"Our tech is shaped by our need to make money". Apps and services are discrete items because they need to be packaged for sale or hire. These are my New Year musings. I'm curious if anyone else has thought about what influence our need to make money has made on the shape of our tech. App stores definitely promote the idea of discrete units that can be sold/hired because they make a cut of the transaction. I'm sure there's also an I made this factor playing out. I guess I'm wondering what if collaboration was the pervasive modus operandi? What would our tech look like then? What if we didn't need to package apps up as discrete branded units? What would the tech world look like? How would we build functionality? What if we never needed to earn anything from software? How much better could it be? What restrictions do we place on apps because we need to make money from them? And how much better would they be if we didn't need to do that? Purely from a technology angle. Even though there are loads of non-profit open source projects creating tech we are still stuck in the more pervasive paradigm of packaged units of code. How much better could we be? Of course, this is a pretty simplistic view of the world but anyone ever thought about this stuff?

Open source is already kind of like this, right? We still like packages for legibility and ease of distribution. Edit: let me try to do better. The notion of an independently distributable piece of software, with a limited interface to the rest of the system, will be reinvented almost immediately, regardless of the economic situation, for roughly the same reasons we like modularity inside our projects. It will help organize any collaboration that happens. That's 80% of the way to "apps" IMO. The packages can have more wildly varying sizes, that's true. You wouldn't have NPM-level micro packages if each one had to make a case for people to pay for it. FWIW I know this has come up here before, so you're in the right place.

The “need to make money”, as well as all other obligations people can have, are something that prevent the progress in general, in my opinion. Successful open-source and side projects that people have, are often the result of their authors' privilege. Either, they don't have to think about money and are free to work on whatever they want. Or they're lucky and can do so as a part of their main job. Or they're benefiting from others doing chores. See the Maslow's hierarchy of needs — when you have to survive, you don't have the time and the resources for the upper levels of the pyramid (or still do them, which can result in both physical and psychological issues like burnout, etc.) Things like UBI (universal basic income), as well as anything that improves equality (both economical and sociological) could elevate everyone and lead to faster progress.

I'm also musing this same topic and also taking the first steps in making the change. Currently I'm working on 2 projects (building 2 apps) for which I do not get paid. In my work I don't cut any corners to finish it (like with the littlest amount of work). I love the ideas and people working on these projects, so I put in effort because of the journey as well as the planned result. I've simply started to move away from the money system (make the first step instead of waiting for a better solution). I'm sure something good will come off it in whatever way. I don't like the 'old' money system. Not sure how or with what it will be replaced (others are better at this topic to come up with something clever or it will happen organically), Maybe someone does something for me for free at some point in time. Or maybe it brings new projects for which I do get paid (I can't live without money just yet 😉). We'll see. I'm positive 😄.

@Andrew F is right, this has come up before and is very important. Some examples: • Me, 2018-10: "One test for whether something is reducible to money is: can you get equivalent results by paying someone vs finding someone directly involved." Arguing that you can't hire someone (or rely on a for-profit company) to write software because software can be broken in so many ways you might take a while to notice. • Gregg Tavares, 2018-10 There are other examples in the archives if you search for 'money' or 'capitalism'. Bear in mind the top-level channel pages are reverse-chronological. Also, in the early years we unfortunately weren't so good about creating threads back then, so you'll need to scroll upwards to see responses.

This is something we talk about not infrequently at Ink & Switch, as it's one challenge (or, perhaps better, detail) explored by both local-first but also and especially malleable software. In both cases, control that was previously wielded by the vendors of software must be surrendered to the user. This invalidates a handful of dominant business models, like holding user data hostage or forcing users onto an upgrade treadmill. These movements (local-first / malleable software) are interesting because they started with a strong technical argument — if we change how we do things, our software will be greatly improved — and later revealed the perverse incentives that stopped things from evolving this way naturally. So, yeah, I complete agree with everything you said @Daniel Harris.

Constraints play an important role in engineering (and in creativity!). I agree that needing to make money dominates tech, and that that is bad, but if removed, money will be replaced by other (similar!) constraints, such as time and motivation. And money can also help overcome some time/motivation challenges. So it's not quite as simple as "money/capitalism bad".

I’m a little nervous to wade into this topic…but here goes. Whenever folks talk about money and how it is shaping a thing, I think we should try to not talk about money and instead talk about how it centralizes power. I think that, despite what some economists say no one is actually a singular “neoliberal,” instead, we live under the conditions neoliberalism produces. Similarly, if you are alive within culture today you live, regardless of your choice, wishes, or attempts otherwise, under capitalism. As such, the forms we are capable of producing are inherently shaped by the culture we inescapably live within and beneath…so anything we want to make “outside” of it I think will inherently fail 100% of the time because there is no outside…so instead I think a more productive space of exploration is to consider how to resist or break the culture we’re already stuck in — movements from feminist thinking like queering and weirding are examples of this at play. A more concrete example of this, for me, is that in my own explorations I often use tools that I think corporate bodies will see as undesirable, and I mostly refuse licensing because they’re a power structure that fits the shape of our existing culture…I don’t wanna play into that.

@Eli Mellen Could you expand on "I mostly refuse licensing"? Is that about software you write, or about software you use? What then is the legal context of this software?

Glad you overcame your nervousness and waded in @Eli Mellen. 😉 Yeah, I get that we all exist in a society that has a badge of "capitalism". Society and indeed capitalism might seem like fixed terms but the implementation on the ground and day to day can vary wildly and is potentially very malleable. The world doesn't just pop from one cultural paradigm to another. There's a lot of grey fuzzy space and in-betweenness. I'm not sure that trying to change things from the inside is doomed to failure. Let's review in 5 years and see how I did. In fact, let's see how we all did in 5 years! ;-) But I do know I'm personally not comfortable with the idea of "resist or break the culture". It doesn't feel nice in my body when I resist or break stuff. I feel much better when I love and create. Of course, we might be talking about exactly the same thing – it's quite hard to tell with text sometimes, eh? By the way, have you ever heard of "what you resist persists"? In terms of strategy, I'm pretty bought into the current paradigm. Registered a nonprofit org. Applied for government grants – and got some. Pay employees. Pay taxes. So, I'm not saying that the system is wrong or anything. I do feel that the system is not optimal for sure. I'm just musing about how we can make it better from within. And still have relatively pleasant lives. Golly gosh! Seems like 2025 is going to be a real deep year! 😉

100% with ‘love and create’. And 2025 is the year for a lot of that! ❤️

@Konrad Hinsen mostly that I don’t use them much. Not as a rule, but also not as a habit. Elsewise they’re sort of unavoidable. I also don’t have heaps of occasion to use other people’s code in my hobby stuff, so it’s an easy thing for me to say without having to try real hard. @Daniel Harris yeah, we are defo aligned on that. I think that resisting and breaking culture are how culture grows and evolves, and that creativity and love can 100% be modes for achieving that resistance.

This has been on my mind a lot for the last few years as I've transitioned from the big tech software development world to the public university research world. While I've noticed a lot of big differences in the incentive structures and how they shape the work being done, it has been eye opening to see how pervasive these power structures are. Removing the "how will this make money" requirement is really nice, but at least in the academic world, it still falls short from enabling people to work on research that is not closely connected to making someone money/ strengthening the centralization of power. An example of where I've seen this is the difference in the amount of funding and number of people working on different medical imaging techniques: MRI and ultrasound. My partner and I both work in medical physics, which is the field where a lot of medical imaging research is done. I'm a part of an MRI research group, my partner is part of an ultrasound research group. MRI machines are big, and expensive. Ultrasound machines are relatively cheap, and portable. Both imaging techniques can be hugely beneficial tools, but Ultrasound is used around 10x more frequently than MRI and costs significantly less. Despite this, there is significantly more funding for MRI research. Both from things like NIH grants and from corporate funded grants from companies like Phillips and GE(who make the big expensive MRI machines, and cheap ultrasound machines). I have had to reshape some of my naive beliefs that "science" is ideologically neutral. It has been interesting to notice how widespread this belief is and how it shapes the problems people work on. I'm having a hard time trying to learn how to approach research when it feels like many people around me start from the implicit assumption that scientific work is inherently neutral. I'm very interested if anyone has advice or suggested resources in this vein! I've found Felienne Hermans recent /paper to be really helpful for re-examining my own assumptions

Hi @John Christensen (JohnnyC1423), your MRI case is a really great example of how money skews technology advancement. I don't think we can necessarily get away from this situation in our current paradigm. But being aware of it and bringing it into conversation is a good thing. And even imagining what it might be like if we created technology from different motivations might be an interesting thought game.

A related observation that I made in the three decades I have been working in academia is that money corrupts in terms of reliability. Disciplines with few resources (mathematics, fundamental physics, ...) have higher quality standards, and invest larger efforts to increase them, than "rich" disciplines such as biology or medical research. Part of it is the available resources per researcher: the less you have, the more ingenuity you need to invest to get results. But I suspect the main driver to be inequality in terms of resources, which attracts a different kind of person, more interest in status than in knowledge.