Martin Luther King Jr. famously had an idea of [negative vs positive peace](https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/when-peace-becomes-obnoxious), where negative peace is defined by an absence of conflict, a standard which is below what we can afford to accept:

> But peace is not merely to absence of this tension, but the presence of justice. And even if we didn’t have this tension, we still wouldn’t have positive peace. Yes it is true that if the Negro accept his place, accepts exploitation, and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be an obnoxious peace. It would be a peace that boiled down to stagnant complacity, deadening passivity...

Now, I'm not as wise, articulate, experienced, or targeted by the U.S. Government as Dr. King, and the only trait which carries any chance of my "catching up" is the last one. Nor is what I'm about to talk about nearly as directly important as the civil rights of the singular human race. But unfortunately, because of the tools being adopted by the enemies of civil rights, it's connected. So I want to talk about tech. And specifically, I want to talk about:
## Features.

[I'd like you to look at a stereo with me.](https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116677448712496117)

In fact, let me paste the post contents (by Thomas Fuchs) directly, in case the internet rots a little:

> This is a Pioneer Stereo Receiver SX-850 from just about 50 years ago.
> 
> It’s not spying on you.  
> It doesn’t need firmware updates.  
> There’s no subscription.  
> It’s widely compatible with other audio equipment from other manufacturers.  
> It won’t suddenly decide you can’t listen to explicit lyrics anymore.  
> It won’t “autocorrect” you, interrupt you with notifications or get hijacked by a botnet.  
> If a component breaks, it’s pretty easy fixable, even by amateurs.
> 
> It still works great, sounds great and looks great and it will probably do so for another 50 years. It’s a piece of useful electronics that you can hand down for literally generations.
> 
> Can you do this with modern technology?
>
> Why is modern technology considered “better”?

![[pioneer.png]]

That's a compelling question, isn't it? And I have a bad habit of trying to find real answers to rhetorical questions. The Pioneer SX-850 will probably always be fantastic at everything it was designed to do. So how does a newer piece of equipment compete year after year, compelling people to upgrade? Well, it has to do _more,_ and it doesn't do more for free.

The SX-850 won't show you the lyrics to a song, let alone track your current playback position within the lyrics. I mean, that's a cool feature. Spotify does that. Spotify also underpays artists and is participating in the fascist project of replacing their creative labor with AI. They also spent eyewatering amounts of money on a podcast full of COVID-19 misinformation at the height of the pandemic. So like, it's a mixed bag or whatever.

The thing is, you could make a similar "mixed bag" statement about most of the technology being shoved in our faces on the daily, and not just in the audio scene. Photoshop is some of the most impressive image editing software ever produced - and it's only legally available through an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription now, which increases in price solely according to when Adobe feel they can get away with a price hike (and by how much). Need Windows, because it's the only desktop OS that multiplayer anticheat tools support? That sucks if you care about not getting spied on by an always-on AI, your Start Menu opening quickly without a bunch of irrelevant internet results/ads, or not getting pwned by a malicious link in a Markdown document[^1]. And I'm trying not to single out AI as if it's the sole lever these companies are using to gape your asshole wider 3 inches at a time, but I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader: can you name one technology in your life that has a board of directors somewhere behind the scenes, but _hasn't_ crowbarred in some "AI" feature that nobody asked for?

Modern tech is awash in features, but also _anti-features_, about as many as the product owners believe they can get away with - and the more captive the audience, the blanker the check. Now let's look back at the SX-850 for a second. In fact, I zoomed in on the picture and went over the whole interface, and while I may not have quite the eye of a vintage audiophile[^2], I feel pretty confident to say that the Pioneer SX-850 Stereo Receiver has _no_ superficially visible anti-features.

"Old stuff good, new stuff bad" is too simple and shallow an explanation for what we're seeing here, and would actually be a bit untrue for reasons that will follow imminently. What we're actually seeing is a shift in values over time: **between the presence of features and the absence of anti-features, which does society prioritize?**

## Time is a flat circle

I do want to take a quick detour for some good news. Consumers _are_ getting collectively fed up with the anti-feature slop. A little bit can be tolerated for a long time. A lot can be tolerated for a short time. But when nearly every company makes a damnable pest of itself in the same spiteful ways for multiple years, it reaches a breaking point for consumers where they dramatically lower their tolerance and purge every piece of modern garbage they have the freedom to jettison.

This is leading to a lot of loosely-overlapping revival movements for old tech, old priorities, and an appreciation for amateur art. You won't see that at press releases or WWDC, [but you'll see it at commencement ceremonies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlQ7EoJDTQY). Some of the YouTube tech channels that are having the most stable time right now are the retro ones. I follow people who are making new games - in the year of our gourd, 2026 - for DOS, the Nintendo 64, and far more obscure platforms.

I think it's a mistake to call this purely nostalgia - it's really more of a synthesis of the static past and the blank page of the future, with actually quite a bit of emphasis on the latter. It's also a bit too big to fit merely under the banner "the kids are alright" - I've seen this act like an intergenerational connection below the radar of the tech you're _supposed_ to use, where kids know that companies are feeding them a tall plate of feces and naturally feel escapist towards eras _they weren't alive for,_ and veterans are volunteering as sherpas to guide them through the massive cornucopia of prior art. I'm somewhere in the middle, which means some days I'm the student kicking my heels watching [gloriouscow reverse-engineering the ROMs and layout of long-defunct chips](https://oldbytes.space/@gloriouscow/116676219582012085), and some days [I'm introducing the Gamespot review of Big Rigs Over the Road Racing](https://raphus.social/@MaddieM4/116676337759639726) to a new generation.

In short, for all that's fit to be complained about in the world right now, I'm broadly an optimist. I don't know who'll win in the end, but I have faith in the potential and enthusiasm of the counterculture, and that's more than I had a year ago.

## But how did we get here?

Well, actual features have diminishing returns. You make a product MVP with the bare minimum features to be useful. You add more features based on what would be an easy win. Eventually, you run out of things that have a reasonable effort-to-reward ratio, and enter the grey area of "well it's not hostile, but like, who really _needs_ this shit?"

Meanwhile, if your company is publicly traded (or has aspirations to be), you must somehow pull growth out of _some_ piece of your anatomy. Every single year. Maybe every single quarter. Planet Earth has a lot of people on it, but the number's still finite, and that's your unreachably-theoretical maximum user count. Each person only has so much wealth you can extract. There isn't _space_ to grow forever, and the longer you go, the more you have to act like a villain if you want to be able to tell your investors, "we staved off the growth plateau another year!"

I can't remember if I've ever explicitly blogged about why I think the stock market is a slaughterhouse that eventually kills all companies within its walls, while enriching the people running them, but it's not actually that complicated. Shareholders can freely abandon your ship when it stops "infinitely" growing, making for an immediate death spiral. So once you're walking up that escalator, you can never ever stop, or you _will_ be sucked into the high-torque mechanisms beneath. You also cannot keep pace forever. This is of no concern to C-suiters, who can golden-parachute their way to safety when you start wheezing.

The thing is, if _one_ company acts like this, you can easily avoid them. If you build the economy itself around infinite growth, and _every_ company acts like this, you create a cartel without even requiring coordination. What, am I gonna move from Spotify to YouTube Music? They suck too, and lost a bunch of my uploaded stuff from Google Music back in the day. And of course, this cycle is so standardized that we as consumers _expect_ to get a temporary free lunch that eventually entraps us in hostile ecosystems a la [Cowslip's Warren](https://thewriterslibraryblogging.com/2019/11/19/rereading-watership-down-an-analysis-of-cowslips-warren/).

No good intentions indefinitely survive contact with the investor class. You cannot look at any proprietary tech these days and expect any future short of enshittification, no matter how rosy they might look - or even be! - in the present. We rightfully make hay about Google dropping the "Don't Be Evil" motto, but it's also instructive to look at the same history backwards: even this notoriously evil empire once had the most wholesome of mottos, and was generally taken seriously as a consumer-defending entity, _and for valid reason._ You are not immune to propaganda, and your darlings are not immune to investors.

## Is open source an escape hatch?

Uh, kinda, but it's complicated?

In a broad strokes sense, open source software usually has the freedom and motivation to work on the old set of priorities, which happen to be expressed well in the Hippocratic Oath: _first, do no harm._ You don't have the same obligations as a proprietary company.

Unfortunately, this is the difference between _will enshittify_ and _might enshittify._ Consider the recent data integrity regressions in `rsync`[^3]  after original maintainer Andrew Tridgell came back to lead the project again for the first time in ages, and began making sweeping changes under the apparent maxim "Claude is my Copilot."[^4] There wasn't some shareholder pressure to do that, but, in Tridge's (carefully worded) defense, there _was_ pressure, and it's useful to examine that.

Being an open source maintainer can be intensely difficult and/or thankless, but if it's one, it's usually both. There has always been a funding gap that often manifests most visibly as a feature gap (to proprietary tech's advantage). The `xzutils` backdoor a few years ago was heavily dependent on cyberbullying the maintainer, making him feel guilty for not reviewing and merging PRs fast enough.

This used to be bad, but thanks to innovation, now it's _terrible._ LLMs are finally good enough to catch large volumes of latent security bugs in popular FOSSware, but they also still have a painfully high false-positive rate, and are often operated by people who are unwilling or unable to check the existing issue list for duplicates, or who are motivated to insist that every bug is a security bug. The life of a maintainer is being hit in the face with a firehose of URGENT!!!1! tickets, with _at minimum_ the usual percentage of entitled shitbirds filing them, and no disclosure window at all before the users under your care are at risk. Which of those tickets are actual CVEs? Better hurry and figure it out!

Of course, LLM companies make money off both the attacking and defending sides (the only defense against a bad guy with an LLM is a CI with an LLM), while also fracturing the FOSS ecosystem for AI conscientious objectors like myself, while also rarely actually paying maintainers to allow them to work as a job rather than a stressful hobby, while also inspiring a crowd of credulous devotees to harass maintainers who _don't_ use LLMs to "keep up", while also enabling license-washing of labor done under copyleft, while also undermining the public ability to trust FOSS (again, leading to proprietary advantage), while also being proprietary and often subscription-based vendors themselves, while also on a mission to devalue all skilled labor and make it less consequential to politically cleanse "undesirables" who used to hold all the infra together...

I mean. Gosh. I'm not saying that this tech was specifically invented to kill the FOSS ecosystem so that the only viable tech options are proprietary antifeature-drenched cartelslop, in a way that actually feels politically viable in our FOSS-in-everyone's-floorboards 2020s, but... if you _did_ want to do that...

It's easy to dog on LLMs, because they're bad, and at the epicenter of the current crisis, and we should run them out of town with pitchforks as a pretty self-evident given. But if/when we do, that won't automatically solve our decades-long problems, like XKCD's iconic vital package maintained by one unpaid guy in Nebraska, or some of the usability or feature gaps that keep users locked into proprietary platforms. Fundamentally, the global economy is designed to tilt in favor of [extractors, abusers, and rent-seekers](https://youtu.be/W9mhsW5aWJM?t=40), leaving the well-intentioned the meager role of guerrilla resistance.

## Adaptive resistances in the Hextech Gunblade age

Okay. I'm an optimist. Surely I have a better idea for the long-term health of FOSS than to just lay down and take it. And I do, I have a couple actually, thank you for having faith in me.

Firstly, we have to stop the bleeding. There's no way to use LLMs without legitimizing their industry, even if you manage to get it for free. You do have to be a hardliner who says, "this is the tool of the enemy, and we will not use it." More generally, reducing your proprietary tech exposure is pretty much always a good idea to the extent you possibly can.

Secondly, we have to physically, logistically, and emotionally take care of each other. We are in a political and technological shit tornado right now. Mutual care, even mutual aid, is how we ride it out and live to see brighter days again.

But thirdly? We gotta get mean. It's pride month, Stonewall is on our lips, and it's fresh in our minds what a brick is for when the fascists are coming for you. Bricks are for windows. Bricks are for skulls. A purely defensive strategy is not defensive enough. We have to make it agonizing to be a rent-seeker.

That might sound a little abstract, and it is, intentionally - because there's an almost unlimited spectrum of good trouble you can get up to. Tech used to make companies scared, because the folks adopting it were slightly-nerdy everyday people who said stuff like "I want to listen to this album, but I don't want to pay for a record label exec's third divorce. I'm gonna figure out what this BitTorrent thing is." Tech was not yet the tool of the enemy. It was the plowshares we were starting to turn against our masters, to call politicians on their lies, to find out we had more in common with someone in Sudan than someone in D.C. People were talking in dead serious tones about abandoning geographic citizenships in favor of digital ones, creating virtual spaces where the old powers were powerless. Tech was the rebel's advantage, and it must become our advantage again.

I recently spent a few days making a video that was... honestly a bit impulsive and unscripted for a multi-day thing? Because I was mad at the way Wikipedia the leadership were treating Wikipedia _the people who did shit._ It was only afterwards, talking with my goddaughter and hearing her reaction to the video - the way it wasn't just educational, but actually put the smell of blood in the water, the way it made "untouchable" institutions something we could hit back _and the education was how_ - it was only then that I really started to realize I'd accidentally stumbled into the thing I wanted to spend (most of) my video effort doing[^5]. The people we need to fight against are preying on public illiteracy. So the most valuable thing I can do is teach people how tech actually works, specifically through the lens of becoming ungovernable.

I have literally no idea what the next topic I cover is going to be, except it'll probably require some research. But I know that we can't keep tolerating disposable, subscription, extractive slop as a diet anymore. Whatever the next year looks like, is ours to define, not merely accept. It will _not_ look like last year's model (but with more tensor cores, the better to report on you, my dear). It will look like a street full of panick-stricken financiers surrounded on all sides by ordinary people, in great numbers, with boring, sturdy, simple weapons in their hands.

[^1]: "I love how smart Notepad is now!" - nobody with even the barest grasp of what Notepad is _for._

[^2]: I don't consider myself an "audiophile", but for certain songs like _Closer_ by Nine Inch Nails, I have to admit, I get why they want to fuck music.

[^3]: `rsync` isn't "just" backup software, but considering how popular it is for making backups, data integrity bugs are... mucho no bueno.

[^4]: The more religious trauma you have, the more likely you're going to laugh or wince here.

[^5]: I reserve some of my energy for [stupid nonsense that replenishes my soul.](https://makertube.net/w/oogafDQLhLLCNmqFTB9Rfd) That's called self-care. Never heard of it? Read a book.