On the irrelevance of software

Among the most time, energy, skill and concentration consuming activities is software development.

Of course, commercial principles are at the origin of most of the immeasurable waste that is the world of computer software creation.

Let's try to draw clear lines here about what is really relevant to support and what is purely and simply mental inflammation (and I use this term intentionally).

What do we really need?

The computer world is huge, and 99% of people use only a small percentage of it. This is a deliberate approximation but close to reality.

Concretely, what does humanity seem to need the most when it comes to computing? What are the uses that really show a substantial contribution and how can we differentiate them from those that do not?

This is simple. Just look at what most people willingly do with their computers and separate it from what they reluctantly do.

We will deliberately leave out of this analysis the small percentage of people whose widely varying aspirations lead to the assumption that the full potential of a standard commercial computer is used in some way.

This is not a good approach, because it is precisely the approach of the current commercial world, which is not synergetic and imposes more than it offers technological functions used by a very small number of people but serving as a justification for a large-scale diffusion (5G is the best recent example: in all honesty, who really needs 5G?)

Here are the uses of 99% of people with access to a computer:

- receiving and sending email

- writing documents and printing them from time to time

- listening to music and watching videos

- surfing the Internet

- storing information (files)

- play video games

And that's it.

And it is then easy to understand that these needs can be met by much simpler and more reliable technologies than those we have today, and in fact: they were already 30 years ago.

The "improvement" of computing over the last 30 years has concretely brought nothing more to the vast majority of humanity.

Many people argue that video games have evolved a lot and that it would be impossible to run them on old computers. But which games are we talking about? What percentage of computer users play high-definition games that require modern computing capabilities? Very often, when it comes to video games, we see people playing card games, sudokus, small 2D games, some of which already existed 50 years ago.

It's really important to realize that the current business model imposes tools on the majority of people that are only used by a very small minority.

The design of addiction

What is in fact the origin of what is quite correct to observe from the outside as a form of madness is the careful and self-perpetuating design of the addiction to a form of technology that is not useful to us, does not make us particularly happy and consists in the end of a considerable waste of energy and material.

I already talked about it in my previous article about shitty design and in my article about technolucidity.

The biggest companies have a vested interest in keeping their users in addictive spirals that everyone observes but very few admit to. It is all the more difficult to admit that almost everyone on Earth is susceptible to these addictions.

Indeed, they work on a very simple and natural cognitive model: the reward. The idea is to minimize the efforts to reach this reward (pleasure) BUT without ceasing to be profitable, generally without our knowledge.

Because, if companies had reward as their only goal, there would be no need to develop such complex software, sometimes exciting, sometimes frustrating. There wouldn't be all this technology that everyone usually experiences as an ordeal, and rightly so.

Like having four different pop-ups appearing suddenly in front of our eyes when we open a website. Like receiving endless satisfaction surveys that are mostly reduced to the most rudimentary language imaginable. Like spending an hour and a half trying to connect our printer to our computer and only being allowed to print in black and white if the color cartridges are present and not empty!

In truth, the goal is to conquer the market, and everything is done to keep the users in a pleasant enough state that they do not stop using the software (or if it is not pleasant, it is made compulsory for administrative reasons) without ceasing to capitalize on their existence and their habits. Because a perfectly happy user is not the most profitable case.

Exactly like when supermarket salespeople rearrange the shelves to prevent customers from settling into comfort routines where their spending remains lower than in a context where they search for their products, discovering new ones along the way and finally leaving with a slightly fuller cart than before.

Exactly like healthy people are not profitable for pharmaceutical industries and that medication is above all a tool to maintain people in a suffering state of consumption, not healthy, not dead: sick.

This is how using a computer and surfing on the Internet is to be constantly tossed between pleasure and frustration.

Certainly, a significant part of what I present here comes from shitty design. But it is important to understand that sometimes, especially for the major websites widely used like FaceBook, Instagram, Google and so on, what appears like a shitty design is actually made on purpose.

The inflammation of software development

In the West, people tend to be inflamed. It is partly caused by food and a culture of hyper-everything: hyper-consumption, hyper-conceptualization, hyper-competition, hyper-emotivity, hyper-narcissism, etc.

It is also due to the lack of physical exercise and the infinite access to information through the internet.

This inflammatory state also lays in software development, like a permanent bulimic crisis of mental activity.

This leads to an incredible amount of software developed for plenty of reasons, most of the time badly developed, and that will need a never-ending stream of updates, that could flow forever if that would be possible.

When a tool has to be fixed every two days, something is wrong somewhere.

Change is also used in business to keep people in a state of « consumption-ready » excitement, like with the Windows user interface, changing all the time, even if people were totally happy with Windows XP for example, adding piles of bloated software which performance is only compensated by the fact that hardware is clearly overkilled.

It is also sometimes a way to keep investors happy with their investment by showing how the products are « improving » and are modern and blah.

And in the end, everyone seems to be hysterically travelling on a train, launched at full speed towards an unknown destination, which requires permanent repairs and where everyone is responsible for small separate elements without anyone being able to control the machine as a whole.

This may sound interesting from a decentralized governance perspective of the IT world, but when it appears as a throbbing cancer in constant acceleration of growth, it says a lot about the underlying culture behind the monster.

But it is actually quite easy to say it in regard with how hard it is to propose something else. Why is that? Because every software nowadays is depending on other software. Hence, you can’t just come in the party and say « I will do things a lot simpler. »

The bricks that are used to create software, to make it run on computers, to make it accessible through the internet, to be sure that this software stays compatible with all kind of computers and smartphones, are constantly changing. And you will have to adapt yourself to this change. And if someone bases a part of his work on your own work, he will have to adapt it too, and on and on.

You won’t be able to make your software run anywhere if you want it stable and simple, as everything depends on something else that is in an inflammatory state.

The only solution is total autonomy

Autonomy is enough matter for an entire book, and it is sometimes linked to the notion of parallel society.

The only viable solution in this case, to allow a more synergetic way of life in the IT field, is to get rid of the inflammation entirely (like a cancer, that is a form of inflammation by the way).

We can’t stay in the middle of the storm trying to build our own shelves. It is not satisfactory nor it is in the end synergetic.

So, let’s restart from the beginning.

Hardware autonomy

Computers are complex machines which can apparently help us in performing some apparently simple tasks (email, print, etc).

They need electronical components and programs. And now we can observe that since computers are a product of mass consumption, the will to keep these two simple vanished right away.

No business firm ever thinked of how to keep a computer simple, reliable and durable. Yet, this is what we are interested in, and so is the vast majority of people around the world.

It is not as profitable as programmed obsolescence and infinite complexification, but synergy is not the same thing as profitability, we don’t have the same values in mind, nor the same goals.

And because creating a computer needs quite a lot of money in our society nowadays, the possibility to create on the market a far more simpler computer than the ones currently sold is very low.

At the time, hardware is the biggest issue of autonomy in IT, and there is a lot of oligopoles in that field, forcing developers to follow their own rules in creating compatible software requiring some choices of development that are not synergetic at all. It is also in the hardware that lays the most tenacious trackers of users and where the lack of transparency is the most common.

But I do think that the positive change we would like to see is over all a matter of will and collective organization.

Some crowdfundings gather hundred of thousands of dollars, that could be a start and I follow some initiatives for a while on that topic, without having found anything really satisfying for now. But it is a matter of time I think. And when we will be ready, we will find our way.

Software intelligence

Being autonomous regarding harware is the biggest part but having our own simple, reliable and durable computer is not enough. We need programs (the easiest part actually) and we need to be sure that the needs answered by the computer remain answered.

For example, an old computer can barely even surf the web nowadays, because many software components inside the websites are too modern and « bleeding edge », and they never cease to change all the time.

Irony is, these components are here to satisfy the greed of companies and governments, not to help users in any case. Thinking that people in general are asking for « super immersive experience » and « high customization » is a pure lie.

So, the surfing the web need cannot be answered properly in that circumstances, and it leads us to two different options:

• having our own parallel internet, made as privacy-friendly and safe as possible and kept as simple and stable as possible

• creating a program that is able to keep the minimum from websites and make them readable on our low-tech computer

These options are quite satisfying, even if they are not perfect and take time to be set up.

They are not perfect because our society demands us to comply with certain rules like having a bank account and, thanks to dematerialization, bank offices are disappearing and bank websites are some of the most badly designed software, forcing users into accepting tracking and conforming their behaviour to a point that it is not possible to not be upset.

But, it could be a start, like a step, to propose little by little another world, more synergetic, less inflamed and mentally hysterical.

Summary

• Create a simple, reliable and durable computer

• Create programs to fit this computer

• Take the opportuniy to create a parallel Internet with privacy-friendly software

At the same time, we could get rid of most issues and bugs brought by inflammatory software and opaque hardware, updates would be very rare and could be kept optional. Energy consumption would be far lower and there would be no need to replace electronical components all the time. Computers would remain easily fixable and almost everyone would be happy with their low-tech computer.

So, if we take the synergetic criteria, we have:

• a better efficiency, where the means are closer than ever to the needs

• a slightly better accessibility since we would need far less power of calculation from our computer, even if the issue of rare material remains and we don’t know yet how much could cost such computer

• a total transparency, with libre licences both for hardware and software

• this transparency would make the computer a lot more predictable than the current computers, that break privacy principle all the time

• a far simpler computer, without a doubt, and by far

• a way more durable computer, partly reusable if we manage to keep the hardware parts simple with a minimum of circuit board (or with reusable circuit boards that we could invent, why not)

• a big improvement in human contentment since the computer would be designed to fit the real needs of the majority of people, while minimizing bugs, complexity and stressful updates

Only a few could be frustrated, but nothing would prevent them to dig into higher technological tools, but without taking everyone on the boat by force.

In the meantime, before we get our synergetic computer, we can look at some linux-based initiative. If you have an old computer and some skills, you can install one of the Puppy Linux distributions or even Tiny Core Linux if your specifications are really low.