How to use software
One of the most interesting things about living right now is the unfolding witnessing of others’ principles in their relationship to software.
Others’ principles are never articulated, of course. You have to figure them out through the back door, by understanding what actually drives people. Power, status, money, audience, safety, comfort, convenience, a sense of belonging. That sort of stuff.
What you come to learn after enough time is that people don’t really have principles with respect to software – or if they do, those principles are overridden by the more core needs of life. People never use software because they possess principles. They use software because they desire outcomes, and software is capable of providing them with outcomes.
On face, the dynamic here seems to be clean. A thing promises an outcome; you hire it for that outcome. In practice, however, hiring software for any task contains deep knock-on effects depending on the flow of capital, underlying politics, and stakeholder interest.
Like there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, there is no fully ethical relationship to software, and so nobody is fully ethical when using software. But we can do a lot to mitigate the deleterious impacts of software by understanding what we’re using, why we’re using it, and what we can to do avoid being forced into using software that fails to match our values, we can continue to maintain a positive relationship to software going forward.
Where the money goes
Before you engage with any software, the first thing you need to do is figure out where your money is going to go.
Are they a private or public company?
Are they funded by venture capital, or developed independently?
If the latter, where did the founder’s money come from?
These are shockingly easy questions to answer. Anyone with 30 seconds of spare time can search Crunchbase for a company’s funding rounds, as well as press releases and the tech press.
Be extremely wary of hype. The tech press is heavily conditioned to parrot first-party press releases and find cool, shiny new things. The whole industry is future-oriented, so it’s always trying to find something cool.
The issue with “free”
Like any industry, software is driven by capital. It’s a bit cliché to say that “you are the product” if you pay nothing for software, but it’s true. At best, the process is unsustainable. At worst, unpaid software creates perverse incentives that foment fascism. We live in this mess almost exclusively because of unpaid software.
Paying for software is the only way to take back your agency when it comes to technology. Refusing unpaid software is an act of radical resistance. There is always a better way.
Platform economies & lock-in
Lots of tech companies endeavor to become platforms for lots of different activity. Think:
- Adobe acquiring various tools to bundle together a suite of mid-tier, low-quality professional software
- Uber leveraging their rideshare network to provide deliveries
- Zoom adding chat rooms to their video utility
- Dropbox adding document-editing & signature functionality
Those are all examples of companies adding different offerings to bundle together things you may not want. Other companies entice you with deep convenience and slowly make the offering worse:
- Streaming services having exclusive content, then hiking fees as artists abandon
- Amazon taking over a sixth of American online retail, then hiking fees
- Social networks slowly eroding their norms, losing the ability to moderate, filling themselves with advertising, etc
After close enough examination, it becomes clear that many pieces of software require deep forethought before you take the plunge. In most cases, there’s a better alternative.
Some principles for enforcing right relationship to software
And so there are some broad-stroke principles for ensuring quality relationships to software:
- Pay money for it.
- Avoid subscriptions.
- Seek products that do one thing well.
- Favor calm businesses that embrace durability.
The stakes have never been higher.