I started writing this as a series of Bluesky posts, but it got longer than I thought.

I watched Scott Hanselman's TEDx talk titled "Tech Promised Everything. Did it deliver?". It's a beautiful talk. I strongly recommend you to watch it before reading this.

At some point, Scott shows the viewers a box of a Commodore 64. I just realized that the same one was sitting right behind me while I was watching it:

The talk made me tear up like Scott. My parents also "sold the van" to buy me a computer when I was only 11. I also had utopic dreams about how tech might change our lives in magical ways. I almost fully agree with Scott's points. But, I believe that the talk is more focused on the pessimistic side, as if there was a good path we could take, but we ended up in a bad path. Scott had to use a very limited time to present a very broad problem, and did a fantastic job. I just want to expand on Scott's points to make the picture clearer.

Good people are here, and they're doing fantastic things

Scott shows a screenshot of Richard Stallman's email that announces GNU project in 1983. This is a screenshot from his video:

Note that the email says "contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed". Today, GNU is a beast. Thousands of developers around the world contribute to it. It kicked off the free software movement, greatly participated in making Linux what it is today, and thanks to it, the blog platform that I'm writing this on, Ghost, is free software. I can self-host my blog anytime if I want. Free software movement has changed so many things for the better. Thanks to it, anyone can write an email to BMW, and get all the GPL source code they wrote.

BOINC project allowed numerous academical projects to be researched by pooling the CPU power of the computers from all around the world. The project has spawned more than a thousand academical papers. A feat that was unimaginable in the 80's.

Signal singlehandedly spearheaded the end-to-end encrypted messaging. Thanks to it, even big tech adopted E2E, and increased our privacy. Yes, governments are trying hard to circumvent it, but we're still way better off than we were a decade ago. Similarly, Let's Encrypt movement made web more secure at scale.

If I start counting free software success stories one by one, this would be a very big article: Ubuntu, Linux, Git, FFmpeg, and OBS to name a few. We have orders of magnitude more good people doing great things in tech than we had in the 80's. Most of the world runs on free software. It's a vision realized.

Big tech is amazing too

Yes, Siri can't understand me, yes, autocomplete sucks, yes, ChatGPT lies its ass off, yes, the web is an ad-ridden, unreadable mess, yes, privacy is something we never get without a fight. But, as Scott showed in the talk, we have access to immense computing power, and can do great things with it. That's pretty much fully thanks to big tech companies like Intel, AMD, Apple, ARM, and NVidia. This immense computing power is in our pockets because of big tech.

Internet is faster than ever and so ubiquituous that groups can communicate in realtime with video. That was a sci-fi dream since the early 20th century and up until the 80's, and was only realized fully and at scale over the last decade by big tech mostly. Boutique ISPs are emerging with even better alternatives like Sonic providing unlimited 10 gigabit internet for only $60 a month, but we need more anti-monopoly work ahead of us in order to unleash those small competitors so they can pressure big players into better prices and faster speeds.

We have 5G cellular networks with gigabit speeds in the cities. Connected is the norm, the exact opposite of what we had in 2000's.

Games look mind-blowing. Despite taking their own sweet time, VR/AR are shaping up to be great experiences, and are actually usable in daily lives. We can reach anyone, anytime, even when there is no cellphone coverage, using satellites. I can't overstate how far we've come.

We can almost "download a car" because we have things called 3D printers! We have self-driving cars, on the road, today! I was a kid when I watched Knight Rider, and the possibility of having such a technology was only a dream to me.

So, why do we think that big tech is bad?

Think about all the things that makes big tech look bad: ads, planned obsolescence, subscription models, paywalls, walled gardens, monopolies, unwanted features, bloat, lack of privacy, too much hype, too little substance.

There is only one common part among all those: money. The reason we feel bad about tech is because money has finally arrived. Yay, I guess.

It took its time though. Remember, Amazon had to report losses for a decade after it was founded in 1994. Money wasn't "online" in the 90's. It was curious, checking Internet out, but it wasn't online all-in. Today, it's all-in. Our communication channels have been overwhelmed with money. Money is everywhere... and it's sucking up our air.

Money bothers us because it forces bad mode of incentives. We need money. We need money to survive. We need money for healthcare. We need money not to become homeless. We constantly need money, therefore, our mode of working must keep us profitable. So, profit maximization becomes a goal of individuals, not just corporations. In that case, you need to be a part of a system that works for profit maximization. You need to integrate with this flawed ecosystem because you may not survive otherwise.

Money isn't bad as long as we can breathe between its gears. But, when everything becomes about money, fundamental human needs like privacy and social interactions get harmed by it. You follow your friend on your Instagram, and he praises a product. Does he do it sincerely, did he get an ad gig, is that a referral link? It harms interpersonal trust and authentic social connections.

When only incentive is money, Instagram doesn't stop at being a nice photo sharing app. It strives to become a dopamine faucet. Every app tries to become the most addictive instead of being the most useful.

The good money

Not all money is the same. Ad driven money is inevitably focused on getting as much as data from you, and presenting you as many ads as possible. So, it's probably the worst in terms of abusing your privacy and mental health. But, subscriptions aren't as bad. I don't like every Internet corner being paywalled right now, because I don't want to subscribe to something indefinitely just because I liked one article, but I expect them eventually turn into bundles, instead of individual subscribers, like cable boxes we had that came with 120 channels.

In a similar vein, I think that monthly payments for other types of services are okay too. Those services are incentivized to make you happy, not the advertisers. The most prominent example is Kagi for me. It's a search engine that respects your privacy, provides great search results with many customization options: the best one being the ability to remove Pinterest from search results. It also gives access to many AI assistants for free, and is fully ad-free. Kagi has been aware of bad mode of incentives, and that's why they don't have a referral program, but they occasionally provide free trial codes. I've been using it for two years, and I'd never once had better results shown to me by Google.

Not all monthly subscriptions are good though. The worst example could be Adobe Photoshop. I understand that their cause to battle with piracy, but, monthly payments for something even when you use it entirely locally? It sounds ridiculous to me. That's why, me not being a professional designer notwithstanding, Paint.NET is my favorite. Although it's free, I intentionally paid for its Microsoft Store app to support its development. It's a fantastic tool for basic image and photo manipulation. I hope to see it on other platforms other than Windows in the near future.

When I was using a Mac, I had paid for fantastic tools like Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo both great Photoshop alternatives without a monthly subscription. Although they were purchased by Canva recently, they seem to be keeping their one-shot payment business model which is what it was supposed to be for a local-only software. I haven't been using them for years, but I know that I can go ahead and install them tomorrow if I wanted to. That's what ownership is about.

I'm okay with paying for remote services monthly because I know that they have ongoing costs for the provider based on your usage metrics. I'm not okay for anything other than paying for major version upgrades for local-only (or remote-optional software) though. It feels like extortion to me. Make your development costs for bug fixes and small improvements part of your pricing model, like games, I'm perfectly fine with that. I like Jetbrains IDEs more than Micrsofot's Visual Studio for that reason: you can keep using your software indefinitely without your license expiring as with Visual Studio. But, you can keep paying for annual upgrades if you want for improvements and whatever. That's how it should be.

I paid for Zorin OS for the same reason. I'm not a Linux user, but it's a beautiful distro that's very easy to adapt to for Windows users like me. I wanted to support its development, and having perpetual access to it without worrying about my subscription expiring incentivized me to pay for it.

Berkeley Mono from US Graphics is another success story in that regard. It's a beautiful monospaced typeface. I love it, and the one-time payment for a perpetual license to use it. I'm all paying for beautiful stuff as long as it feels fair. A substantial upgrade from the V1 version required a payment too, but it didn't suddenly invalidate the license you had.

You can see that there is a pattern to this. Ad-based free services are almost universally bad for you. Subscription is fine if you're paying for something ongoing. Paying for software for one-time if it's local-oriented use is the best. Commercial software developers should be focusing on these models, and hopefully leave abusive practices like "renew your license to use this software every month that you don't even need Internet for".

So, deriving from the wise words of Michael Pollan, my advice would be:

Pay for stuff, not too much, mostly once.

It's a way healthier approach than trying to live on "free" apps and services, but actually paying with your data, by sacrificing your privacy, and jeopardizing your mental health. If a platform provides alternatives, pick the paid option. Dopamine exhaustion can cost you more than $10 a month. Not even the treatment costs, but the opportunity cost.

When you start looking for such alternatives, you'll notice that great things are happening in free and commercial software ecosystems in general. We're sometimes too imbued in big tech news and feel like everything's going bad for us, but we need to take note that that's mostly because ads and hype are intertwined. When you look beyond the billboards, there are many good people doing good things.