My last blog post was in 2021. In a few months, it will be three years old. A lot has happened in that time. I lost my father to pneumonia; began my medical transition; and found two loving partners. After I bought a MacBook Air in March of 2021, I quickly stopped needing any of the network infrastructure that I’d built in years prior, and arrived at that “Autopsy of a Dead Paradigm.” Without that infrastructure, what was I going to post on this blog? None of it made sense anymore. And yet I held onto this domain, and continue to serve my old posts to this day. So why am I back?
Because I’m a human being with thoughts and a need to express them.
Before, I had some delusion of posting information someone might find useful. In one instance, I received an email thanking me for one of my posts. That made my day. But my blog was always tailored to the audience I wanted to attract, rather than serve my need to communicate. I’ve come to understand this as a disease of the modern web.
I’ve felt something was wrong with the way we use computers now for well over a decade. Whereas in the 1990s, we could buy physical media containing all manner of reference materials (Encarta, for example), and useful software for managing our affairs (Microsoft Money comes to mind), now we rely on web services. Even as storage and compute power increased exponentially, our computers began to increasingly resemble thin clients for the buzzword of the day - the “cloud”.
Simultaneously, web browsers increased expoentially in complexity. For example, between 2002 and 2011, Mozilla Firefox evolved from version 0.1 to 4.0. In the last decade, that number has balooned to 124. To put this into perspective, browsers alone now far surpass the installed size of Windows 98, and rival - if not far exceed - the complexity of the JVM, a once ubiquitous web technology cast to the wayside for its excessive complexity and frequent CVEs.
Using NextDNS to monitor and restrict my web traffic (such that I don’t spend all of my time on YouTube and Reddit), I learned that even Firefox constantly pings Mozilla services in the background. Most egregiously, however, my phone looks up an Apple subdomain over fifteen hundred times per day. I’ve recently transitioned back to Fedora Linux, but even that makes semi-regular pings to fedoraproject.org roughly every 10 minutes.
I suppose this is where I’m supposed to pull the reader aside and explain the importance of privacy. So many people have done that by now as to create an entire market for snake oil salesmen, complete with manipulative advertising and attention hijacking. The conversation about privacy has gone mainstream to put it one way. It got picked up by people with big pockets and turned into the very thing it sought to undermine. And it’s not what this post is about.
This post is about recognizing that the world forgot the KISS principle. Systems today are needlessly overengineered, understood by few, and controlled by a handful of corporations with a vested interest in keeping your eyes glued to the screen, and milking your attention for every advertising dollar it’s worth. Honestly, it’s about so many things that my struggle in organizing the information is bleeding through. Luckily I don’t have to say it all in one post.