Newer is Not Always Better, and It's Possible That 'Peak' is the Past
Three years ago Dr. Andy Farnell published the following series:
- Peak Code — Part I: Before the Wars
- Peak Code — Part II: Lost Source
- Peak Code — Part III: After Code
He described conditions getting worse for us, developers, as well as - less directly - for users at large.
Recently we saw Microsoft GitHub, which he complained about, becoming headless and folded onto a fictional (newly-created) shell [1, 2], probably as Microsoft sought to justify the massive losses by calling it "AI".
In a lot of ways, GitHub thankfully failed. Its sole appeal was, it didn't cost anything to most people. GitHub and later Microsoft GitHub shouldered the losses.
Nowadays we see more people who realise there's "no free lunch", so they learn how to host things themselves. People creating their own platforms means progress, whereas centralisation (like moving from blogs to social control media) is the opposite of progress.
To many of us, hosting our own things always made sense. When I was 15 I made a site in Geocities (centralisation), but as I grew older I started making my own sites. That was considered progress, one might say a sign of maturity.
"Not everyone reaches technical maturity," Dr. Andy Farnell explains in his latest essay/article. "Some of us get stuck in the wide-eyed stage of life, forever giddy at the new. Others are lost even earlier, in the eternal warm thrill of confusion. How comfortable we feel with new technology depends on how closely the unfolding world meets or deviates from our hopes and expectations."
He quotes Wittgenstein: "Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it."
Think for a moment about a time people truly owned their computers (not locked out of them) and got to keep media that they purchased (or licensed to have a copy of in perpetuity). How many of us took that for granted? █