technology ennui.

wednesday, june 14th, 2023.

It's been a sort of weird week for the Internet, far as I can tell. Perhaps the biggest story of the week are various subreddits going private in protest solidarity with third-party apps arguing against Reddit's API rate increases.

This feels like the tip of the iceberg on the worsening changes to the surface internet, dubbed by Maggie Appleton as the "dark forest of the clear web." Or, perhaps in Cory Doctorow's less delicate terms, the "enshittification" of the Internet.

I've previously written about AI before, but I failed to realize the impact of artificially generated text on the clear web. It's getting bad out there, and I don't envy Google for their task of trying to index actual human-generated content. It really seems like they're fighting a losing battle, especially seeing how the lights going out on Reddit had such an effect on the efficacy of their search results. Even tasks given to "human" workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk are getting fed straight to LLMs instead.

Personally, the Reddit blackout has been just the ticket for getting off that website. Although I don't participate actively on the site, it was the last vestige of social media in my life. Now? It's just Discord with my friends, refreshing my personally-curated RSS feed, and reading the local newspaper.

I think culling Reddit from my life is a big improvement, in other words. I'm no longer constantly bombarded with engagement-driven content.

what is technology for?

I've been a computer tinkerer for a good long while. From writing Perl scripts to answer the telephone to playing around with esoteric operating systems like Haiku and Plan 9, I always seem to get a kick out of doing things just because I can.

Perhaps it's middle age setting in or perhaps it's because I've been making computers do things for the better part of two decades, but I'm becoming a little less enthusiastic about all of the whizz-bang things computers can do.

I think there's merit in culling the computing experience down to its essence.

I think computers are great tools— means to an end. A way of accomplishing things that actually matter. I suppose I'm most generally unenthused by the movement to monetize and rent-seek every single thing humans do behind a service.

I briefly considered installing Haiku on my ThinkPad X250. I also keep thinking about the MNT Pocket Reform. Man, that's a cool piece of kit. But, much as I want to support MNT Research for making truly open-source hardware, I think I'm more inclined to follow Kris De Decker's approach and just keep old machines going.

Maybe I'm just getting nostalgic for the GUIs of yesteryear. Maybe I'm just smitten with the thought of a computer as serving two purposes: capturing a moment in time, and being useful until (and even after!) it breaks. Even an old iPod can live a new life with new software like Rockbox!

Ah! Maybe I do like those darned computers, after all. :)