This Link Party is Obsolete

I’m doing a Link Party! The theme for this party is planned obsolescence and how we relate to the future.

Planned Obsolescence Will Kill Us All 🔗︎

by Unlearning Economics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz68ILyuWtA

I’ve already summarized this one fairly thoroughly before, but it’s such a good introduction to planned obsolescence that it’s worth sharing again. This video is a great examination of planned obsolescence from an point of view of an economist, and finishes off by turning the criticism against capitalism. Many leftists youtubers can be a bit loosy goosy when it comes to critiquing capitalism as an economic system (mostly because most of them aren’t trained in economics), which UE criticizes fairly. This one feels more rigorous, and ties planned obsolescence directly to the core of capitalism. He argues it isn’t just something you can regulate away, and if you could it would hurt the economy in a major way and cause many to loose their jobs. Therefore within the capitalist system we have a vested interest preserving planned obsolescence (and capitalism). Planned obsolescence isn’t happening because of a bug of capitalism, it is happening because capitalism is working

Why we can’t have nice software 🔗︎

by Andrew Kelly: https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-we-cant-have-nice-software.html

This article takes a narrower view of planned obsolescence and focuses on software. Why is it that software just can’t seem to stay good? Why does software constantly have to change, even if it is for the worse? Why doesn’t “being completed” seem to be a state that we can accept software to be in?

For example, the state of chat apps is pretty depressing. Not because there is no innovation, but because there are a dozen of them, and they all have basically the same features yet they are not compatible with each other. They all have direct messages, group chats, optional end-to-end encryption, emoji reactions, whatever the fuck stories are, voice chat, and a personal profile. Most have some form of reply function, but a consensus has yet to arrive on that front. This should be standardizable (imagine not need a billion chat apps on your phone!), but it hasn’t been. Because if it was, innovation would stop and messaging would be completed. And the number of people that would need to work would shrink. And that would hurt the economy, despite incredible waste of working hours. Contributing to the economy is what is important.

As an aside, the author correctly points out that Discord’s “super reactions” wasn’t a thing that needed to happen. For those that use Discord and want to clean their eyeballs, here’s a script for uBlockOrigin that removes them. Paste it into the “My Filters” section in the settings.

discord.com##div[role="button"][aria-label="Add Super Reaction"]
discord.com##div[aria-label="Add Super Reaction"]
discord.com###message-add-reaction-1
discord.com###message-actions-add-reaction-1

discord.com##div[id^="message-reactions-"]>div:has(div[aria-label*='super react'])

An increasingly more important question for me is, is it possible that we have done enough with computers? Have we produced enough knowledge about them? Do we need more innovation? Would we be fine if we miss out on the “innovations” that could be? Isn’t it more important to reduce the waste and start caring for what we have?

If it isn’t obvious, my answers to these questions lean towards a “yes”. We have a lot of knowledge about computing, but I think for the most part, that knowledge and the computing resources (both hardware and, uh, wetware i.e. programmers) are directed towards bad ends. We live in an ecological crisis that is caused by over-extraction of resources; the materials used for computer hardware is better kept in the ground, and the programmers dealing with the endless software churn (implementing super reactions) could be doing more useful things. Instead we have tech capital perpetually trying to find a new way to pretend they are inventing something revolutionary. We are so high on innovation that we’ve stopped caring about care.

How to be a better reactionary 🔗︎

by Lee Vinsel: https://sts-news.medium.com/how-to-be-a-better-reactionary-1630b5098fbc

I don’t think this obsession with innovation is just about planned obsolescence masquerading as something good. It is also a form of fear of missing out. Historically, we’ve been very bad at predicting the future, and many inventions that we think of as revolutionary and crucial were discovered by accident, and the people that discovered or invented them did not understand how it would be used and valued. To declare an area as being done would therefore close the door to the future. What if VR is the future of computation (whatever that means)? What if LLMs will change everything and make everything better or ruin the world? What if a distributed append-only database could revolutionize the economic system (whatever that means)? What if you could have an app as your boss?

This articles rejects this obsession of the could-bes both from the industry but also from the critics. We are bad at predicting the future, so we should not let our fantasies of the future cloud the real sufferings of people today. We can’t be afraid of politics, and we can’t let technology that doesn’t exist be our escape from the real crises of today.