Bonum Certa Men Certa

Peak Code — Part II: Lost Source

Article/series by Dr. Andy Farnell

This work is licensed under version 4.0 of the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license

Series parts:

  1. Peak Code — Part I: Before the Wars
  2. YOU ARE HERE ☞ Lost Source


A light sword



Summary: "Debian and Mozilla played along. They were made “Yeoman Freeholders” in return for rewriting their charters to “work closely with the new Ministry in the interests of all stakeholders” – or some-such vacuous spout… because no one remembers… after that it started."

I was a Free Software "hacker". The nights were late, the pay was… nothing. We were all-volunteers. There was no recognition, just a sense of being part of something. But oh boy, were we part of something! We felt like we were building history. I made companies. I wrote applications. I taught new hackers.



"With "disinformation" outlawed, we were swaddled, blind, clothed by the machine. Then, so suddenly, here, naked and together."All things pass. Much changed between the great pandemics and the mid-century storms when skyscrapers fell like dominoes. But I remember the software crisis starting. No great conspiracy. No revolution. No foreign hackers. No mythical "software wars". How suddenly it all blew up before that week when the food deliveries stopped and the lights went out. How many had already been on the edge, not knowing about each another or what was happening? With "disinformation" outlawed, we were swaddled, blind, clothed by the machine. Then, so suddenly, here, naked and together.



That old Malthusian worrier, your uncle Archie said it, "One day the code will run out. Everything runs on code, but it's not sustainable". We all laughed at him. Everyone knew software had zero cost and was inexhaustible. There would always be kids who wanted to write it, to prove something, to scratch an itch. Besides, machines would soon write all the code we'd ever need.



That must have been "peak code". You don't notice peak anything while you're living through it. By definition, it's the golden moment. Those days there were hundreds of languages, millions of coders and billions of devices. Software pulsed and flowed, in hourly updates, through the Internet into the gadgets that ran our lives. Secure Software, nourishing the always-on, always pumping machine. Then like all hearts, it just grew old, tired and sick, and one day it gave up. Some spirit within it died and the software went away.



"Those days there were hundreds of languages, millions of coders and billions of devices."Hired coders never cared. In their short, exhausting careers they plastered libraries on top of libraries, dependencies all the way down. To where? Nobody remembered. Maybe those few strange people who hacked not for money, but because it made them feel good?



Old words from before The Face Chain and The Age of Legibility, "vocations", "callings", "civic duty", seem senseless now. By the thirties, only performative activity validated by public perception telemetry and backed by a smart contract could earn credit.



"Hired coders never cared. In their short, exhausting careers they plastered libraries on top of libraries, dependencies all the way down."Graeber described "moral resentment". Hate of care. Within a decade it wasn't just overt, it was policy. Helping a neighbour or family member might be overlooked. The Humans First Bill sealed it. Nurses and teachers, medics, firefighters, police, child-carers, all gone. "If a bot could a bot should". Interpersonal Disorder, from a mid century copy of the DSM describes a "pathological desire to interact with or serve other humans rather than accept convenient rational transaction with the machine".



Momentum, aspiration and the inability of the masses to comprehend the decline kept things buoyant throughout the late twenties and thirties. Who knew the giant corporations could no longer sustain their own code? Things advanced too fast. Complexity and dependency went too deep. Education faltered. The "third industrial revolution" quietly ran out of steam.



"Who knew the giant corporations could no longer sustain their own code?""Free" coders did still exist. They still believed that "Software Freedom" as prescribed by the great Stallman could open a doorway out of enslavement. In practice authorities turned a blind eye. These farm animals were obliviously in service of the BigTeks, who harvested their code to fuel the machine.



Negative wages? That had an effect. Suddenly we were all supposed to pay for the privilege of keeping BigTek afloat?! Students, the only group who pay to work, rushed to fill the jobs without complaint. It was cheaper being a code worker than staying in education. Average age of the tech workers fell from 41 to 22 in a decade, expunging the entire body of active wisdom - those who knew how stuff worked.



"Average age of the tech workers fell from 41 to 22 in a decade, expunging the entire body of active wisdom - those who knew how stuff worked."Some techies whispered of the great "Techxit" when all the creators and developers were supposed to stop coding in protest at the Face Chain. It never happened. Fear kept them in line. Not fear of losing income, such crude social control policies were so 20th century. To take away a person's purpose, was the new cruelty of power. Losing your access to code or gaming often led to suicide.



Something was slowly shifting. Years before, in China it had been "Tang Ping", that ended in the "code for food" camps. In the USA a "Great Resignation" was successfully dismissed by social control media as disinformation. Some withdrew or poisoned their own libraries in protest, but their works were seized, reverted and stripped of their names by the Ministry of Code.



"Some withdrew or poisoned their own libraries in protest, but their works were seized, reverted and stripped of their names by the Ministry of Code."When SMMC's "security mandated maintenance changes" were first issued, paying coders dutifully went along, virtuously signalling that it was the "responsible" thing to do. I would say it happened right there. Those first seeds were sown into the depleted soil of free software captured by its new master of "public necessity". From there the weeds would slowly spread.



BigTek wanted to be the new banks, too big to fail. To show the vestiges of government who was boss the "three day weeks" came. Staged "security crises" lasted months, as the infamous Goldberg, alleged leader of Eponymous, "attacked our precious infrastructure". Some people learned how to store electricity, offline data and food, but those who died could not hack the DRM of their solar batteries, home appliances or get past the "Life Rights Management" for online access.



"BigTek wanted to be the new banks, too big to fail."BigTek's right to extract from the Free coder's "hobby projects", now declared "critical infrastructure," was official at last. GitHub underwent some re-branding. Accounts flipped to read-only, then locked, and then one day it became "The Ministry of Code". In the blink of an eye Microsoft appropriated nearly ninety percent of all 'Free Open Source' software, to "ensure stability". They kept the "messaging" light and positive - thanking all past contributors for their hard work over the years. It was, in all but name, the largest land-grab since William's rule in 1066.



The Free Software Foundation remained dutifully quiet, helping deliver the peasants to their feudal lords. Debian and Mozilla played along. They were made "Yeoman Freeholders" in return for rewriting their charters to "work closely with the new Ministry in the interests of all stakeholders" - or some-such vacuous spout… because no one remembers… after that it started.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Writing and Coding Isn't Always Enough
Last year we had to assume a role we didn't have before: litigants
Autumn Has Come
Autumn should be exciting in all sorts of ways; it'll also mark our anniversary
 
Gemini Links 01/09/2025: News Corp. WSJ and A Month With NixOS
Links for the day
Slopfarms Already Peaked, They Will Die When Slop Companies Run Out of Money to Borrow
slopfarms will lack an actual "engine"
“Sideloading” Never Killed Anybody
There are many online discussions this week about the misnomer "sideloading"
Slopwatch: Google News as FUD Vector Against Linux and Plagiarism Enhancer, Serial Slopper (SS) Uses LLMs to Googlebomb "Linux"
Slop destroys the Web not just by screwing with search engines and helping plagiarists. It's also responsible for de facto DDoS attacks...
Links 01/09/2025: "Attacks on Science" and China's "Soft Power" Grows
Links for the day
Links 01/09/2025: Fresh Backlash Against Slop and "Norway’s Electricity Crisis is About to Hit Britain"
Links for the day
Links 01/09/2025: Catching Up (Mostly via Deutsche Welle), "Windows TCO" Effect in UK
Links for the day
Gemini Links 01/09/2025: Linguistic Barriers and "Web 1.0 Hosting"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 31, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, August 31, 2025
The UEFI 9/11 - Part IV - External Interference
They all seem to be playing a role in crushing Software Freedom and self-determination for users
Links 31/08/2025: Baggage Claim Scams, an Insurrectionist’s War on Culture, and a Sudden Robotics Hype
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/08/2025: Reviewing Netsurf and Slightly Less Historic Ada Design
Links for the day
IBM Has Taken Control of GNOME
Don't expect a successor to be found any time soon
Links 31/08/2025: Google Gmail Data Breach and LF Puff Pieces for Pay
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 30, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 30, 2025
This is What Google News Has Become
Moments ago
The Slopfarm WebProNews Has Turned Google News Into a Laughing Stock Full of Plagiarism by Slop
If Google News dies of neglect, that's one thing. It's starting to seem like active neglect by Google is a form of participation.
Do What is Moral, as What's Legal Isn't Always Moral
Do what's objectively moral, no matter the costs and the risks
Slopwatch: Google News Assisting Plagiarism and Anti-Linux FUD, Serial Slopper Rips Off Linux-Centric Journalists
This makes the Web a much worse place and lessens the incentive to do journalism
Links 30/08/2025: NVIDIA Fakes Results to Hide a Bubble Already in Implosion Phase, Data Breaches Galore, Important Win for Workers' Union in Canada
Links for the day
Representing and Speaking for Animals
If I ever choose to take this matter to tribunal with animals-centric NGOs on my side, it'll get some press coverage for sure
The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
In dictatorships, humour serves an important role. It's tragic.
In Kazakhstan, Yandex Estimated to be 20 Times Bigger Than Microsoft
Bing is measured as down this month
Shutterstock Not Enough? The Register MS Uses Slop Images in Articles (Seemingly More and More Over Time)
Cost-saving trajectory amid office shutdown?
Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Games, PostmarketOS, and Slop
Links for the day
Links 30/08/2025: Imgur Uproar and Many Ukraine Updates (Mediazona Reports Over 200,000 Russians Died for Putin)
Links for the day
How Not to Build Software
code forges that need a Web browser perhaps fill some 'niche' demand
GAFAM and "MATA"
The use of dark humour there hopefully helps illuminate what a lot of "modern" technology became like and how it interacts with human civilisation (to what ends and whose gain)
Birds Are Not "Pests and Vermin", Privacy is Not a Crime, and GNU/Linux is Not 'Hacking Platform'
I could not help but think of Free software analogies
The Sites Should Be Very Fast Again
That issue is now resolved
Flying in 2025
worse than ever before
Activists, Including Technical Activists, Need Not Pursue Affirmation
Techrights doesn't play or participate in a "popularity contest"
The UEFI 9/11 - Part III - Chaos is Scheduled to Happen Second Thursday of September (No Matter What the Microsofters Tell You)
The clock is ticking
Downplaying the Impact of "UEFI 9/11" is a Losing Strategy
we won't publish much whilst on holiday
Government Sites Should Run Free Software
Not proprietary bloatware with buzzwords
LLM Slopfarms Take No Breaks
When people run sites by bots they don't need to worry about "breaks"
GNOME Having a Meltdown Again
Thanks and farewell to Steven Deobald
Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Low Tech and Hunchbin 1.0.6
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 29, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, August 29, 2025