I had a good few years there where I didn’t have to think about technology all that much. I mean, I still used it a ton. And it was still my job, but it didn’t necessarily feel all-encompassing.
That’s was a good thing because for large portions of my life tech was all-encompassing. Not too many people can claim to have had a tech burnout about the politics of public networks and to have taken a multi-year hiatus on that account in the 1980s, but I did.
(The Fido node I operated hosted an Operation: Overkill II game that was very popular, but in these days RTCs weren’t all that reliable, and some heavy users got it into their heads that the clocks were doctored because people were cheating and I was helping them to do it, so the Fidonet split and… so on.)
I’d come back to tech in the 1990s and become a computer science major and also was in the business of writing trade nonfiction books about open source projects like XFree86 and Linux. And then in the 2000s as I went to grad school, and the Linux desktop wars were in full swing, I was burning out again.
So I switched to Mac OS. And decided to just be a user. A user. And around the same time, cloud was really taking of so not only was I just a user but I didn’t even have to host/install/update my own software, because it was all just services.
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Just went down a 60 minute rabbit hole trying to get Espanso to work in FocusWriter. Involved two LLMs. As usual, Gemini was brain-dead and worse a confabulating liar, while Claude got us there in the end.
But it’s all emblematic of what I was talking about.
In 2009 I was busy embarking on a long course of study to earn a doctorate and needed to be done with a life of fighting to make technology do what I wanted it to do. I switched to Mac OS and gave up on self-hosting anything at all, so as to clear time and space for other work.
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Sadly, that’s not where we are today. Enshittification accelerates to new velocities day by day. All of tech and all of subscriptions are getting more expensive and less capable.
In particular, I find myself in that same place I was in in the late ’80s and early ’90s, not wanting to have my choices constrained by corporations and what they decide to give me, or what they decide to charge me once they decide I’m a captive customer that hasn’t been provided a way to export my data.
Without getting into particular triggers, it’s enough to say that this year has been a return to a distant past.
I am self-hosting again. I don’t entirely like it, and it has eaten so much time that it feels in some ways like a lost year. But I am hosting my own:
- Inference
- Harnesses
- VPN
- Cloud storage
- Mail delivery agent
- IMAP server
- Webmail platform
- Cloud office applications
- etc.
As was last the case in the late ’90s before I headed off to college and then grad school the first time around, the house is full of servers and networking again. I have growing stacks of LTO everywhere.
I have spent the better part of a year fighting my data back out of the cloud systems I once fought to get them in to, most notably those of Google, whose motto over the time from 2009 to now has gone from “Don’t be evil” to “We’ve enshittified and we plan to fuck you hard.”
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There’s a lot of tension in this for me. I’m fifty this year. That’s the last year you can claim to be even a touch of middle age. You’re still within spitting distance of forty-nine. You’re “almost” still in your forties, you’re “just out” of your forties.
But those word games aren’t fooling anyone. I’m running out of time. I don’t want to spend all this time on technology bullshit. Seriously. “Oh, I’m racing toward the home stretch, why don’t I spend a year setting up new MX, SFP, DKIM, and DMARC and pointing all of it a bunch of repo builds and trying to make it stable and reliable!”
That is not it.
But at the same time, there’s a lifetime’s worth of data that I don’t want to lose and that corporate America, knowing that I care about it, would like to blackmail me out of.
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Seriously, there are some things very badly wrong with our society and some people in it who are evil. History is full of warnings about why you shouldn’t go out and try to combat evil.
But at the same time, I think it will soon be time for Mme. Defarge in our society. Trump was a kind of foreshadowing of that. A public angry enough that they’re starting to want to harm. Not others, not self. Just harm in general.
This is going to accelerate, I think, and I understand why.
You can feel the malevolence emanating from our millionaires and billionaires. People say “eat the rich” but in fact they want to eat us, as the Epstein shadows demonstrate. That people turn this around is probably understandable.
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When the Mad Max begins I guess we’ll all learn what we’re made of, but in the meantime I’ve spent the year being lonely IT guy. Again.
Would love to not be at least one of those, but I think it’s not on the cards to escape either of them.