I love systems. The idea of them. Thousands of pieces, each doing a simple - almost trivial - task, but coming together to form a beautiful tapestry. Maybe you've seen Wintergatan's Marble Machine, or one of the many Lego Great Ball Contraption builds out there. It's almost mesmerizing to watch. Maybe it's what fueled my multiple addictions to OpenTTD and Sweet Transit1. Seeing tens, hundreds, of pods light up and then soon disappear in k9s.
I love systems. Taking these complicated messes and taming them. Figuring out where they fail and reinforcing those weakspots. The bottlenecks. The single points of failure that would have brought it all down. The race conditions that would have made it all go amok.
I love systems. How it lets anyone order wildly complicated wildly advanced technology that might as well have been moon magic a few short decades ago, from across the globe, to my doorstep1 in a few short days like it was nothing. That the world has become small enough that we can travel to that other side of the globe in a few short days.
I love systems. Or, well, I did. As a child. Back when I thought technology was just technology. That it didn't come with its own agenda.
I don't love how systems fail. How a single bug can render half of society inoperable. How your hospital can leave you out to hang, with a simple message of "sorry, no slots available right now, come back later".
I don't love how systems centralize control. How they enable genocide on unbelievable scales2. How these systems enable massive consolidation. How they let a few megacorporations to control our public conversation. Even (try to) replace it. How they sell our attention to the highest bidder.
I don't love how systems force us to normalize everything. Turn us into cogs. Turn everything into easily digestable numbers that disregard all nuance3, so we know who to blame. Who to yell at. Who to fire.
I don't love how systems make us lose our humanity. Our understanding. Our cooperation. Our innocence.
Maybe... maybe I don't love systems. I just don't know where the fuck to go from here.4
A while ago I would have happily put Factorio on this list. I won't, now. I don't know, maybe it would have been a good help to illustrate the point made?
Well, local kiosk.
I wish I could say this was a moot point. That it happened once, that we learned from it, and that we will never let it happen again. And yet. I write this just as the Orange Hitler has somehow just been reelected. But I'm also painfully aware of how none of this is isolated to the USA, as I write this in Kristersson's Sweden. Åkesson's Sweden. As Russia keeps trying to invade Ukraine, as Israel keeps occupying Palestine.
She has since recanted this tool, but not because she changed her mind on its usefulness. Oh no, it's just that managers don't deserve it, apparently.
And yet, I have to fight the constant urge to set up a Ceph homelab.