Earthshine

I went to work in tech because I wanted to use human ingenuity to solve problems and make regular life for regular people easier.

The longer I spend working in tech, the more I want to just burn it all down and go back to working the land with my bare hands.

If this is the cost of progress, then it's not worth the cost.

Jun 25, 2025 at 7:53pmWeb
Show threadEarthshineJun 25, 2025
I think everyone who performs some kind of labor can relate to wanting some way to automate part of it away. Maybe the technology to do it is just outside your own reach, or maybe it's some futuristic scifi bullshit, but in all cases the tech you want is tech that solves a problem for you, and you wish someone with the means and resources or smarts could build it for you to make your life easier. Maybe you go into tech because you want to be the one building it, but somehow it never changes.
Show threadEarthshineJun 25, 2025
and the deeper you get into tech, the more you find yourself asking why... why we can't just solve these problems you came here to solve... and the answer always and invariably seems to be: because someone needs to profit from it. No tech is free. No tech comes without downsides. Under capitalism, you will pay for it, and it will cost just as much or more than it did when you did without it. And thus complexity grows and grows, but things never improve.
Show threadEarthshineJun 25, 2025
I'm a hacker because I hate the profiteering of tech and want to make solutions with the resources I have available. Not by compounding cost and complexity, but by expanding knowledge and ingenuity, and elegance of engineering. There shouldn't *have* to be a middleman gatekeeping every solution and asking for capital in exchange. We should build things up to help and improve ourselves and each other, not to grift and exploit for personal gain. Make solutions, not more problems.
Show threadmike805Jun 25, 2025

@earthshine The best results from tech have come when technical people were just given money and allowed to build stuff. That is how the Internet got built. Commercial videotex failed hard in the same era.

Good stuff also gets built when people have an ideological desire for a thing. The piracy ecosystem is an example. Nobody gets paid and nobody can even claim the glory using their real names, yet it does a better job of distributing content than any of the for-profit streamers do.

Show threadl_b_iJun 25, 2025
@earthshine I'm in tech because it tickled the correct part of my brain, it just clicked. I find myself disliking the work more and more, not the work itself, but the results. I don't feel good at the end of the day. Would this change if I was in a different part of tech? I dunno. I'm still working on an art website, and I'll continue on it, but outside of that,? I'm thinking of making a big change and exploring something completely different like learning to fly and being a pilot. That comes with its own issues to me and my morals, but at this point, I think it might be better than where I'm at now.