Edward Clayton Andrews @edclayand@orbsafe.masto.host

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Some hardcore gaming going on here with these #cats

It's time for a new agreement. A new balance

Several aspects of modern industrial life are unsustainable. I'm just going to run off a couple that I have at the top of my mind, this isn't an exhaustive list.

Eventually, I'll talk about what we can do about this.

This is getting scattered, I'll explain.

Because it's a crisis of scale.

Industrial scale, capitalist scale, growth for the sake of growth, growth without purpose or end, is the problem.

I've recently encountered some people who noticed this, saw it, and then decided that this means Humans are a Cancer on the world and went full nihilistic ecofascist.

That's not helpful, and it's wrong. I want to call that out explicitly. We can do better without giving up.

When I say Human Scale Production and Consumption I mostly say them together.

We're facing a crisis, in that we have changed the climate on this planet in a way that makes it unsafe for people, and it is accelerating.

Lots of "solutions" to this problem have been proposed, but they're mostly Bad.

Everyone driving electric cars won't solve this crisis. Everyone eating vegetarian won't solve the crisis. Switching to bioplastics won't solve the crisis.

And that brings us to Human Scale Production and Consumption, which will take some time to unpack.

That article though, and many of the articles that I've written on the topic, fall in to the classic trap of assuming that this is a technical problem to be solved by technology.

It is not a technical problem to be solved by technology. It is a cultural, human-level problem, it has to be solved by a change in ideology.

I first encountered these ideas from another human being here: https://medium.com/@jkriss/anti-capitalist-human-scale-software-and-why-it-matters-5936a372b9d

Yes, I understand the irony of that piece being on medium, but I think Jkriss works for netflix now, so ...?

Basically, make it big enough to be useful to you and a small community, and make it simply enough that it can be re-deployed and interoperate.

Don't try to manage 10,000 servers and complicated load balancing with millions of dollars on the line.

Build tools that actively resist capitalization by encouraging interoperability (and optimizing for smaller loads and simpler systems.)

Human Scale computers mean Hubs and Spokes.

It means you know your Admin, or at least know how to reach them.

It means your site serves a few dozen or maybe a few hundred people, and probably interconnects with other similarly sized hubs.

This concept, and it's implications, are really easy for fediverse users to grasp. We live it, especially on smaller instances.

But this concept can (and should!) be extended to every aspect of computing.

“Don’t ask to ask” as a blanket rule as pushed by tech chats and techy workplaces has done so much damage to the idea of compassionate discourse.

If you’re about to ask someone a heavy personal question or bring up a topic that might be uncomfortable to them, you should absolutely ask to ask.

as a consumer, i find paywalls look less like a business model and more of an internet prank, like rickrolling