An Open Source Guide To Ending The World

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born:
now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

I mean this, but probably not in the way that you think.

Each person growing up learns “how the world works”. This understanding is unique per person, based upon their lived experiences. The World experienced by a soldier with combat experience is likely much darker than the world experienced by software engineer.

“The World” looks much different to someone who is rooted in lived experience, versus someone who build an understanding on second hand experience. Reading war novels and biographies is not the same as seeing a friend killed beside you.

Personally, I’m a software engineer. I experience 9–5 jobs, long term relationships, and generally enough money to live a comfortable life. I try to keep up on the world, but unless it’s in my family or my industry, I likely only have second hand experience at best.

As a software engineer at a major tech company, I’ve been experiencing a change in the industry over the last few decades that I do not like.

My choices are rarely life or death on a daily basis, like they would be for a soldier, but I’ve come to see how the changes within the industry that we’ve accepted over the years has created power for people who should not be trusted with it.

The push towards monetization of data has created markets, legal and not, for tremendous amounts of data of us, as individuals. While it’s hard to be concerned about a gas rewards card specifically, the aggregate data set can paint a scarily accurate picture of each of us.

Did you know that while a subpoena is required for the government to request your personal data, it is not required to purchase data that was already offered for sale?

Consolidation of industries, both inside and outside of tech, have given tremendous power in their relevant fields. Companies like Zillow can use their technology stack to not only take a sizable chunk of commissions for real estate sales, they can also use their detailed information to strategically invest in real estate as well.

You don’t need to be in the tech industry itself to leverage the same tools that the tech firms use in order to explode your bottom line.

There’s an amazing amount of Open Source tooling for data analytics. There are Open Source AI stacks. There are Open Source frameworks for Open Source languages that run on Open Source clusters running on Open Source operating systems. All of this is available Free of charge, with paid support available as needed.

Just look at how the finance world has been able to leverage these tools and their special levels of access to the markets in order to model stocks and extract value from our collective investments.

It’s estimated that 70% of Enterprise software stacks are Open Source software. As a software engineer, I thought this meant we were winning. The truth is a bit more complicated than that.

There is an upside though. We can leverage the same tools in new ways in order to regain some power over How The World Works.

We can buy what we need from our phones, while understanding that the products will be delivered locally when possible.

We can pay each other to do work, without sharing profits with stock brokers.

We can communicate with each other without using tools owned by Billionaires.

We can never solve every need by ourselves, but we can have more control over who benefits from how we do business.

The future can belong to a few, or all of us. Not through government but through community and local business.