gram: page

> ./2025-08-08.feudalism.md

Lenses
(coming soon!)

---
name: End Online Feudalism
summary: |
  "what is the duty that's your sacred duty?
  That's yours alone to reach."

  - Seph Gentle
composer: c4lliope
labels:
  - policy
  - business
---

On my long sailing expeditions,
which can take a week or more to measure the same distance
that a car can run in an hour,
I rely on my propane grill for cheer,
and my chosen podcast dialogues for company.

Yesterday, caught up in a flurry of programming errors
and managing a video call to relaunch some sleepy machines,
I pressed pause in the middle of
[Seph Gentle's Local-First Podcast interview][lofi.fm].

[lofi.fm]: https://www.localfirst.fm/21/transcript

I had the pleasure this morning,
as I plugged the 5g modem back in,
sipped my coffee, and logged on to manage
my corporate financial crisis,
to hear Seph describe some really compelling ideas
that ring loud and clear in my ears.

Since coming to DC I have had a serious challenge in finding peers
who obsess on their programming language opinions in the same manner that I do;
the impulse to sign on to a corporate contract
is usually how people end up in this area,
and any nascent start-ups here
have only the machine-learning boom to credit.

This example Seph gives, at around 1:14,
seems like a clear summary of the problems I hope to challenge,
bridging the domains of legal policy and online policy,
where communicación norms are being chosen in a clearly un-democratic manner:

> The cloud always feels like... feudal city states, you know?
> So back before we had democracy,
> and before we had countries,
> you have these towns, and the town?
> It's not a democracy; there's one ruler, the noble, the local noble.
> And if you upset the noble, there's no laws necessarily; that's a recent invention.
>
> The noble would say, no, not you.
> And you'd either be exiled if you're lucky or like,
> you know, hung from the town square,
> if you did something the noble didn't like.
>
> And no one owns property.
> Only the noble owns the whole town.
> That's the rule, right?
> And so if you have a house, you have a house
> because the noble has graciously allowed you to live there.
> And that's the rule, you know?
>
> And if the noble wants to do, whatever they want to do,
> There's no higher law than the noble.
>
> And that feels like the software ecosystem that we exist in today,
> where, you know, there's the Google city.
> And as much as I have endless respect for so many individuals that I know
> who I've worked with at Google. I think they're amazing people.
>
> But - the experience is Google is a feudal city state.
> Where you walk into the gates and if the noble, if the local Lord
> doesn't like you, then you can get banished at any moment out of Google.
>
> There's no recourse.
> There's no laws.
> There's no rules.
> It's not a democracy.
> you don't have any privacy.
> Everything you do is monitored 24/7
> by the Google cameras that exist everywhere.
>
> You know, in their nice little plastic,
> you know, beautiful designed, whatever.
>
> And if you don't like it, you can go down the street to the Apple town where
> everything is run by Apple and Apple has slightly different values from Google.
> And I happen to like Apple's philosophy on privacy more than Google's,
> but it's the same kind of world.
>
> And I personally believe in democracy,
> and I like that my streets aren't owned by a company,
> call me crazy, but yeah.
>
> And I don't know how it interacts with AI, but I feel like we've got, I don't know.
> It's like, we've got this opportunity to being more creative, to make
> more stuff, to not need billions of dollars of funding, and it's up
> to us what we want to do with that.

There are some ideas that compel because they inspire,
and there are some ideas that compel because they scare.

So much of the corporate landscape online is focused on inspiring people -
as an example, I clicked through the landing page of [n8n] a bunch
in the last couple days,
and their product branding seems to promise the capabilities
of either [Thor], [The Flash], or [Shazam].

[n8n]: https://n8n.io/
[Thor]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor
[The Flash]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flash
[Shazam]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(DC_Comics)

So, no one needs a reminder of why techies are seen as children.

2025 is here, and all of us agree that we woke up to a hellscape.
Here I am, falling asleep on the Chesapeake Bay,
and looking out on a horizon that is as smog-filled
as the Beijing weekdays I remember from 2013.

All of us have made connections to friends from across the globe,
simply soon enough to see their neighborhoods pummeled by bombs
into rubble on our media feeds.

The rate of censorships from our own government this year
has us asking if 1984 really could be a simple 40-year anachronism,
rather than a spooky and silly dystopia.

So I'm happy to be holding onto a real idea here,
that our communicacións are more or less broken,
because of decisions made decades ago
that should be more challenged by the public than they are.

- - -

Of course, I need to think of how I can lend my skills
to this scenario.

A couple minutes before the feudalism discussion,
Seph raises the issue of Dharma:

> there's this idea of Dharma that's talked about,
> in some Eastern philosophy, which is like,
> what is the duty that's your sacred duty?
> That's yours alone to reach.

> And that duty, by the way, might just be to like, be a really great parent.
> It doesn't have to be anything grand or grandiose in any way,
> but asking that question of what is it yours to do in the world?
> That's yours uniquely that no one else will do if you don't do it.

> I think that's really the question
> that we want to be asking ourselves as creative workers.

Of course I am unable to nicely ask Google or Amazon
to please explain the business purposes behind their legal agreements.
Please give me a chance to read through them before deciding
if I should sign up for another email provider.
The busy-ness of our lives, the quick pace we all embrace and rely on,
keeps us from yelling about the abuse,
keeps us coming back to the same horrid relationship
that gives us the sense of reward we crave.

In the end, domestic abuse is also how dogs were domesticated.
I'm far too much of a lone wolf to obey capricious calls from an alien lord,
in exchange for gaudy toys, and [saliva-inducing snacks][pavlov].

[pavlov]: https://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html

- - -

So I bounce and roll around on the sailboat
(the spin from shade to sun now indicating
that the tide is changing, and I should be going),
and I consider how to arm the peasant rebellion,
in 2025, using code and phone and new languages of expression.

I am the one on a soap-box,
largely of my own making,
yelling in the town square of the impending bloodbath.

The wages of our labor,
spelled out in songs and images on screens across the globe,
are of course becoming repurposed behind the horizon
by managers in a board room,
who run the psychology experiments
using the metrics of click and spend,
cheerfully ignorant of our basic unmet needs,
as we ride to anyplace we can call home,
in a subway car beside someone tuned into
a streamers popping head-shots and yelling obscenity into the abyss.

The escapism we are being sold is supposed to inspire?
No; speaking of scary.