Programming shitpost #2: Building competitive alternatives to big tech

(Originally posted on Minds.com)
Jun 14, 2021

In my experience, the tech industry (and increasingly the world) is dominated by transhumanist technocrat dweebs with very utopian "robo-communistic" and "anarcho-capitalistic" ideologies who think they're saving the world from ignorance, disinformation, fascism, poverty, disease, and death itself. They're playing God, and that never ends well. They're building a global digital gulag that's too big to fail, therefore it will fail... sooner or later.

I want it to fail ASAP and that requires a competitive alternative. Return To Monke would be a nice option for those who want it, but let's face it, technology is irresistible to most people. I'm talking about alt-tech that'll make normies quit FB and throw away their iPhones and Alexas.

I'll use Telegram as an imperfect example. Before Telegram all my normie friends/family wanted to talk to me in FB's WhatsApp spyware; I told them to use Signal instead but it was slow and unreliable (unsurprisingly for an app designed for Marxist useful idiots). Telegram is fast and smooth and has groups, filesharing, voice and video chat, GOOD cross-platform phone and desktop apps - almost everything you need to communicate and conduct business online. It's not just a messenger, it's potentially a Web 2.0 killer.

Web 2.0 is the heart of today's centralized censorship regime, and it has a major weakness: it's a monolithic system - like the mainframe before PCs. It's a huge pile of shit and a time/money sink for all who touch it. It could've been a simple hypertext system like Gopher or Gemini but because dialup was too slow for images and video, people used HTML+Javascript to spice up "boring" text pages , and the rest is history - the browser evolved into a jack of all trades, monopolized by Microsoft and then Google. Who needs it now that we have massive bandwidth for video and better ways to make cross-platform apps? It has long outlived its usefulness. Make Internet Great Again - KILL IT!

For a censorproof internet we're gonna need totally decentralized content distribution (somewhat like LBRY maybe) which is a difficult technical problem that also opens up a social-political-legal can of worms - a subject for another post. And for hardware we can trust, we're gonna need open-source chipmakers and electronic manufacturers competing in a free market on the basis of quality and transparency - not proprietary secret sauce with glowie backdoors.

But the thing to do now is just START making smaller, faster, simpler, human-readable, privacy-respecting, apolitical, agenda-free, self-contained software/systems that people actually enjoy using. Then keep rolling back all the layers of fucking garbage in the web, cloud, internet, frameworks, libraries, languages, operating systems, and hardware, until we reach a stable equilibrium.

So, do you want to do your part?

- Try to use alternatives - like Minds and Telegram. Look for the next big thing or a comfy niche thing. Test it, push it to the limit, break it, give feedback/suggestions, or if it's perfect just use it. New tech is nothing without users - you're already doing your part.

- Git gud, level up - this shit is hardcore lol. Learn gamedev, shaders, blender scripting, web shit, databases, anything. Get good at C - it's not going away anytime soon.

- Keep it simple and retarded. Don't try to integrate with everything. Don't even dream about solving everything once and for all.

- Build prototypes, leveraging whatever bloated garbage is convenient for you, then rebuild on solid foundations. (Before you get too serious with your prototypes, do some research to figure out how (and if) you can finish the job.)

- Minimize dependencies. If possible use plain C and single-file libraries like these: https://github.com/nothings/single_file_libs - but be careful about security where it matters.

- Build it yourself or with a few buddies. No successful software was ever designed by committee.

- Do it for yourself - to do something useful, scratch an itch, challenge yourself, and polish your skills.

- Don't do it for profit or prestige. Keep your politics, personal life, and even your name out of it. Use anon handles - preferably a different one for every project lol.

- Don't expect to change the world.

- Don't be different just for different's sake.