Software never had a soul
jmduke.com
Software never had a soul
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Software never had a soul
#2This totally misses the point several ways.
It's not software. It's the fact that distribution is owned and taxed by outsized players that live as gods and control the experience for the rest of us.
You might not care about Google and Meta, but your customers and parents will be bound up by them. You'll have to pay a tax to reach them. You'll have to jump through their arbitrary rules and give up more than you wanted.
They're the ones deciding to let privacy encroaching governments continue to erode our rights. It better facilitates their profit making opportunities and helps maintain their high walled moats.
Your little blog might have meant something in 2004, but today it's nothing against the titans.
The internet of 1990-2008 was not "indie". It was "free".
The internet of 2000 was the undiscovered country. The internet of 2026 is 1985 surveillance coupled with Brave New World meets Thunderdome algorithms.
The other reason the author misses - the internet was a much smaller place. A personal website or forum would be seen by a large percentage of the internet. The "indie" web was the web. (Drop the "indie".) Now you have to go live on a platform and be an ephemeral engagement sink.
If you don't obey all the arbitrary rules (no external hyperlinks, no videos under thirty seconds, no website references in your images, no green texts, no edits, no posts after 11AM), you won't be selected by the algo lottery for content farming to the horde. Nevermind that they'll ban you if you're a problem to any important powers.
You're just a consumer now. And if you're a creative person, your wares are content to be algorithmically milked.
Isn't that just a little bit dystopian? Doesn't it fall just a tad shy of the dreams we had twenty years ago?
Re: Software never had a soul
#3This totally misses the point several ways. It's not software. It's the fact that distribution is owned and taxed by outsized players that live as gods and control the experience for the rest of us. You might not care about Google and Meta, but your customers and parents will be bound up by them. You'll have to pay a tax to reach them. You'll have to jump through their arbitrary rules and give up more than you wanted…
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Re: Software never had a soul
#4This totally misses the point several ways. It's not software. It's the fact that distribution is owned and taxed by outsized players that live as gods and control the experience for the rest of us. You might not care about Google and Meta, but your customers and parents will be bound up by them. You'll have to pay a tax to reach them. You'll have to jump through their arbitrary rules and give up more than you wanted…
> The other reason the author misses - the internet was a much smaller place. A personal website or forum would be seen by a large percentage of the internet. The "indie" web was the web. (Drop the "indie".) Now you have to go live on a platform and be an ephemeral engagement sink.
Some of this might just be demographic shifts, i.e. "normal" people using the internet more. The people who are on the internet now would likely never have been interested in reading some indie blog, they just weren't online in 2000.
I could be wrong, but I suspect the absolute number of people who read this blog today is larger than it would have been in 2000, just in a smaller corner of the internet.
Re: Software never had a soul
#5I might be missing the point as this only aims at the title but I still own a 5 1/4" floppy disk with the first software I ever wrote as a child. It was a disk label printer software written in BASIC on a C64 and has a label on it printed on a Star LC-10 C. The silly main feature was some sprites flying through the title screen.
This software has a soul - at least by my definition.
Re: Software never had a soul
#6This totally misses the point several ways. It's not software. It's the fact that distribution is owned and taxed by outsized players that live as gods and control the experience for the rest of us. You might not care about Google and Meta, but your customers and parents will be bound up by them. You'll have to pay a tax to reach them. You'll have to jump through their arbitrary rules and give up more than you wanted…
Lots of early internet users were also “gate-kept” in some weird AOL CD land.
Also, you dont need to consume the algo content. You can choose to disengage.
Re: Software never had a soul
#7If my hammer has a soul. Software has too.
Re: Software never had a soul
#8Like someone who saw U2 in a small club in Dublin in the 1970s noting that they're not the same anymore. The internet used to be a Sub Culture. Now its the whole world.
Re: Software never had a soul
#9Petrolheads often say that electric cars have no soul. It’s because ‘soul’ is used to mean rough edges that we find endearing. Things that are perfect recede into the background and become invisible, and while that can be very desirable, it’s hard to form opinions about such things.
Re: Software never had a soul
#10When people talk about software or computers being "fun" in the past, it reminds me how advertisements about children's foods talk about how their cereal brings "fun" to the breakfast.
What does that even mean? Seems like empty words to me from people too accustomed to tv commercials.