By going direct to consumers, we are outflanking these distractions. 🥷 The most robust compass in life is when old dreams come to mind once again because making the right choices brings them back into relevance. What world do you want to wake up to?

Nevertheless, there are powerful counter-productive kinds of advocacy nearby:

1. Anti-commercialism that rejects social finance.
2. Anti-social brands of individualism that reject social decisions.

These views have become extremely concentrated in open source and other online communities.

Just as the ultimate meta problem of evolution was to create intelligence and thinking, social finance & social decision problems are the ultimate meta problem for evolving societies. 🐙🧠🧬

I am a few blocks away from a research institution where I once had a student job. The people who work there use a lot of software. A lot of it is open source. They cure diseases, breed better crops, and study climate patterns faster when their open source tools do their jobs well. 🧪⚛️

Lowering the cost of competitive outflanking, getting new things to market faster, and bringing hard technological problems within reach all tend to create benefit that is highly available to the virtuous, creating social mobility for those who sell what the rent seeker would not. 🧐

Alongside individual freedoms such as access to information or control of the computers we use, the promise was to enable living in a smarter society, one that would not work against us, one that provided dividends, one that doesn't insulate the rents of incumbents against our own ambitions. 🗽

It was always a direct interest of the original ground swell around open source to create smarter societies by building tools to enable financially and politically organization necessary to displace narrow interests of rent seekers who will only employ programmers to build stupid treadmills 🏃

Greater opportunities for society to move forward tend to upset narrow entrenched interests, and the resulting chaotic motion tends to create a lot of opportunities and ancillary benefits for all, albeit at the cost of obliterating a few rents here and there 🤷‍♂️

Do remember the fail whale that was Twitter. Do recall the early days of facebook as a PHP instance created per-college. The technical challenges they faced were far simpler, send tweet to a list of people, and yet career web application engineers struggled. This work is not for the faint.

At length, over many years, it has become apparent to us that the real technical challenges were not to be underestimated. If anything gives me pause, it is the fear of discovering yet another layer of combinatorial explosion and fractal complexity that is not merely hard but insurmountable.