Voxel Quest
  • Home
  • News
  • Videos
  • Gallery
  • Contact or Subscribe
  • downloads and source

(R)evolve

7/4/2008

4 Comments

 
[Original article that I wrote can be found here on medium.com if you prefer]

‘ Where are the revolutionaries?

It used to be the younger generation, around college-age, would rethink their parents’ systems: political, business, etc. These kids would look at the buildings around them and imagine what could be accomplished in razing those buildings and creating a new foundation. I don’t see that anymore. I see college-aged kids simply wanting to add a new floor on top of a very rickety shack that should have been discarded ages ago.

Ironically, the people writing these types of manifestos for Computer Science are almost exclusively older. They often wrote that first foundational layer and know that it needs to be overhauled.

It’s true we’ve tried many variations on these themes in the past, but if we do the logical syllogism in our heads, we come invariably to the conclusion this is how the future should be. We know these things. So why give up? What does failure mean other than that we need to continue trying?

It infuriates me that we don’t try — when people say “we’ve tried everything and there’s no way forward.” No, we’re just lazy. Charles Duell never actually said in 1899 that “everything has already been invented,” yet, oh my God, we can’t stop saying it now. So I’m going to ask again, “Where are the revolutionaries?” ’

— david927

When we optimize for the dollar rather than the product, we are no longer engineers or artists - we are salesmen.

When we invest based on traction or growth, we are not betting on an improved future, we are banking on an existing present.

I having nothing against making money, I just believe it should be a byproduct of running a good business, not a metric optimized at the expense of everything else. Similarly, I believe in competition, but in a race to the bottom, no one is actually a winner.

To the average person, things probably seem fine right now. In fact, the average person is probably eternally content in the present, whenever that present might be. As someone who clings to the edge of the bell curve, and not necessarily the favorable edge, I want to help you understand that vector between now and the future is discontent.

…

There was something magic about the 80s and 90s. We were small enough that the individual mattered. We had real heroes. Software was an arcane art that took expertise to ship and worthiness to occupy a store shelf. There was no room for shovelware. There was no ceaseless drip of notifications. We were not glorified drug dealers vying for your attention span. Nobody knew what a dark pattern was. Applications did not harbor their own moral ecosystems dictated by the whims of advertisers and boardrooms.

By necessity everything was smaller, faster, less wasteful, free of bloat. Engineering was the business, not a business expense. It took dark wizardry to cram worlds into kilobytes, and that expertise was valued. Software was not crippled by a myriad of bad platforms, store restrictions, privacy concerns, and permissions.

Somewhere along the way we lost a few things. We lost our freedom, we lost our courage to enact change, we lost our reason to care. We need to care again. We to dream again. We need to feel something, anything, other than passively numb. We need heroes. We need people with brains, guts, hearts, and maybe a loose grip on sanity. We need to challenge things. I refuse to believe this is the best we can do.

The solution is not gradual, it is radical. We need to rethink the operating system, the compiler, the web browser, the internet, and maybe even the computer itself. We need to lay our own fiber if that’s what it takes. We need to ditch legacy, because legacy is not the future. A Formula One car does not have a passenger seat for the horse and a trunk to store the cart in.

We need to rethink the rules. The rules that create perverse incentives and favor monopolies. We need to level the playing field. We need to put the consumer first. Software should not be something that we fight with, that exploits us, that siphons our attention span and our wallet, that pits us against each other. It should augment our abilities and our free time to do other things. We need to hit the reset button.

Right now I probably sound insane, which ok, maybe even par for the course. Reminder: Apple is a quasi-trillion dollar company, started by a crazy homeless person, that competed against juggernauts of its time like IBM. I am definitely not Steve Jobs, but I know what future I want to live in - and I will get there or (literally!) die trying.

When you give up everything that exists right now, the possibilities are virtually endless. There is nothing stopping you from molding the rules in your vision. Want to create your own internet, your own computer, your own blank slate? Go ahead. It will be small, but it will be yours. We are engineers, we are artists, we are gods of our own domain, we are in control. We are not here to stand on the shoulders of giants, we are here to throw stones.

On our net, no domains are yet registered, there are no search engines to compete with, there are no ranking algorithms throwing you into a predestined bucket. There are no advertisements - does that sound crazy? When was the last time you tuned into commercial TV instead of Netflix? 

On our grid we own all the fiber and all of the airspace. We paid for it, we put it there, and we own it. What was once an obscene tax paid for a connection will now empower content creators - they are the only reason the connection exists in the first place.

In our system there are rules. Anarchy sounds appealing in theory but that has led us to the present, where corporations abuse the lack of rules or bully people into using their own. I believe it is possible to create a system that maintains freedom while preserving order. It is also possible to create a system that avoids the pitfalls that have led us to where we are now.

In our content, politics are not present unless you are looking for them. The same goes for any other mind-numbing content. Using newfangled technology like tagging, you see what you want to see, rather than corporations showing you what they know will drive engagements or hiding what they believe qualifies for censorship.

In our browser there is no distinction between a native application and a web application. Does that sound dangerous? Good, get out of your comfort zone and quickly learn who to trust; rethink security in a way that does not cripple consumers and creators.

In our interface creative freedom is allowed and encouraged. Material Design and Metro are not gods. We are artists, not cult members. Bring back skeuomorphism, bring back shading, bring back anything that qualifies as variety. Rethink the mechanics of interaction, because no one has bothered to do that for several decades. We can probably come up with a painless way to center elements horizontally and vertically if we are so daring.

In our compilers “write once and run anywhere” is a reality. Performance is peak, package and build systems make sense, frustration is minimal. We are not simply piling on a new standard, we are crushing inferior standards. We will spend our time building rather than fighting three layers of APIs and searching for obscure bugs. Software will only survive based on its quality and merit. Knowledge and experience will matter because strong software does not run on a weak foundation.

​We thought we conquered everything but there is still an infinite land left to explore. The point is, the future is nebulous and distant, but the present is whatever we want to make it, starting right now. We are only trapped in a cage of our mental design. There is a future out there waiting for anyone bold enough to claim it.







Notes:
Although this is not related to Voxel Quest, I thought this piece that I wrote might be worth reposting here, forgive me if it is not!
For those wondering, because the question often comes up, I am still working on Voxel Quest although at a rate probably 100x slower than normal due to life constraints.

4 Comments
A Person
8/25/2018 08:14:10 pm

As someone who remembers the days when compilers worked, but dropping to assembly for anything performance sensitive was still common (or required), and still remembers writing interrupt handlers for DOS. As someone who ran a dial-up BBS for anyone who wanted to log in. As someone who wrote entire programs in assembly because compilers couldn't be trusted to generate the fully optimal version...

Yes. We had an internet where people effectively did whatever they wanted, and it wasn't perfect but it spawned many things. We're all now locked in to the child-safe versions of everything. Windows 10 is great and all, protecting against all kinds of bizarre and sometimes obscure threats, but it also protects against me using my computer.

You know what? I don't mind running only a single program at a time. It's all my brain can really focus on anyway. I don't mind if a poorly written program takes down the whole machine, I can debug and patch that. What I mind are the 9 million things the computer has decided it needs to be doing in the background constantly in order to... what? Make my "experience" smoother? Wouldn't it be smoother if you weren't doing all these things in the background? It doesn't seem to matter which OS you use anymore, you get defaulted features that should have been optional.

Remember when you could turn javascript off in your browser if you didn't want the load of running someone else's code locally and still view websites? Javascript JITs have been billed as getting faster... but isn't it just that we now have the resources for a GB of memory and a spare processor core to execute things on? How is that situation any better, except as your article said from the whole security standpoint, than just giving me the option to allow sites to run a native application?

I made it through 20 years without using an antivirus and managed to never get infected. How do I know that if I wasn't running one? I disassembled anything I didn't trust. I can't inspect an entire program anymore, everything has been bloated to the ridiculous levels everyone complained about in the word processors of the 90s.

I have nearly 8TB of hard drive space and barely know what's taking it up anymore. How do I back that up these days, without uploading to someone else's computer? What happened to all of the very high capacity optical media we were supposed to be getting? From historical experience, I trust a burned DVD or BluRay to last over a decade even if abused. I trust a hard drive to fail in 5 years or less, regardless. Why not a lower speed SSD with huge capacity and an internal battery to keep bare minimum power / prevent data loss. Why are tape drives of that capacity $2000? We've had that technology forever and it's out of consumer price ranges, always. Why do I feel like the "cloud" is being forced on people?

Just some thoughts. I very much like your article & thoughts on this subject. Thanks!

Reply
Gavan Woolery
9/26/2018 10:14:38 pm

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I agree :)

Reply
Connor Mackay
2/25/2019 12:33:11 pm

Develop at your own pace, if that means it'll be a very long time before you release anything then so be it.

Reply
Nox
3/11/2019 07:18:42 pm

This is very inspiring.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

Legal Information