Tech doesn't need a big company

An idea can become a reality & be easily reachable to more people than ever before. It might be something that appeals to only a tiny fraction of people who are scattered around the world, but the effort to create one copy of an idea is most of what's needed.

In the past, the reality of getting something into people's hands, like a book, might have been a far greater challenge than producing the first copy.

An idea that can be expressed with technology doesn't need a huge group of people, multiple departments or a big round of investment. Any idea can go out into the world with a only a bit of technical knowledge, where it can compete with everything else, & technical skills are less of an issue than ever in getting an idea out on the internet.

The gaming industry is a great example of this. So much innovation & excitement has come from individuals or small teams trying new things, working with minimal tools, compared to the barely recognisable, massive companies who seem to spend more time tacking on company names to the ends of their own than actually producing games.

This does mean that there are more works produced than ever before. As someone who has released a number of different works out into the world, I'm aware of the realities of getting your hopes up & not finding the audience hoped for. But I've always had the chance to get an idea out, & this is much more than many hopeful dreamers had in the past.

Much of what we rely on today is in the hands of huge tech companies (many of whom have taken shaky promises of AI as reason to cut their numbers down). If people with new, great ideas keep them out of the hands of billionaires, seeing a purpose beyond quick profit, & if we support these ideas as they come, then we can have more freedom & choice than ever before.

It won't be easy. We, for example, Locked in by design.

Locked in by design

Consumer group Which? has accused the tech giant of “trapping” users into its cloud service. It says 40 million iCloud customers could be entitled to roughly £77 each if successful. -- BBC News UK (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c932d1r0p96o) £77 ($102) isn’t a whole lot of money,

Better TechThomas Heslin

But the fundamentals of computing are on our side, since Any computer can talk to any other.

Any computer can talk to any other

But may they communicate? Every time some tech company erected a 10-foot enshittifying fence, someone would show up with an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder. Those 11-foot ladders represented the power of interoperability, the inescapable bounty of the Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine, which, by definition, is capable

Better TechThomas Heslin