(2024-12-05) Bjarnason Let's Pause For A Moment I Need Time To Think

Baldur Bjarnason: Let's pause for a moment, I need time to think. Back when I relaunched this site in 2010...point was that it would be a more focused foundation for my career...this site has always had a defined purpose... ultimately it should always return to form: work.

The site is, by my admittedly modest standards, a success. Pretty much every positive development in my career from 2010 onwards can be traced back to this blog.

This year, I haven’t managed to act on a cohesive strategy for the blog

I’ve also felt quite directionless in general. A year of being buffeted by storms – being pushed without direction.

But, faced with an authoritarian US (Donald Trump) that’s going to let the full force of the climate change crisis hit us all, those of us making websites and web apps in other parts of the world now have an obligation to figure out approaches that are less dependent on American companies and infrastructure, and those inside the US have a clear need for tech that’s less likely to get co-opted

It’s a horrifying turn of events that is going to have long-term consequences for the world, but it’s also clarifying. Shit is going to keep happening, of course, but these are the two crises we need to tackle and that tells us what our priorities in software development, web dev, and professional writing should be.

Having a priority doesn’t tell you exactly what to do.

We still need to live and pay the bills. Work continues.

So, I need to pause a moment and figure out how this blog/newsletter can best serve that purpose.

Dec09: Interim note 1: tech

Some thoughts, because I write to think.

Tech is about to enter a proper wealth extraction phase. One of my annoyances with “enshittification” is the lack of imagination it implies. Tech, as an industry, can be much more extractive than this. There’s ways to the bottom yet.

Most large tech software products are, effectively, extremely shoddy front-ends to highly reliable back-ends. Look at Twitter....the lesson CEOs took from it is that once your employees have put in the work of engineering a reliable back-end, they become disposable

“GenAI” is only a part of the picture, but it’s already considered by management to be an effective enabler of downsizing

Much of the developer ecosystem on any given platform is downstream from big tech.

From rare earth materials, to battery components, to chip-making, to assembly, tech’s hardware supply chain is highly reliant on a globalised marketplace. A trade war will disrupt this.

Tech is now a much more overtly political project.

This is worrying because the pressure to move our entire economies to centralised tech platforms – various forms of “cloud” software – means that those same economies are now under more direct centralised political control.

Even though you can’t force an LLM to stop fabricating nonsense or stop libelling random people, you can easily shift sentiment. If the political collaboration removes the worry of lawsuits or regulatory action, the companies themselves are free to manipulate language wholesale

Effectively, you assholes have given a handful of CEOs a racism and bigotry dial for the world’s English-language corporate writing.

The dev tool ecosystem is another point of centralised control. Between GitHub, npm, TypeScript, and Visual Studio Code, Microsoft effectively owns modern software development.

Amy Hoy has been right all along, basically. Sustainability comes from outside mainstream tech...'this is why my mission and my business since 2009 has been to help people create ethical “tech” businesses (businesses that use technology) that actually help people for a reasonable profit'

Serving the customer directly in ways that are conscious of their vulnerability and unlikely to be co-opted or controlled by a big tech companies is a radical act.

Not only is it a radical act, it might increasingly be the only sustainable path left for anybody with a conscience who wants to continue to work in tech or a related field.

Dec13: Interim note 2: business thoughts

A few thoughts on my freelance and ebook business.

A deregulated US poses a significant risk to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Banking, transaction system, or payment disruptions disproportionally harm SMBs. (monopoly)

I think high-level, research-heavy, slightly informal but practically-oriented books like mine – Out of the Software Crisis and The Intelligence Illusion – are probably a long-term dead end in the business sense.

I think systems-thinking and software development could have been a decent topic for a small education business like mine, but it’s transparently obvious that modern software dev management has thoroughly rejected the idea. The layoffs and “AI” adoption are just the latest symptoms.

On the demand side, in a previous note I made this here observation based on Amy Hoy’s principles for building up customer-driven businesses: “Sustainability comes from outside mainstream tech.”

there are a lot of people working in web dev at customer-driven SMBs, smaller organisations, and in isolated corners at institutions, and many of those aren’t necessarily software businesses either. So, I think there’ll still be some demand for practical web dev advice. The question is how to discover that demand – what it’s specifically for.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, my freelancing took a hit a while back. Over the past five years or so, my freelance gigs were pretty evenly split between research-oriented projects funded through grants and education and training gigs connected to mainstream tech companies

The education and training gigs evaporated

I’ve always been a sucker for research-oriented projects... over the past couple of years fewer and fewer of these projects have been getting the funding they applied for.

It feels like all of these are dots that I should be able to connect to form a cohesive picture. I think mainstream web dev is in a pretty horrible place, while at the same time I also think there are probably a number of niches within web dev that are in very interesting places.

Dec19: Interim note 3: text-based media in the age of showmanship.

Thinking about where text-based media – print, ebooks, websites, newsletters, etc. – are heading led me to start another re-read of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and, unsurprisingly, that helped a lot. (cf (2020-02-24) Rao A Text Renaissance)

The substance lies in the observation that different forms of media have different epistemology.

meaning and knowledge is created and transmitted through textual argument, that he calls Age of Exposition gives way to the 21st century Age of Show Business where truth and knowledge are defined through showmanship, performance, and entertainment.

I think the internet, during its initial decade or so of existence, postponed this transition, at least for a while

The strongest text-based form, microblogging, which is the dominant form on Threads, X (née Twittr), Facebook, and Linkedin is an atomised form of text that has more in common with the showmanship epistemology of video than it does with exposition epistemology of other text-based media.

This is probably either already over or about to end. Video and truth comes from showmanship is the new norm with YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and other primarily visual media.

Raising this topic on social media, where microblogging dominates, even without taking a side, will almost guaranteed start a fight and might even trigger mass blocking and harassment

Audiobooks aren’t reading is a shibboleth topic – one that defines factions. One side is against audiobooks, the other is for them. Meaning for each faction is defined through showmanship.

This is not a flaw or defect in the people or the communities. This is how social media works

Compare this to a writer addressing the same topic in a section of a book, like a book on the publishing process.

This creates a tension between textual forms that borrow from books – such as newsletters and essayist blogs – and the primary modes of distribution for these texts.

Books and ebooks, paradoxically, remain great products. I still believe that they are a solid deal for both the reader and the publisher

However, the problem lies in finding ways to promote and sell said books because, as I noted above, microblogging only lends itself to promoting texts and creators that have a strong element of showmanship.

One of the questions I am pondering is whether, again paradoxically, video and podcasts might not lend themselves better to promoting and selling books than newsletters and blogs... That is, you could do a YouTube series/podcast that interviewed people relevant to the topic of your book... The problem here is that video production and podcasting are very different skills from writing and most of it is done badly.

The answer, as seems to always be the case these days, is that there isn’t a single clear-cut answer. If you want to be in writing, you probably need to be in media in general. There’s more than one way to do this and you probably need to be doing more than one thing at a time to do it.