Contents

• Introduction
• Demystifying
• Progressing the wrong way
• SaaS Supremacy
• Self-hosting
• Massive hardware strides
• Conclusion

Introduction

I feel like we are witnessing the death of personal computing.

What do I mean by "personal computing"?

Let me put it this way: I could go out and buy a car today, and even though I'm not a mechanic, I could still change a flat tyre. In the worst cases, I could change my oil, or washer fluid, or windshield wipers without having to pay someone. I own my car. I may not understand the inner workings of an internal combustion engine (ICE), but I'm also not completely ignorant about how a car works.

The same can't be said for modern tech products. I understand the allure of things that work "automagically", i.e. they just work, but at some point I started feeling like I didn't really own my devices.

How is it that I can be entrusted to change a tyre on my car; something that could literally kill me if I get it wrong, but I can't be trusted to upgrade the RAM or storage on my machine?

Without getting into details, I certainly think that there are massive downsides to people not being informed enough to take ownership of tools that play such a massive role in their lives.

Demystifying

For obvious reasons, I can't sit here as a CS grad and overall computer nerd and act like computers should be easy for everyone. However, I do feel like there are financial incentives for some members of the tech community to make computers, especially software, (appear?) as complex as possible.

Growing up, I read a lot of popular science books; from Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and they sparked in me an interest in physics that persists to this day. It's always struck me as odd that there isn't as much of that going on in the world of computer science. Admittedly, our field is much younger, but I do find myself wondering what kind of incentive structures could encourage public science communication for natural sciences, and (maybe?) discourage it for computer science. After all, a physicist can't sell you "gravity+" because you don't understand how it works, but a hardware vendor can absolutely sell you a "geek squad" subscription.

Progressing the wrong way

While I didn't actually live through the golden (early) age of the web, I am old enough to remember a time when I could build a website with a few HTML files and serve it from anywhere. We've come a long way from that and, even for web developers joining the industry today, many are resigned to the idea that technological complexity just can't be avoided.

History shows us that most innovations move from being managed by companies to becoming minified and simplified until eventually users can purchase personal versions. Mainframes preceded the personal computer, cinema came before TV, and we went from payphones on street corners to everyone carrying a smartphone that was all these devices in one. Progress often meant increased accessibility, with all the complexity being safely tucked away until the average person didn't need an ever-present expert to guide them (remember when elevators had operators?).

Such progress was, oftentimes, never good for the businesses that were built around the provision of these services. When I was a kid, my mum owned a "phone shop", which was literally a shop filled with landlines where people would come in and pay to make a phone call. Similarly, internet cafes used to be great business. Until they weren't. Until technology progressed enough for these technologies to become personalised.

SaaS Supremacy

I spoke about the financial incentives of mystifying, fear-mongering and, locking down technology and that wasn't just a matter of me being conspiratorial. Within the last decade and a half, there has been an explosion of subscription-based tools designed to offload complexity from users and enterprises. It's not that these tools didn't exist before - Jira existed long before it adopted the subscription model - but more companies believed they could build in-house tools. Many of them weren't great, but they still got the job done.

Today, companies (and individuals) pay for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products that promise to offload everything from product development, task management, marketing, and finance. The selling point is that you can move fast by not having to worry about building any of the supporting software required to run a business. I have seen this become especially common in software engineering where developers will pay for everything from boilerplate code, to authentication solutions, and managed hosting platforms. Similarly, people will subscribe to video and music streaming (separately), workout apps, planning apps, cloud storage, etc. They own nothing, and they are happy. But, these costs add up. They add up until you find yourself needing a SaaS (recurly, spendesk, etc.) to manage your SaaS subscriptions.

Self-hosting

Daily-driving Linux was such a game changer for me because it demystified a lot of technologies. It introduced me to virtualisation and containerization. I know both of those are complex concepts that the average person probably knows absolutely nothing about, but it showed me that I could run personal instances of various applications that I'd ordinarily pay a subscription for on a low-powered device like a Raspberry Pi just by copy-pasting some configuration from their docs. Most importantly, the average person wouldn't even need to know what virtualisation is or how it works. That's the beauty of it all.

I know the biggest objection to this will be something along the lines of "It's not easy to manage your own servers", or "most people just want something that works with zero config". I know. But, to me, that says a lot about our failings as the people who build the tools than anything else. Before graphical user interfaces (GUIs), you had to know your way around the terminal to operate a computer. But, someone saw how absolutely untenable that was for casual users and decided that a more visual interface was needed.

So, just sitting back and declaring, "it's not easy, so we'll manage it for the ignorant plebs", sounds to me like exactly what a merchant of complexity would say. Instead, we should be taking on the difficult task of demystifying technology. Linux is hard to use? Then, make it easy! Imagine if your doctor told you absolutely nothing about your illness and instead gave you nothing more than a "trust me, bro", a prescription, and an instruction to come back for pills every month for the rest of your life. I wouldn't blame you if you started to wonder if they were actually helping you or if you'd just gone out and got yourself a parasite.

Massive hardware strides

What's more infuriating is that computing hardware has become so affordable. For 3 months worth of 2TB storage on Google drive, you can get a similar size HDD that you actually own, and no one's using your children's vacation pics to train their AI.

Hardware has come so far, and a lot of people have data-centre scale hardware just burning a hole in their pockets, while they pay for storage. I know because I've had about 200GB worth of free space on my phone for years, now.

Instead, we've got *bleeping* Chromebooks, the physical manifestation of the opposite of personal computing. Sure, they are cheap, but for the price of an upper mid-range Chromebook (~$250), you could get a used/refurbished Macbook (I know Apple is not exactly the poster child for open hardware, but you get my point).

Conclusion

The biggest mindshift moment I ever had in relation to technology was when I heard the phrase, "the cloud is just someone else's computer". Depending on your background, that's either something painfully obvious, or it's food for thought. For me, it came with the realisation that there was nothing inherently special about all the cloud-based services tech companies were trying to sell me (with the exception of music and video streaming because, well, "copyright law").

The computer was supposed to be personal. Instead, computing has been consolidated under the control of a handful of people. Microsoft can take take screenshots of everything you do on your computer, Apple doesn't like it when your repair your devices, game publishers can just pull the plug on a game you've "purchased", and YouTube apparently knows enough about you from your habits to determine your age. This enshittification is exactly what happens when service providers know that users have no way out. And, part of this is a result of both the fear of the unknown (some of it caused by fear-mongering) and the gradual descent into over-engineered complexity.

Maybe, personal computing is dead already.