The fear to contribute
Hello Void, its me again.
I still write this all in the assumption that no one will ever read it. So dear Void, here are some of my fears. Actually, writing this blog into the void is already contributing to the problem I am having. We are apparently now in the age of the near dead Internet. Its not really dead now, but every day countless LLMs crawl and fill the web as we knew it with more and more crap and soon the signal to noise ratio reaches a total level of chaos so that there is nothing to be gained anymore. I actually read the argument that this new Web will be as the old web in a way. You needed to curate content because there is so much slob out there, while in the old days there was just no way to actually find anything.
But anyway. I haven't written any great Open Source libraries or actually contributed in a meaningful way. I think I have raised wooping two issues in two different Open Source Projects that got solved eventually. And I would like to think that finding and documenting issues has some value. There are also some personal projects of mine that are on Github and maybe some of my scripting might actually help someone out there. But here begins the problem. With Microsoft having acquired Github I actually mirrored some stuff on Codeberg, but if I am job hunting again, it might be advantageous to have something on Github to show off, maybe even some history of contribution.
The other day I dabbled for a quick moment in Python to write some API automation for Immich, its nothing fancy, probably something that will eventually find itself into a proper tool native to Immich. I would have loved to contribute that, but I know nothing about Svelte and writing a pull request into a big projects seems daunting at best. To the point, there appears to be an active Subreddit for Immich. I swore to myself to not contribute to Reddit in any form since the death of the API Clients a year ago and till now I was able to adhere to my oaths. But here I have this tiny little tool for a niche use that might help someone else. I created something and I still believe in this whole Open Source thing, to share code, to contribute towards society in one form or another. But I really cant. There is no big public forum anymore. Any place I can spontaneously think of belongs to the big corpos. Everything I write anywhere will be mined. There is all this creative energy and all I can thing is how it will fuel some vast mega corporation that will use my work to further deconstruct society as whole.
This is of course a big hyperbole, I cannot thing how Cursor and the likes can bring down society directly but some other stuff might actually train LLMs that will be used in the hands of some oppressor. This is the danger with everything remotely cool. Countries ban the use of the Flipper Zero for that reason, unshackled tools are somewhat dangerous in the wrong hands. But on the other hand..those hands always seem to belong to big cooperation and countries and less in those of some gangsters.
There are of course less poisoned forums and communications, there are mailing lists, remnants of the old web actually. But those are clunky to use and need some registration. Sometimes you actually have to know someone that introduces you. Maybe even personal contact. And I am terrible with that. I am postponing going to a meetup of my local CCC chapter for months. I miss the inherent ease and trust that the 2010-2016 (or so) web had.
So back to topic. Deep in my mind I fear that everything I create, everything I do will be used by some faceless rent seeker that make themselves even richer than before without giving anything back. Everything I do will just fuel the agenda of some techno fascist and make my life actively worse. And the thing is..I don't create that much, basically nothing of use. I love using Immich for my photos, I love sharing photos in the fediverse and this discussions on feddit. And yet, it really feels like everything that is done will monitored, stolen and used against us. How do people feel that actually create the big backbone tools that are used for free by big corpos?
But what is the alternative? Goat farming? Just rolling to the side and let them eat us? Accepting the role as serf for aforementioned techno fascists that seek to break the world into a new feudal structure? This is by the way less tinfoil as I would like it to be, there quite open with this.
Feeling wise, I really hate this world we have reached. And the worst, I cannot think of anyway out of this situation, they seem to have all the cards. Logically speaking this is to be expected. Regardless of objective reality, elites in all of history always seek to have the total domain over information, so my assessment might be false, but every strategy needs information first and foremost. Why do I have to think about such things when all I want is to share a small neat script with handrails that might help people. All I wanted was to give back to the community, not lead the revolution. This is depressing. Can someone call an adult?