【译】打破咒语

–[ Breaking The Spell

It can feel like the world is in a dreamlike state; a hype-driven delirium, fueled by venture capital and the promises of untold riches and influence. Everyone seems to be rushing to implement the latest thing, hoping to find a magic bullet to solve problems they may not have, or even understand.

While hype has always been a thing, in the past few years (2020-2024), we have witnessed several large pushes to integrate untested, underdeveloped, and unsustainable technology into systems that were already Going Through It. Once the charm wears off, and all the problems did not just magically disappear, they drop these ideas and move on to the next, at the cost of everyone else.

Many of these New & Exciting ideas involve introducing increasingly opaque abstraction layers. They promise to push us towards The Future, yet only bring us further from understanding our own abilities and needs. It's easy to sell ideas like these. What isn't easy, is creating something both practical and sustainable. If we want to make the world more sustainable, we need to understand the inputs, outputs, dependencies, constraints, and implementation details of the systems we rely on. Whenever we make it more difficult to know something, we inch closer to an information dark age.

After the past several decades of humanity putting all of its collective knowledge online, we are seeing more ways to prevent us from accessing it. Not only is good information harder to find, bad information is drowning it out. There are increasing incentives to gatekeep and collect rent on important resources, and to disseminate junk that is useless at best, and harmful at worst. In all of this chaos, the real threat is the loss of useful, verified, and trusted information, for the sake of monetizing the opposite.

Fortunately, there are still hackers. For every smokescreen that clouds our vision, hackers help to clear the air. For every new garden wall erected, hackers forge a path around it. For every lock placed on our own ideas and cultural artifacts, hackers craft durable picks to unshackle them. Hackers try to understand what lies beyond their perspective. Hackers focus on what is real, and what is here.

We can move forward through this bullshit. We can work together to maintain good information, and amplify the voices of those who are creating and curating it. We can learn how things actually work, share the details, and use these mechanisms to do some good. We can devise new methods of communication and collaboration, and work both within and between our communities to jam the trash compactor currently trying to crush us to death.

Hacking is both a coping mechanism and a survival skill. It represents the pinnacle of our abilities as humans to figure out how to use whatever tools we may have, in whatever way we can, to do what we need to do. Hacking is a great equalizer, a common dialect, a spirit that exists within all of us. It has the power to shape the world into one we want to live in.

The hacker spirit breaks any spell.