(2024-11-06) Bjarnason Plan B It Is

Baldur Bjarnason: Plan B it is. My default worldview is that of a disappointed optimist.

Waiting for the US presidential elections I had a Plan A and a Plan B. (Donald Trump winning would trigger Plan B.)

anybody working in tech is directly affected by the changing winds of politics as complete deregulation is first plank in the BigTech industry’s two-plank strategy for postponing its inevitable decline. (The other plank is superstitious “GenAI” woo and the manufactured deniability)

Plan A was to assume that US institutions would at least last another four years

In which case, my idea was to focus on writing about how to make robust and flexible software in order to lay the foundation for a long-term rebuilding of software development as a practice...

Plan B was to assume that the already fragile institutions of both the US and other countries that depend on it, will be under a constant risk of collapse, that the pre-emptive obedience of dysfunctional platforms might strike at random.

In which case, the idea was to investigate ways of building software that would tolerate systemic chaos, failing institutions, and hostile environments:

• Working in an industry whose governance and institutions are at a constant risk of failing.
• Local-first web dev, even if it requires more front-end JS.
• Investigations into peer-to-peer, distributed, and federated approaches.
• Making software that tolerates large-scale (infrastructure) failure.