. HFT – just stop. If you have to ask. You don’t get it. There has been advancement in the past 40 years and a lot of hard working researchers. A lot of them are paid to research on top of sand, optimize your executive function till you buy NordVPN, or simply are drown out in the discourse. Incrementalism has done a lot but not for you or your daily life.

We need technology to service and serve as the backbone of a viable economy. The internet is the infrastructure we have to build from. That infrastructure is critical and wondrous. We did something of value in the past 40 years but it wasn’t on the software side. We connected the planet. Sure, you can say that the ad driven web built those lines but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same tens of billion dollar packages for building fiber networks across the US get passed and then signed into law so many times now we could have just done planetary Space X a couple times over.

It’s not all bad but how can we sit here and say with a straight face that this is fine. At this point I can’t say what a viable tech industry looks like. If the sum of 30% of the global power grid, 30 million developer jobs, countless menial database to database jobs, and 50 years of planned obsolescence just yields to your average person GPS, social media, Youtube/Tiktok, and ereader.

Then I’d rather plan on a future investing in paper maps, community centers, education, libraries, – if were this far in might as well throw the extra into housing and healthcare because we allowed technology to fuck up the environment for ephemeral bullshit. Might as well spoil ourselves.

Go back to bitching and bemoaning Bitcoin and AI. They are totally the worst part of the industry.

Up next, how open standards aren’t byzantine fault tolerant and how steermanship via proprietary software has made FLOSS useless.