Clothes have never been cheaper. These days a t-shirt is often cheaper that a decent cup of tea in a cafe. The wonders of capitalism. At least that is how it is often described. And when you point at the underpaid, gruesome labor that people in poorer regions of the planet have to do to make this possible the answer tends to be: “Well, they are having jobs and can provide for their families now, so it’s reducing poverty.”

Now of course the situation is a bit more complex, has more angles. Because fast fashion causes about 10% of the world’s carbon emissions (about one EU), that is more than all international flights and all maritime shipping combined. And because the clothing is cheap and what experts call shit it ends up in a landfill or burned. Because those shirts and pants don’t survive contact with the real world for long.

Fast fashion is not about durability and sustainability, it’s about novelty. Not just can fashion companies sell you more stuff, get you into their stores more often, you can also express yourself more. Buy a fun t-shirt just for this one party. Or – maybe even worse – just for a haul video on Instagram or TikTok.

But if you do not think about the context, the externalities (fancy way of saying the way it fucks up the world and the people in it) too much, fast fashion is great: You have a fun idea about how to attend a party or how to make a statement of any kind somewhere and you can probably order something for cheap.

This is exactly where we are with software now. We are turning software into fast fashion. Because “AI”.

One of the current trends in software is “vibe coding”: You no longer have a person who more or less knows what they are doing write software but you have an LLM do it. There’s a few optimized ones out there that even get the code to actually compile or run most of the time. Sometimes the results are even correct.

This is often framed as liberation: Every human being can now have the software tool they want. Without having to learn to code or without having to ask someone else. You think it, you get it.

Now most people will admit that the code is utter garbage. It’s inconsistent, inefficient and mostly unmaintainable. But it does what the user wants it to do … maybe. So who cares? We don’t need to maintain this stuff. If we need something similar later we don’t build on this, we just have it generated anew.

Software is no longer seen as an asset, as something to care for, to maybe even take pride in. It’s a throw-away product. Like a napkin. Just get one quick, wipe your mouth and throw it away. Like a novelty t-shirt.

There is software you need only once. A quick script to automate a few things. Like renaming a bunch of files or so. And if LLMs would just be used to write those I would care a lot less about it.

But that’s not the narrative: The promise is that you can built full online services or meaningful products (think a web browser) that way. It might even work almost. Some of the time.

Software has become an important part of our lives. It structures a significant part of our experiences given how much time we spend in front of some sort of screen. The vision that “AI” companies are selling under the label “democratization” of software development is a world where the only clothes you can buy are fast fashion throw away items. Shirts that are basically not worth putting into the washing machine cause they won’t survive anyway.

But just as with fast fashion there are consequences. Let’s not even talk about the environmental cost of LLM use, the water, the electricity, the a-waste.

When was the last time you were really frustrated by a piece of software you had to use? Your bank’s app not allowing you to change your address but forcing you to talk to a chat bot that kept trying to do the wrong thing. Your music player making your laptop’s fan spin eating up your battery while not playing any music, just generating a “busy” cursor. Your email client crashing while you are writing. The options are endless. How long ago was that? An hour? 5 minutes?

Software has gotten bad in weird ways. It’s not just that everything is basically just a half-assed website pretending to be an app with even simple text editors bringing almost a whole browser along just to show a bunch of characters on the screen (as long as the file doesn’t get long). I have to use Microsoft 365 at work and literally none of the paid tools work properly. Features are missing or just do not work as documented. Everything is dog slow and doesn’t integrate well. Now apply that everywhere.

I am not a fashionable or stylish person. I basically buy a thing that works 5-10 times and then I am done for a long time. But I am in the position that I don’t have to buy fast fashion (and I know some people have so few resources that that is the only thing they have access to, it’s tragic) and I would never buy a shitty t-shirt for 5 bucks or whatnot that will annoy me after 3 rounds of laundry. I want to have the things in my life work. Ideally be even a bit nice. And I think we all deserve that. Deserve having access to objects that have a level of quality and care put into them.

It’s not just about giving people access to something. My guiding ethic is to give people access to good things. Because that’s what is right.

I keep coming back to the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness from Terry Pratchett’s novel Men at Arms:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

We are working towards a digital world where we’ll all be having wet feet. And that makes me very sad.

When computers entered the homes it was often as toys or toy-like artifacts: These machines, usually called “home computers“, were often used like gaming consoles with magazines giving you code to type in to have simple games on them. Their use was limited to people who wanted to play arcade games without losing all your money or people who just loved technology.

After a while and through some marketing the term personal computer was established and describes the machines people have at home till this day (Apple probably would disagree since they love to always invent their own lingo to claim to be unique, but TBH fuck Apple). The personal computer was a stand alone system that people could run at home for their personal (but of course also professional) tasks: Word processing, some simple data management, gaming and later media consumption and the web.

I find the prefix “personal” a bit underexplored. As I remarked in my post about my attempts to untangle my personal infrastructure from billionaires and fascists:

I think that infrastructures are deeply personal because our needs and wants are personal. The way we have pushed for a harmonization of everyone’s digital life through centralized platforms for the last decades has been a deeply inhumane endeavor.

I thought it might make sense to dwell on this a bit more.

The Platform Age

My family got their first computer when I was still in primary school so somewhere in the middle/end of the 1980ies. It was an Epson 80286 with an amber monitor. It came with some software for certain tasks and I remember my mom getting the word processor she was also using at work because she knew how it worked.

Even with later computers: Whenever you got a new device (think a Sound Card – those didn’t used to be built-in) you got some new software with it, there was the shareware scene where you got little programs and tools on disks attached to magazines or something. But what was interesting is how nobody’s computer looked the same. Sure. At some point everyone had Windows 3.11 or even Windows95 at some point but the sets of tools were a lot more local. I remember how when one got to a new school, met new kids that they’d use completely different tools for the same things and one would (not usually legally) share whatever nifty thing one had access to.

The software landscape wasn’t ideal or maybe even better, but it was highly personalized. Mostly based on software being not that easy to get.

Then came the platforms. Not only did Microsoft win the battle around office tools but web platforms created these very streamlined, homogenized infrastructures that – because many were free – everyone adopted. Think Google Mail and Docs for mailing and collaborative editing. Operating Systems kept getting more and more locked down – mobile platforms being the worst offenders in this regard – and the app stores with their ratings would make sure that everyone would pick the same tool when searching for he same thing.

The promise of the “global village” was manifesting through centralized platforms everyone was on: How could you be a digital participant without a Facebook or a Google account?

Criticism against this is often framed in terms of anti-monopoly rhetoric: It’s bad if everyone is on the same platform because it harms the market and one player gets too much power and all that. But I think it’s also very inhumane, very violent in a way. We are different, our needs and wants, our skills and willingness to endure friction in our computing are different. And all that heterogeneity is made invisible, untouchable. It’s not that these systems actively fight our individuality, they make expressing it, make perceiving where you want to reshape something harder.

The monoculture of digital infrastructures has made people forget (or never learn) that software is by definition malleable. But the iPad taught people to just be good consumers and shut the fuck up. (Not just the iPad but I love hating on those devices. Grant me some fun here.)

The Anything Systems

There has been a response to those thoughts. Because of course we all see ourselves as brilliant individuals who have specific desires and needs. I call those the “Anything Systems”.

Some of you might know Notion but there’s a whole bunch of systems like that. Notion allows you to build your own workflows and data structures: It’s not a knowledge management system with clearly defined processes and capabilities. It’s more a set of building blocks for you to express yourself.

Not this might sound like a great approach: You can now build exactly your workflows and tools even without programming. But we are losing something when end-user software no longer carries semantics.

Stephen Farrugia (follow him) could probably go on quite the tangent here but you are stuck with me so here it goes: Anything Systems are not tools. As I have written about when it comes to generative “AI” systems, a tool is not just a thing that you maybe can use for a specific purpose. A tool is designed for that purpose, it contains assumptions about the problem space, you as the user of the tool, it is often the current iteration of a long line of attempts to optimize a certain tool for specific use cases. When people want to talk about tools and they are looking for a simple example they often use a hammer but if you have ever worked on a construction site you will know that there are many different kinds of hammers for very specific use cases, materials, contexts etc. “Hammer” is not an object but a category of objects.

Anything Systems claim to help you built the best workflow or solution for your case but they disconnect you from the experience and expertise that goes into the design and development of tools: A good tool brings with it an understanding of how to solve a problem the optimal way. That sometimes takes a bit of learning or the realization that a specific tool and its approach does not work for you or your context but it is a large part of what makes tools so good: You are not poking in the darkness hoping to figure out a good solution on your own, you are standing on the shoulders of giants.

Anything Systems give you a great box of toys to play around with but when things do not work for you, it’s your fault for not configuring it right. It’s a form of refusing to take responsibility for the things you put out into the world. The opposite of what I consider engineering to be. Anything Systems will keep you busy though: You can keep dicking around with your processes and structures for the rest of your life without ever really being happy with it. Maybe if you add just another thing then it will be perfect? Those systems are absolutely fantastic if you want to mask the bullshittiness of your job but are you really making progress? Or are you keeping busy?

The Everything Machines

We are not in the age of what the journalist Karen Hao calls “Everything Machines”, the age of so-called “AI”. This is an interesting amalgamation of the platform logic and the Anything System: Modern “AI”s want to turn everything into a chat interface (JUST LIKE IN STAR TREK!!!11). There is just one way of setting up digital interfaces: As chatbots. That is the future. And the present.

But those systems are not exactly specific. When you open ChatGPT it basically tells you to ask it anything. The interface and UI claims the system can do everything. Which is true if you don’t know much about the thing you are dealing with or are willing to accept garbage solutions. But that’s of course not the promise. The promise is that you have a subservient, willing slave-genius at your disposal – for a small fee.

Recently one of the banks I have an account with changed their whole interface. I can no longer see my account information on a website or in the app. I have to ask a chatbot for that information. Because chat is the only interface left. How could one just build a small form on a web site that allows me to change my address or anything? That’s past shit. Legacy design. Everything needs to be a chatbot because chatbots can do everything. Well. There’s still that asterisk.

Personal computing

As I wrote in my article on rebuilding my digital infrastructure: That article is not a howto. You probably should not do what I did because your needs are different. Maybe some things I did make sense to you and you can apply. Some might not fit your needs, budget or are things you don’t want to deal with. That is very healthy thinking.

I think it is important to share more about or computing with each other. But not (only) in the form of howtos but more as a small tour with explanations. Why did you pick certain tools and not others? What did you want to achieve? Which inconveniences are you living with?

I was very lucky. I grew up in a time where digital infrastructure wasn’t so standardized and locked down. Where I could experience the digital as something to built and shape and change. When I look at my 5 year old son I wonder if he will have that opportunity. And I want him to have that, I want him to experience that digital systems can be humane and can enhance our lives as long as we can shape them around our needs and that that reshaping is possible and doable.

I still really like technology. I like building systems for myself or others that work based on what the users want and need. And I don’t want to glorify the old days too much: Yeah, everyone’s system was different but it was often hard to collaborate and share. Because file formats and whatever.

Personal computing must be based on individual human or group needs but also on the technology side based on open standards that allow different tools and infrastructures to connect and share and collaborate. And it’s a social project of all of us building things, trying things, learning from one another. So we can built upon each others successes and failures. It’s “human needs, community sharing and standards” instead of “platforms” or “everything machines”.

That’s what I want to keep pushing more towards.

Bose released the Application Programming Interface (API) documentation for its SoundTouch speakers today, putting a silver lining around the impending end-of-life (EoL) of the expensive home theater devices.

In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher latency than Wi-Fi).

After that date, the speakers would stop receiving security and software updates and lose cloud connectivity and their companion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to integrate the device with music services, such as Spotify, have multiple SoundTouch devices play the same audio simultaneously, or use or edit saved presets.

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