> Q: What does software do?
> A: It produces and reproduces capital.
> Q: Who does software benefit?
> A: People who own capital.
This makes a lot of sense. If we want better software (less dark patterns, less loot boxes, etc.) we need to change society rewards. If the companies that earn more profits are the ones that exploit human weaknesses then the world resources will be dedicated to them. If we want better software, or even less software and more other things, society needs to reward those activities. If it pays more to work for a crypto exchange or the next data-stalking start-up than to cure cancer then most of the knowledge people will work on them. Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments, we currently reward data gathering so it is what we get.
I can imagine a future were more resources are dedicated to extract value from people and less to produce products and services. And it is a red queen race. More resources call for more resources to be used, like an arms race it has no end unless there is a society will to end it.
There is an old joke that the US government cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas because it would "cost too much" primarily. Yes, a lot of cap-ex, but it would have also employed an army of Physics and other PhDs (2000+ staff.) The cost was in the single digit billions.
The joke goes that all those PhDs had to find work, and found well-paying jobs on Wall St, created exotic derivatives, and blew up the world. Then we paid hundreds of billions to solve the 2008 financial crisis.
The story I've heard is that Congress was wary of the growing deficit and gave the president a choice of going forward with either TSSC or ISS. The political optics of a space station are much better than those of a super collider and there was still a desire to have aerospace projects for former Soviet scientists to be engaged in so they wouldn't end up working for a terror state. Had TSSC been picked over ISS, those Wall Street quants might have been kept busy underground in Texas but the folks who created the International Space Station would have been left to find their own opportunities, with unknown consequences.
> ... but the folks who created the International Space Station would have been left to find their own opportunities, with unknown consequences.
Space-X and its ilk decades earlier? Might not have been too bad...
Except of course half of them might have gone to work for Russia (or those private actors) developing ICBMs and hypersonic missiles. So maybe we'd all be speaking Russian now, praising God-Emperor Putler. (ETA: or Elon or Jeff. But those, probably in English. Small mercies...)
Well, my friend study in university for Nuclear Physics, yet ended up working for the Toronto Stock Exchange programming monitoring software of the trades.
They also paid a full year's bonus for working in December for Y2K, so yes, there is the money.
Not just Wall St, but also Silicon Valley. For several years it felt like the big names would literally just hire everyone they could with exorbitant salaries to starve the rest of the market (and other markets by proxy).
A bunch of our brightest spent their energy trying to shove one more ad in your brain.
Another way to look at it is markets are very powerful local optimisers - so if you rely on them exclusively you end up trapped in a rut.
Everyone hooked on naturally produced molecules that activate opioid receptors via your dark reward patterns, or indeed on synthetically produced and injected versions is not necessarily a globally optimal solution.
The job of government is to make sure the external costs, that are not immediately felt by the markets, are applied.
So the cost of addiction is put back on the sources of it, or the costs of pollution makes it's way back to the polluters.
That's what in essence good regulation is.
Obviously centrally deciding what's best for everything is of course doomed to failure - it's a massive under utilisation of talent and too centralised control is far too easy to lead to corruption and stagnation.
The trick is to find the right balance - and the right balance is a pragmatic one - not a clean ideological one - but you have to embrace that complexity, not try to over simplify.
So "wasting" money - with multiple people working on the same thing, or things that fail - is actually essential for innovation - markets work.
But at the very same time, it is important to have the confidence to state the obvious and take centralised action.
So if you leave the dealing of climate change to short term capital markets alone - you are signing up to it being much much worse before it get's any better. Something that you can avoid with collective action.
> If it pays more to work for a crypto exchange or the next data-stalking start-up than to cure cancer then most of the knowledge people will work on them.
Curing cancer would be infinitely more profitable than yet another crypto exchange. But humans are greedy. They won't wait for the big payday when a metaphorical marshmallow is dangling in front of them. Even holding out for the rewards of a crypto exchange is more than most people can handle. Most people will indulge in the not-so-tasty treat in front of them as soon as someone offers them a mediocre job.
> Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments
That may be true of an authoritarian regime, but under democracy, as I imagine most of us here are, government does not regulate society. It regulates individuals who try go against society. Society defines expectations, government cleans up those who refuse to comply. If the general public interest turns one way government can step in to ensure that the remaining people are brought into line, but a (democratic) government will not lead the charge.
> Curing cancer would be infinitely more profitable than yet another crypto exchange. But humans are greedy. They won't wait for the big payday when a metaphorical marshmallow is dangling in front of them.
The problem is the NPV calculations - tying you money up from 15 years before you see a return in a high risk sector ( where most things fail ) - doesn't make mathematical sense.
What makes mathematical sense is to rely on optimists to try anyway and then buy them at the right time when you can get the most return on your investment.
This is what a company like Pfizer does - it goes around buying innovative companies - taking the products and sacking the people [1]. They are extremely successful - but if everybody behaved like that we'd be fcked.
( I over emphasise for effect - but broadly true )
Curing cancer will be infinitely more profitable than a lot of things, for the investors, but that doesn't mean they will be willing to pay engineers more than pure financial manipulators, even if they are able.
The only reason investors would enter the picture is if the engineers preferred to take a smaller cut upfront. Keeping with the marshmallow experiment theme, that is them choosing to eat the marshmallow instead of waiting for the desired treat offered to those who wait.
Indeed, that is the likely scenario as humans are greedy. People generally don't have the will to hold out for the bigger rewards, they want instant gratification to quash the feelings of their greed in the moment. They don't have to choose instant gratification, but if they want to then I suppose investment helps ensure that they still work on something useful when instant results cannot be seen.
> That may be true of an authoritarian regime, but under democracy, as I imagine most of us here are, government does not regulate society. It regulates individuals who try go against society. Society defines expectations, government cleans up those who refuse to comply.
That is not what most of us want in a democracy otherwise we would never go forward. Our society expects the government to Lead and not simply comply with the current mood. That is the problem we have now when every action is calculated on short term election result and not long term benefit for the whole society.
If a democratic government were supposed to only enforce the majority expectations we would never change those expectation and our view of what is right/wrong.
If that were the case we would let leaders rise up to take the lead instead of calling on representatives to carry our messages to the central meeting place. It may be your dream to be able to sit back to not have to speak with your representative frequently – and fair enough, democracy is unquestionably hard work! – but that sentiment is not at all reflected in the democratic societies that I'm familiar with. Most definitely not the USA, which HN is skewed towards. American society as a whole is quite clear about the importance of hiring public servants to represent the people, to not have rulers take over. There is no liberty held more dear. Indeed, there are always outliers who don't align with the rest of the society. Hence why we have government to clean them up. Unquestionably there are Americans who don't believe in, or at least don't wish to participate in, democracy, but the individual does not a society make.
There are societies that do expect leaders to take the lead. It is not an unheard of concept and you might even stay it is historically common. But those are not democratic societies.
However looking from the outside, it does look like democracy is failing in the US.
The problem appears to be that it's money, not the people, who have the largest influence on who is elected.
The large amount of money swirling in the system, and the pretty much unregulated use of very powerful persuasive tools - has corroded the US democracy.
Today the technology allows you to surround each and every person in their own advertising bubble online - all data driven to get the outcome the payers want.
And then the effect of the candidates needing money to get elected - and them having to sign up to stuff just to get the money.
Take sensible gun reforms - something that poll after poll suggests there is broad support - is effectively blocked by the arms lobby.
> Take sensible gun reforms - something that poll after poll suggests there is broad support - is effectively blocked by the arms lobby.
Is it blocked or has society not needed to bring the outliers in line? (Democratic) government isn't there to lead. Government is there only to clean up after society recognizes that some are not falling into line. Society must lead. Saying "Yes, I support gun reforms" in a random poll isn't the same as action, of course. Also looking in from the outside, I don't see any real societal movement on this front.
Funnily enough, in my country where we do find clear societal movement that pushed to move away from guns in our history, and a government that stepped in to clean up the outliers who still tried to wield guns afterwards, it was rooted in society wanting to protect their money from the poor and aboriginals. If it is such that American society is driven by money above people, it is curious that there isn't the same kind of interest in protecting that money from people.
Perhaps money in the USA isn't as important as it appears to those of us only looking in?
I believe you over complicating it - I think there is a simply a disconnect between what most people want and what the politicians are prepared to do on this issue, because fundamentally a lot of American politicians are more dependent on money than people to be elected.
> representatives to carry our messages to the central meeting place
Public servants carrying out messages? Really? Like a post office? Is the society which lives up to this noble standard aware of the more modern versions of these servants, such as, gee I don't know, TCP/IP?
Or maybe society doesn't want a constant referendum mode (fine by me, I'd expect it to be a spectacular disaster), and prefers servants to have a bit of built-in intelligence? But it causes behaviors which make them indistinguishable from leaders, e.g.: coming up with new ideas, influencing others, attempting to shape the future. I don't see anyone arguing for dumber representatives (I mean... not explicitly!), so seemingly the majority agrees.
> American society as a whole is quite clear about the importance of hiring public servants to represent the people, to not have rulers take over. There is no liberty held more dear.
False dilemma. The liberty held dear is the liberty to fire the representatives. A "leader" is not a synonym of "ruler". There is surely a lot of options between "servants" and "rulers taking over" (whatever the latter is supposed to mean).
If you could cure it, you could charge more than treatment - because it's more valuable to the person getting cured. If you had cancer with a 5 year expected survival rate, would you pick (arbitrary round numbers)
$10,000 per year in treatment to manage it but you've still got cancer.
$55,000 paid over 5 years, $5000 more than you would pay to just manage it, but you also don't have cancer any more.
Assuming that you can charge whatever number you want. Realistically however you will have to negotiate with insurances and sometimes governments about the price of things. The second group is particularly tricky, since government make the rules.
Imagine you invent a way to cure cancer and it costs you 10000$ a treatment. How much do you charge the customer? Two times that? Ten? Twenty? At what point is someone going to stop in and force you to sell at a lower price? How long till public opinion turns against you? What if competition forces the price down? There are lot of variables that might lead to you ending up at 10000$ + a few percent profit margin.
Now imagine you have a medication that's 100$ a dosage. You sell it for 120$. That's 84 doses to cover the cost of a cancer treatment. Assuming the same markup on treatment that's 100 doses.
At this point it's the simple question what the company is more likely to get away with: Many small doses with a profit margin that add up? Or one large treatment with a big profit margin?
Right now reality shows that the small doses seem to work better. An example would be insulin. In the US it costs 30$ a dose upwards. Production costs are at less than 10$. [0] That's a 200% markup.
With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?
Then let's think through that with other considerations than the patient would have.
The lower bound is surely the same as long term treatment, right? No player here would choose more expensive treatment that doesn't cure the patient. Insurers get premiums for longer if you live, and governments rely on having a workforce.
If governments act beyond the bounds of negotiating as a large buyer and legislate, have they not already done that for the treatment already? Is there as much to lose as you think?
> With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?
Because you can charge more. Being cured is better than not being cured. If being ill and getting partially treated cost $100/month, would you honestly not pay $100.01/month forever but be cured?
Your arguments about public opinion and pressure rely people stepping in because your business practices are immoral, but this is what you're already accusing them of without any actual repercussions.
> What if competition forces the price down
If someone has a cure cheaper than your non-cure, frankly you're already fucked as a business. This also means that anyone who isn't the current main supplier has a very obvious reason to release an actual cure because then they'll get all of the business.
For comparison, the last five years money I have paid for a rent are nowhere near the cost of an apartment I’m living in. Both cancer and a lack of room to live in destroys your life.
Assuming free market, the cost of total cure will probably settle on at least 2-5x of an average life expectation times a treatment cost per year, minus some minor operational expenses.
Are you assuming multiple suppliers for that cure or a single supplier?
Very different. In the case of a single supplier - wouldn't it make sense to pay everything you own ( minus what else you need to live ) to survive?
In the case where there were multiple suppliers ( with no collusion between them ) - then the price could be driven down to the cost of production, rather than the value that it brings.
So for example food is essential to live - yet it's cheap.
> Very different. In the case of a single supplier - wouldn't it make sense to pay everything you own ( minus what else you need to live ) to survive?
That's assuming you get to negotiate with every customer. If it's one price for everyone then while what you say is true for each person's max (ignoring the complexity of people looking after others, the same logic applies of "everything you can afford") that's different for everyone so the optimal price can vary.
> Treating an illness is even more profitable than curing it
You have to actually treat it though - if the patient dies, it isn't profitable either. I suppose (all morality aside), the optimal profitability would be in a cure that required an annual installment fee.
Same here. "Treating" cancer seems way more profitable than "curing" it - at least, at face value. I'm sure a society free from cancer would be better off, but not sure that translates well to "profit", which I guess is the whole point of the thread.
> If it pays more to work for a crypto exchange or the next data-stalking start-up than to cure cancer then most of the knowledge people will work on them.
Stronger morals, perhaps, but also redirecting the collective moral compass from favouring the individual to favouring the collective. Today, one can feasibly frame working for a megacorp for $$$ as morally just to provide one's own family with a comfortable, safe life. Morality focused on the individual.
Things like effective altruism seem to be an attempt at redirection, but they have their own problems. Until someone or something succeeds with redirection, having stronger morals will only make the problem worse.
I would say both who benefits and who pays is key.
So it is better for me if it is X Corp's stockholders who benefit money wise and I who pay, than some spyware company like Google paying.
The problem is that companies now seem to want to make me pay and still take money from Google et al. Like Samsung's TVs. Or Microsoft becoming like Google in their consumer products.
There probably need to be some regulation in the IoShit space to keep it from eating away all "dumb" spyware free devices.
This is another retreat into passing the buck to a non-entity that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33982377 alludes to in talking about where "software" went wrong. Society doesn't exist in a practical sense, it's just a word that refers to a collection of individuals (and the culture/etc that those individuals share).
Individuals can do things like donate to free open source projects to keep incentives aligned with their users.
Tangentially...
> Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments, we currently reward data gathering so it is what we get.
I'd say governments exist to regulate specifically violence (e.g. punish citizens who use it in an unauthorized manner against each other). Other stuff like interstate highways are cool too, but they're easier to negotiate in a federated way than e.g. regulation of violence between states would be (short of just having states go to war with each other).
Towards the end of regulating violence, surveillance is super useful. And this is why we cannot leave tech decisions in the hands of government either, because they have incentives going to the very core essence of government to build a surveillance state.
We also know that centralizing violence is not necessary for minimizing it: there is no world government that regulates all violence, yet countries mostly manage to avoid wars.
The truth is reversed. Software eliminates work; that is, it makes people more productive by making the boring parts of their jobs automated, which as a side effect can increase capital (and profit everyone, not just startup founders). The diatribe against capitalism is thus unnecessary.
>which as a side effect can increase capital (and profit everyone, not just startup founders)
We haven't seen any meaningful increase in real earnings in the last 50 years, despite massive increases in productivity. In America, go to any city and you'll see a massive number of homeless people, those individuals have not magically captured any of the productivity gains of the 21st century, in fact they're probably unemployed because the low skill job that would've existed now has been automated.
Trickle down economics is such a farcical scam made by those who benefit from it, it makes me unironically proud of my country's propaganda machine that people are drinking the neoliberal gospel so hard, it'll make the next few decades a lot funnier.
> We haven't seen any meaningful increase in real earnings in the last 50 years
Who's "we"? The world as a whole has experienced rapidly growing real earnings throughout the last 50 years. Real earnings worldwide have doubled since 2001 alone! [1] Of course, most of the growth has happened in developing countries (where, honestly, it's most needed) rather than in rich countries where you and I live. But even in rich countries real earnings are rising, just more slowly. [2]
> In America, go to any city and you'll see a massive number of homeless people
Only in the rich cities, not in poor rural areas. And that's because homelessness is a result almost solely of high housing prices due to political building restrictions, not low incomes (or mental illness or drug use). [3] Increasing incomes won't actually decrease homelessness significantly - higher income just means housing prices will have to rise higher before poor-er people are forced out. The same number of people will be forced out either way, because a fixed number of housing units can accommodate a roughly fixed number of people, meaning that everyone additional person has to leave.
The number of vagrants had been decreasing YoY from ~2000 to 2020. I think the effect you see in cities is an increased concentration of vagrants from numerous states and other cities into just a few. I do believe homeless population has generally increased over the last 2 years, so I won't belay this point any further.
Real dollars and wages have not increased a lot... for the average citizen, but has increased tremendously for those with more skills. Nevertheless, the average citizen does have more purchasing power compared to their rough equivalent ~50 years back. The main culprits of rising costs is healthcare, housing, and education. Housing has performed it's worst effect on the average American over the last 2 years, but before that was quite steady in relative cost to the average income. Food, entertainment, clothing, transportation, and communication are now much more affordable, inflation over the last 2 years has also put a dent into the relative cost to the average income, but nevertheless still better now than previous.
What solutions are there for the average American? Take advantage of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease, learn new skills and drive forth competition. Stagnant industries will have to adapt or they will die.
I don't think reality is quite so dire. There's not a lot that can convince me, I'm well aware of wage stagnation, I'm well aware of inflation YoY, I'm well aware that the average American is hurting quite a bit over the last 2 years. But in the long run, the average American is doing OK, and will be doing OK. Hopefully, OK turns into GOOD and thriving. Happy to be proven wrong though.
"Real" earnings staying stagnant are a byproduct of inflation artifacts and certain non pay employee expenditures rising astronomically, notably the employer paid portion of health insurance. There's also the socialist or conservative refusal to build houses (depending on where you live).
Assuming you are US based, you will notice that the nationalized health services are slowly going bankrupt or worse, losing all their doctors. Even still, the per capita expenditure on health care in Western countries is an exponential. Giving credit to the nationalized systems, they managed to constrain it to perhaps n^1.6 instead of n^2, but it's still not a problem with "capitalism" directly, as it affects health systems with no meaningful concept of private business.
How does progressive thought deal with people wanting to spend enormous amounts of money on increasingly more advanced Healthcare as they age, and those costs being hidden such that nobody realizes how much money that is?
It appears that the American system has replicated the failures of communist planning - nobody know how much anything should cost!
Perhaps the nationalized systems were able to perform better, for a time due to having very smart people trying their best to work it out - but this even is starting to become unglued.
A proper progressive answer to this cannot be to nationalize more Healthcare, as that is failing the metric used to criticize the private system. More slowly, admittedly - but still failing.
If all talk about the way capital markets improve the world is the "neoliberal gospel", there needs to be an answer for these problems that don't rely on sovereign wealth funds or extremely creative central bank manipulation.
> We haven't seen any meaningful increase in real earnings in the last 50 years, despite massive increases in productivity.
It's funny how this is so widely recognized, yet at the same time we like to claim that college, which also started gaining in popularity 50 years ago, will increase your earnings...
As with most things I "know", I'm not sure what info to trust, but I'm currently under the impression that most of America's homeless population are homeless because they're hopelessly addicted to fentanyl and can't think straight.
> As with most things I "know", I'm not sure what info to trust, but I'm currently under the impression that most of America's homeless population are homeless because they're hopelessly addicted to fentanyl and can't think straight.
Sure, drug addiction is a giant problem in the US, but you were correct to second guess your take. Reducing the most dire portion of the US's housing crisis to drug addiction is flabbergastingly reductive. You should start by trusting information from people who have meaningfully studied housing in the United States.
I haven't seen a starving homeless person. There are soup kitchens and shelters in cities, along with charities and of course, a fair amount of pan handling.
Do you think soup kitchens/pantries offer 3 meals a day? Can't keep leftovers without refrigeration. Most don't even offer food every day let alone give enough to keep people not hungry.
There's an expansive gulf of misery before you hit the Christian Children's Fund commercial, 5yo w/rickets starvation. I assure you that you have absolutely no clue what it looks like and what you've seen hasn't told you what you think it has.
Sounds like the plot of some sort of dystopian sci-fi novel (as in, I'm pretty sure I've read one where that was more or less part of the plot, but can't remember what it was...I'm pretty sure it wasn't A Scanner Darkly at any rate)
They dropped the hammer two years ago .. these days:
> Instead of finished fentanyl being shipped directly to the United States, most smuggling now takes place via Mexico.
> Mexican criminal groups source fentanyl precursors — and increasingly pre-precursors — from China, and then traffic finished fentanyl from Mexico to the United States.
it's hard to even get (direct) fentanyl precursors from China .. but those that have the knowledge in both India and Mexico can start further down the chain and get "pre - precursors" to produce fentanyl to smuggle into the US.
The irony is that the pejorative phrase "Trickle down economics" was pure propaganda. Incredibly effective propaganda considering you are repeating it back like a stochastic parrot decades later.
To nitpick, steam engine and software are products of technique. Technology is the exercise of understanding technique, i.e. this conversation is about technology. But I think we impoverish our language by calling everything related to technical development 'technology'.
> The diatribe against capitalism is thus unnecessary
that would be true if you had no understanding surplus value. i highly recommend you at least try and read the first few chapters of Marx's Capital, which was quoted directly in the article.
notice profits are skyrocketing while wages are dead? "rising tide raises all ships" economics is dead.
The diatribe against capitalism is unnecessary because there is no better system. You can quote Marx's Capital all you want. I have lived the system build upon it's premises and it's the worst system possible. It destroys the human Initiative and intrinsic motivation bringing all the people to an equal poverty and apathy not an equal prosperity while the Ruling class still remains even better than the richest capitalist. And no what is often touted as it was never implemented properly is not true either. Half the world tried several forms of it's implementation, in all forms it goes against the human nature and is always destined to fail.
There is no redistribution of the Surplus value simply because the surplus vanishes whenever you try that system.
While the rising tide is not raising all ships you at least have a chance to fight to jump to another ship and not being forced to navigate the ocean using rafts.
I'd say it's still true that it was never implemented properly.
The fact that you mention a ruling class should signify that. There was still a state, etc so it was never achieved.
That said I think it's a utopia and as such (just like many other anarchistic strains) in line with some of 'utopia's defintions it is impractical/impossible bs.
A ruling class will come out no matter what. Who "redistributes" the wealth? even the most passionate advocates of this form have recognized this and now propose an overruling "AI" and the postponing of this organisation until we can have a "fair AI", Can you predict how even that form will go?
And what's more important it does not change the equation that if my contribution results in the same reward as the person X contribution why should I strive to contribute more? It's the inevitable race to the least effort possible that is the doom of Marxist theories.
If they say to you "Max you can achieve is X because that is the "Equality" of this society and you achieve X with Effort 2 you will not give effort 10.
> if my contribution results in the same reward as the person X contribution why should I strive to contribute more?
The nature of the reward matters, not everything is about wealth and money. Many geniuses are still willingly working in public labs for a fraction of what they'd earn in a corporate or startup.
Wealth is way more complex than 'take home money'. Geniuses in developed countries with highly functional infrastructure and high expectations of security are willing to forego cash income to work on ideals.
Commies use the "but that wasn't real communism" phrase all the time, but the point is that it will never be achieved. At least not for any substantial amount of time. It's utterly unnatural. Societal entropy returns it to a resting state every time.
And I find it pretty easy to argue that but instead plenty of people try to argue to them referring to examples that they don't intend. Essentially arguing past em with neither party achieving anything.
Like some people plainly believe for example china with it's loads of billionaires is a communist country and this is what these advocates want locally.
> Half the world tried several forms of it's implementation
Kinda the same implementation though if you don't count boring social democrats to the block. It is probably fundamentally a really really bad idea with authoritarian rule and a central planning system, which is not self correcting and where the authoritarian regime won't admit errors or faults.
I wonder why coop corporations are not more common. They are essentially "socialist" on a micro scale. There have to be some big drawback.
I think agile has alot of these problems. In most environment it fails due to about the same reasons as it is a authoritarian ideology in practice.
> I wonder why coop corporations are not more common.
that's the same reason why state coops failed everywhere. because they are forced to work toward some common denominator that is almost always worse than each working to maximize their own.
We went wrong in the 1970s, when a stripped down clone of Multics (without capability based security -- CabSec) grew in popularity and outgrew it. That basic lack of a system that can allow the user to securely and transparently manage what resources are to be given to a program is at the root of all the evil (mediocrity?) that follows.
Imagine you have a wallet, and you aren't allowed to take coins or bills out of it, you simply must hand the whole thing to someone else, and trust they only withdraw the right amount. This is what computers are like without CabSec.
In the 1970s, the personal computer started to become popular. Because home computer users didn't share systems, or network them, and data was stored on write protectable floppy disks, the lack of CabSec wasn't an issue.
Think of each floppy disk as a separate "wallet" from the above
It really wasn't a problem in corporate settings, or even in the early years of shareware, etc. Users were technical enough to know what data was going where, and manage things appropriately. Most locations still only had separate computers, and used diskettes to move data, via sneaker-net.
It's when you got to installing software that things started deteriorating. You suddenly couldn't really have a bunch of separate areas to store your data and programs on. It all became one all-important "wallet".
Then the internet came, and internet access became the standard, instead of internet connections. This moved things further out of the control of the users.
It's all worse in each iteration, now everything is out of your hardware, and into a single "2FA" system that is based around your smartphone. If you lose it, you could lose everything. It's the worst possible single "wallet".
> The magic disappeared and our optimism has since faded. > Our websites are slow and insecure; > our startups are creepy and unprofitable; > our president Tweets hate speech; > we don’t trust our social media apps, webcams, or voting machines. > And in the era of coronavirus quarantining, we’re realizing just how inadequate the Internet turned out to be as a home of Mind.
That's a mixed bag of laments about products and sociological phenomena. People using computers and software were supposed to solve all these problems?
> this mess, this tool-assisted speedrun of accumulation and exploitation
This is all of human history. It's a hard course in the frequent application of inhumane principles and failure to understand scale and sustainability. "Software" was never going to change human nature.
> Where did it all go wrong?
So, the OP's question itself is, at best, not an unworthy question but an incomplete question. The software industry was never going to "go right". You may as well ask "where human society went wrong".
Or whether human society has ever gone right, at scale.
The glass is half-full or half-empty. We have websites and can do things I never dreamed of as a child. When I had to do product research when I was younger it meant going to a book store and pursuing a rack of magazines. Google was a startup, Amazon was a startup. I would not call them unprofitable. Back when I was young you had companies like SUN, SGI, MIPS as startups, where are they now? Our president tweets? Direct communication to people without it being filtered by N layers? I bet every president has said hate speech behinds the scene at some point. Now the curtain is being lifted. I consider that good, actually, incredible. If you think sitting in your house alone during COVID would have been better without having the internet, then just turn it off. But I don't know anybody who came to that conclusion.
In the modern world people seem to criticize things that are not perfect. That is fine to notice those things, but to let them sway your entire outlook is unhealthy and, in many cases, wrong.
Can we do better? Yes, I think so. But I don't think we are doing nearly as bad as the picture you paint.
I think the biggest problem is that the Internet accelerated change to a speed that people are not accustomed to. It might take a couple generations to adapt.
> We do not write code for our computers, but rather we write it for humans to read and use.
No, we write code under pressure with deadlines for yesterday, multiplying technical debt and making another person who will inherit our project question their life choices.
Where software went wrong was in attempting to automate human processes as found, instead of as (very drastically) simplified in order to (A) take advantage of the things machines are better at and (B) be maintainable.
Our monetary system is designed to facilitate unlimited compounding interest and returns; this necessarily leads to centralization and monopolization which leads to a monoculture across all industries. I wouldn't be surprised if the same force which drives monoculture in agriculture is also responsible for monoculture in the software industry. The winners (first movers) tend to keep on winning - They just have to get it right the first time and after that they will keep winning most of the time regardless of what they do; whatever they push out into the markets.
I think it's wrong to say that software is capital but software and the people who use it certainly follow capital very closely.
Why do so many people use Uber? Because the investors are/were subsidizing the rides (making them cheaper). Why do people use Apple iPhones? Because it allows people to use money-saving apps like Uber. Why do people use Google search? Because its result pages are loaded with products which are subsidized by big investor funding like Uber. Why did Windows become so popular? Because all the big investor money was being spent on building games and programs for Windows (and also, big-money IBM gave them that huge contract). The infinitely compounding wealth of the richest investors decides everything. Most peoples' decisions regarding which software they use is determined by where the big money is being spent. Those who are getting all the big money can afford to lower their profit margins and the monetary surplus can facilitate an entire ecosystem to grow around them. These sometimes poorly designed but well-funded software systems and ecosystems starve funding from better alternative ecosystems and thus starves them of developers which starves them of users.
On one side you have extremely wealthy companies which can sell or lease software solutions which are very cheap and low-margin (because these companies have so much surplus capital coming in from other channels) and on the other side, you have poor consumers who need to squeeze every penny to get by. This is the recipe for a winner-takes all economy.
Just look at cryptocurrency; almost all the developers are working on Bitcoin or Ethereum. Not because they're the best (they're both horrible to develop for and integrate with) - They're simply able to attract developers because that's where the big investor money is and developers and their users are just constantly chasing the money with laser precision.
Also, underlying all this, there is a constant force of peer-pressure which subtly nudges people towards solutions which are backed by big money. Big money can buy both respect and trust.
The best criticism and praise is not that consumers are scraping by. It is that the businesses that take their money have such a strong value proposition that the consumer prefers that value to cash.
What we do not have an answer for in capitalist thought, are businesses that rely on human failure - take the five blade razor. We have spent millions and millions of dollars on single use plastic to save a month of occasionally nicking our neck. That is not a failure of a sociological system, that is a failure of humans.
Big money stays big by producing value, unfortunately humans are observed as having stupid values on a near constant basis, yes, even me - especially me!
Yes, by ensuring that the average consumer is so poor that they are forced to use the cheapest possible option and then you produce that cheapest possible option for them.
The big money beats the next cheapest product by a tiny fraction, but that's enough to take them out of the market completely. Then, in the absence of competition, the big money can start to boost its profit margins again.
The median household income in the United States is 45 ish thousand dollars. I made 20 ish thousand dollars a year for a long time, still had plenty of food, paid my bills, was even able to afford a car and to go out a fair bit.
There's constant inflation. 20k doesn't buy you the same amount of value that it used to. It also depends on where you live. Many jobs require you to move to big cities were rent is expensive (fully remote opportunities are hard to get in practice). Also, it's difficult to buy a house in this economy as they cost much more than they used to relative to salaries.
There are many old movies where the plot revolves around "communication breakdown". Some creepy character is following you? Hey just call 911 with your cell-phone. The movie just lost its plot. Even Paul Pelosi being attacked by a crazy Trump supporter was able to get saved by using his cell-phone.
Do you have any sources for your claim? Some people are spreading misinformation that DePape was a leftist and not aligned with Trump, so maybe you should check your sources on this.
Similarly some people are (or were) spreading misinformation that Jan 6 attackers were NOT Trump-supporters. It's like a knee-jerk -reaction for them, claim the opposite of what really happened :-)
I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what software is, so it's a bit premature to say where it went wrong. The author says that "Software is not creative." This may be true, but software is a creation. And currently it is created in the most crude and rudimentary way possible.
There are a lot of creative people out there. Writing software today is too hard. It takes too much knowledge and too much work. If writing a game was as easy as creating a TikTok video, imagine how much creativity would exist within the realm of software.
> I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what software is...
Yes, agreed. Software is that magic dust that produces behavior. It's the technology that enables things to react to their environments. All life runs a form of software, you could say. Software will only increase in prevalence and importance as society continues to demand machines to behave in a certain way.
It strikes me that articles like this are more gripes against the development process of software rather than the end product. The end product did not "go wrong" and is in fact at the peak of complexity and usefulness, and this peak will continue to get higher and higher until we reach the singularity.
i don't think the author is saying the process of software is not creative, but that software as software is not creative. software is not creative because it's static. any new data consumed by software isn't reincorporated into a new repetition of the software itself, but simply regurgitated slightly wrong.
though, i actually disagree, it's just incorporated by the desiring-machines creating the software. :) pegging "software" to a static entity i think is flawed as it is in fact always changing, even in a simple machine-producing-machine system of a CD pipeline.
"Software is not creative."
It is a hard implementation of creativity. Like a song on Spotify (or any other listening format) is creativity, all wrapped up and finished.
There are of course creative ways to do things. I am working with two software companies that have a problem to solve. One tries to fix the problem (a very hard problem) and is unsuccessful, the other knew it was very hard and hacked it in a way that the people got what they needed. Proper genius thinking and a super creative way of getting the solution that is required.
I think all these types of questions and statements do a good job assuming a disconnect between software and the real world, between humans and the systems we build. If I build a bridge and it collapses, nobody asks "where did bridge building go wrong?" If I cut corners on a bridge and it doesnt collapse, and create a culture of doing this such that other builders also do it, if I normalize misaligned incentives to those that pay me rather than those that drive on my bridge, and then they all start to collapse, we don't talk about bridge building failing us all. We talk about what we did, our behavior and what it caused.
The state of software, computing, social media, information availability, human rights on the internet, these are all because we, as in you and me, built something we knew was wrong for a paycheck, or at the very least overrepresented our skillset for a paycheck and delivered crap and swindled our employers and their customers. And questions like "where did software go wrong" are our way of passing the buck to a non entity, it's cowardly, it's pathetic, and every one of us, you and me, should take responsibility for what we have done, I mean literally, specifically, not some general collective truism, if not publicly at least when we look in the mirror by ourselves, and understand our role in the current state of the world, and either decide not to do it anymore or accept what we are.
Because we have better methods now. Rather than break up Apple, the EU knows they can just force Apple to do the right things when they don't naturally happen.
We don't need the free market of 100 alternative products to have user respecting software. We can just legally mandate it. Right now the software and products we have are extremely good and keep getting better. Tech companies aren't just sitting on a legacy of old stuff collecting rent, they are actively investing and keeping their status by simply being the best.
What is the point of this? To me this reads like contentless wordplay, some random software-insider negativity with a bit of anti-capitalism thrown in. I didn't really find any interesting points worth engaging with either positively or negatively.
TBH I would have just downvoted this if I could. If you're scanning comments before reading, don't bother with it.
Software in its natural state is not scarce, is freely copyable instead of transferable, and is not capital; just like the ability to start a fire or shear a sheep are not capital.
Ownership over software is scarce and transferable. The thing that lets you use software as productive capital is the exclusive right to it. That right is entirely manmade.
I like to view software as pure thought that happens to be encoded in a weird, formal structure, very much analogous to writing and poetry. It's been a very useful perspective for me in a lot of ways and the parallels are substantial.
It also implies a much vaster realm of "software thinking" filled with things like uxntal and colorforth than currently exists in the world. Instead, most people (myself included) spend the majority of our time writing corporate memos in passive voice.
> I am writing a book that posits software is a form of literacy
The meaning of "computer literacy" is further diluted with each passing day. An equivalence: Imagine if the meaning of "literacy" was reduced to being able to use the Taco Bell menu to place an order, given the assistance of accompanying illustrations.
> Software is at once a field of study, an industry, a career, a process of production, and a process of consumption—and only then a body of computer code.
This is so, so, so, so true. It's rarely how software is implemented, though.
This is a really good read, I only wish they covered more about open source as that is in conflict with their conclusion around software being capital.
I have no idea what this essay is tryig to say, but it seems to be sort based on leftist/marxist premises?
I mean, look at this:
- He thought the internet was going to get rid of "hateful" ideologies, to which I say, "lol what?"
- He thought Trump tweeting things is proof that software is gone wrong
- He complains about "Capital" at the end of the essay
The whole essay seems to be a typical incomprehensible leftist terminology filled mumbo jumbo. I remember reading this kind of material when I took "Communications 101" in University, where nothing ever made sense.
I guess I'm surprised this essay has so much engagement on HN.
There are many things wrong with software and the startup culture; this essay doesn't even remotely touch any actually substantial point what those things are.
Yeah, this was really disappointing - things have gone very, very wrong with software, but this author is either unaware or uninterested in any of the actual reasons.
> Startups love to save the world, but look at the state of the world now—is this what it’s like to be saved? Is the world even a little bit better because of startups like Instagram, Uber, and Peloton? Startups are spaces of remarkable innovation, and they are experts at channeling the multivoicedness of code—just look at the network of voices that GitLab channels (visualized below). But under capitalism, these voices are distorted and constrained, and they cry “growth, growth!” as venture capitalists and founders demand user acquisition, market share, and revenue—in a word, they demand access to capitalist accumulation.
Imagine a world where everyone starts with exactly the same resources and access to identical education. There are no parental differences. Even in this scenario, because of the variability in humans, some will be predisposed to save money while others spend it right away, some will study hard while others spend all day hanging out with friends, some will be natural leaders that organize people and others will be followers.
There is no such thing as equality - none. No two people are equal and no system, even an absolute authoritarian nightmare, can enforce equality. Inequality is natural and expected.
Capitalism is the natural order - it's an emergent phenomenon. People save money, invest it into other good ideas, they get more money, they reinvest it, and on and on. Eventually giant pools of money form to reduce risk, smooth returns, and enable professional investors to act on behalf of less-sophisticated ones. This results in pension funds, sovereign wealth, and a small number of individually rich people.
The best you can do is forcibly take money from people and businesses and redistribute it. The best and fairest way to do this IMO is a straightforwards flat tax, but the tax code always and everywhere results in a Gordian Knot of favored industries, tax breaks, arbitrary taxes to attack some perceived enemy, and on and on.
There will never be a permanent revolution against capitalism, just temporary fits like in Cuba and Russia that eventually die off. Capitalism is a reflection of human wants - the innate desire to own your own stuff. Everything else fans out from the fundamental desire for private property.
>There is no such thing as equality - none. No two people are equal and no system, even an absolute authoritarian nightmare, can enforce equality. Inequality is natural and expected.
No shit sherlock. Nobody is asking for a magical world where everyone is the exact same god fearin' american as the last -- the point is to create systems that aim to create as equal OPPORTUNITIES as possible. Nobody is asking for equal outcomes. If you want to parrot talking points, you need to brush up on what you're stuffing the scarecrow with.
The entirety of human history until the late medieval/early medieval period, all those hundreds of thousands of years existed without capitalism despite resource inequality. It can be hard to see beyond the dominant social structures we see around us every day, but don't confuse them for inevitabilities. Things will eventually change and whatever replaces the current structures will seem just as obviously inevitable to our descendents.
A 2021 Oxfam report found that collectively, the 10 richest men in the world owned more than the combined wealth of the bottom 3.1 billion people, almost half of the entire world population.
In all these thousands of years, capitalism existed. People traded with other countries. Those who got into trade got rich. People who were allied with the ruling class were rich. The people who were rich used their wealth to accumulate more wealth. It was pretty much the same as today in terms of the pareto distribution of power and wealth.
Then people will just trade using something else which serves as a store of value.
I often wonder how people can’t understand how that is one of the most important things it takes for something to be considered “money”. Once it loses that people will immediately exchange it for something else and society will just use shells as a medium of exchange.
Also your “solution” is for the “problem” of people deferring consumption. I honestly can’t see how anyone would see that as a problem.
Unrelated but you most posted a comment many years back (below). Wondering if you have any tips on research / articles in this space?
> Yes, very nice. But it needs an update on structured documents (tree-like, as in HTML). And, ideally, it should be accompanied by work that addresses collaborative editing in such structured documents.
Ironically this is a Marxist argument, more or less.
But it lacks the historical dimension. Capitalism is a historical and technological phenomenon. One of the replies talks about it emerging in the Late Middle Ages. Of course it existed previously, in the form of a landed aristocracy, but the potential for concentration of capital didn't exist.
With the industrial revolution concentration of capital created the order we live under today. To describe it as natural is an unhappy choice of words. It is certainly engaged in the large-scale subjugation and destruction of nature.
Concentrated capital turns the machine up: it exponentially increases inputs and outputs, ramps up the engine, increases production, consumption, everything. It is a system that may be completely unsustainable.
You deal with the benefits of the system: good ideas, smooth returns, sophisticated investors. I don't see any appreciation of the costs: increasing inequality, environmental damage, immiseration of people in developing countries.
There may never be a permanent revolution against capitalism: it will simply be impossible to sustain.
Regarding the environment, every single action a human does, from building huts to skyscrapers, affects the environment. I don’t see the earth as a living creature, I see it as a ball of rock. If humanity went extinct, in the blink of an eye all the damage and changes we did to the earth would be meaningless. I want to keep the environment amenable to humans only because I want humans to exist - the earth is not a goddess, it is unthinking and unfeeling matter.
Regarding developing countries, more people in the last 100 years were lifted out of poverty than in all time, and that was directly because of capitalism.
Marx was a good philosopher and historian. However I fundamentally disagree with the labor theory of value, because all value is subjective. There is no direct mapping between labor cost and value to the consumer, labor is simply an input cost. You can create something with enormous value with very little labor.
> I don't see any appreciation of the costs: increasing inequality, environmental damage, immiseration of people in developing countries.
How is capitalism increasing inequality over what came before? There is more environmental damage now because there are a lot more of us with a lot more powerful technologies. But humans have always altered their environments to make them more suitable. One could argue that we (and our hominid cousins) became an invasive species once we started migrating out of Africa.
And if the developing countries are developing, it sounds like the people are becoming less immeserated over time.
> But we can break this pattern; we can find our own answers to those questions, and if it’s up to us, the answer does not need to be that answer we’ve been taught, capital.
Can we, without changing the environment we are embedded in, without changing capitalism?
Under capitalism, all economic activity is increasingly subsumed by quest for increasing capital -- and under neo-liberal capitalism, all activity is increasingly economic activity, to better serve the quest for increasing capital (to open up more places for investing capital).
I think we can and should resist it, that's fine. I think it's good to recognize and point out what we're losing, and to urge resistance, as OP does, I'm not critisizing OP at all.
It's just to have any chance of success, we probably have to talk about the system we are embedded within and how to change that too, not just limit ourselves to software production as an imaginary closed system.
A different tack: I suppose for software production to escape becoming nothing more than capital intended to benefit people who own capital while reproducing capital -- software production would have to try not to be an economic activity, since all economic activity in our system ends up the former. Software production that was not economic activity was the original fantasy of many involved in original open source software production, I think literally exactly that. That... is now how it's gone. Why not? Would be a starting point for extending the locus of focus from software production on it's own to the social-political-cultural system of capitalism it is embedded in.
What a dreadful Marxist way of viewing something so dynamic and interesting, something that has and continues to delight many of us, not to mention provide us with the means of living incredibly lavish lives by the standards of our forebears.
Software deserves much better than this myopic nonsense.
for example, imagine how much MORE comfortable and wealthy we would be if all productive activity was channeled straight back into public projects, instead of through the business owners and then ostensibly downward?
Well, what will end up happening is, instead of the money going to business owners, and then ostensibly downwards, it will go to the government officials and then ostensibly downward.
Either way, there will be corruption and losses. The question then arises, which is better off on average for society, and which is better on average for _me_. If the two align, I vote for what is better for society.
Investors love SaaS because customers love SaaS. Every day they pay for o365 instead of figuring out libreoffice. The alternatives exist, but they are less fully featured, less well integrated, and harder to learn.
Why?
Because all those extra niceties cost money that Microsoft can pay programmers to work on instead of hacking on arduinos or whatever else they'd do in their free time.
SaaS is just patreon that works. You pay the organization that builds it money every month, and you get a constant stream of updates and support.
> Investors love SaaS because customers love SaaS.
I think you misread the GP. As I read it, it didn't say that "investors love SaaS".
Investors don't love SaaS; they don't really give a shit about software architectures. Investors love rent seeking. SaaS just happens to be the current means to that end.
The office pricing is pretty attractive, especially for a family plan. $120 a year, or $10 a month, for up to 6 people. They throw in 1 Terrabyte of cloud storage/person and email, and you can get the full office app download (what I use) as well as the browser-based versions that are cloud hosted. You can save documents locally or on the cloud, it's up to you.
I got it and it works for our family, where we have both mac and PC members. One of us is working on some chapters for a technical book that is being done on windows, whereas three of us use a mac, and it was the desire to have a common office suite and share documents especially with non-technical family members that made it work out. One of my requirements was decent foreign language support and also right to left text, and I'm a heavy user of excel as well. Depending on how much you value your time, it only takes a few hours of frustration working with the opensource alternatives before it makes sense to sign up.
At the same time, I'm glad that free office alternatives exist to put competitive pressure on Microsoft and to give options for Linux users or those for whom open source is important. Prior to getting the 365 subscription, I used the openoffice flavors for many years at home and the MS office when I needed to write documents at work. Now at work I use gsuite/wikis and never touch office, but have come to really appreciate it for private use. Something about never using it at work totally changed how I look at MS Office -- like a pall was removed and I realized this is pretty good software.
Less fully featured is also defined by the features in the flagship product, for which alternatives are always playing catch-up. Many of Excel's features are mis-features but not implementing them leads to incompatibility.
This makes a lot of sense. If we want better software (less dark patterns, less loot boxes, etc.) we need to change society rewards. If the companies that earn more profits are the ones that exploit human weaknesses then the world resources will be dedicated to them. If we want better software, or even less software and more other things, society needs to reward those activities. If it pays more to work for a crypto exchange or the next data-stalking start-up than to cure cancer then most of the knowledge people will work on them. Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments, we currently reward data gathering so it is what we get.
I can imagine a future were more resources are dedicated to extract value from people and less to produce products and services. And it is a red queen race. More resources call for more resources to be used, like an arms race it has no end unless there is a society will to end it.