A little hope, please

The people I follow are not wrong.

The attention economy did make everyone miserable and then made it a business model. The platforms did enclose the open web and then charged rent on it. The last decade of consumer software really was mostly extraction wearing a nice typeface. The AI companies really are making claims their own researchers will not sign, and the amount of power concentrating in about six organisations is genuinely alarming, and the people warning about it are not cranks. Many of them are the people who built it and would know.

I read all of this. I agree with most of it. And then I close the tab and notice I have not been given anything to do.

Here is what is bothering me. The people best positioned to build something different are spending their credibility on being correct about the problem. Correctness is cheap right now. Everybody is correct. What is scarce is anyone saying, out loud and without irony, that the conditions for making things have never been better than they are this month.

Because they have not. The web is still open. You can still put a file on a server and give someone the address, and no one can stop you. The protocols are still open. RSS never died, it just stopped being fashionable, which is different and arguably better. Hardware is absurdly cheap. A machine that would have been a data centre in 2005 costs less than a phone. Self hosting went from a weekend of pain to an afternoon. And the tools for building software got dramatically better in about eighteen months, including for people who cannot write the code themselves.

Every one of those is still true while everything in the first two paragraphs is also true. That is the part I keep wanting to say. The doom is accurate and the opportunity is enormous, at the same time, and the reason that feels contradictory is that we have got used to treating pessimism as the mark of a serious person.

I am not asking anyone to be optimistic as a personality. That is exhausting and usually for sale. I am asking for something smaller. If you have a large audience and you are right about what is broken, consider spending some of that attention on what is still possible with the tools sitting in front of us, most of which are free, open, and currently underused.

Call the bullshit. Then tell people what to build instead.