About Diedrick!

So this idea of care that you take, what Robert Pirsig would call “quality”, is something that takes a long time to get and an even longer time to start to implement. It’s a moral approach to what you do with your hands, and an ethical framework in what you choose to lend your hands to achieve.

Here’s the context: the world is burning. Actually, literally burning. What are we going to do about it when there’s nothing we can actually do, somehow the crazies and deniers and anti-vaxxers have trolled us to think they have the upper hand, so we do nothing. The OG trolls and defacto morality in this country, Crazy Christians, don’t give a fuck, they’re all just waiting to die with the chips they’ve earned trying to save fetuses. So we don’t have moral leaders.

And everything in the world has gotten to this level of complexity that everything can be proven wrong. Deniers be trolling everything, liberals are trying to take everyone into account and conservatives are listening to nobody, so you get this equivocality that’s designed to stop progress. That’s the Putin method co-opted by the Trumpers, create enough noise that you can’t hear the signal.

So how do you find your place to implement some quality? First look at the world and figure out what you don’t want to do. There are millions of people who get paid to make the world burn, so the easiest quality to apply is to do the opposite. People work in finance to make rich people richer, so there’s a really easy place to avoid. (Or go get into the belly of the beast.) Amazon, the internet giant, is just a modern Wal-mart, designed to take advantage of any capitalist advantage, put everyone smaller out of business, and dominate markets. So there’s an easy place to avoid shopping when possible.

In tech it’s really easy to see what’s morally wrong and what’s making the planet burn. Or, I should say, it’s really easy for me, since I work in the field. Tech companies pay millions to PR people to trick people into thinking they’re doing good. Modern day oil companies putting ads about all their eco-friendly business practices while they pay millions to lobbiests to do only one thing: make more money. It’s what the shareholders demand!

But working in tech, you see those ads for what they are, lies. And you pay a little attention to the Travis Kalanick-type leaders, and you learn that the rot of a leader goes clear through to the bone. You see how Uber created apps that tracked politicians just so they could have the upper hand on them, and you see rot. You see Facebook Marketplace, and how it’s almost entirely unusuable, the first 20 posts have the words ‘free shipping nationwide’ and the idea of Facebook controlling your feed to make them money first and then from time to time give you something you really want is their business model. Rot. Capitalist rot. Here’s an easy indication: is the business shareholder driven? An immediate mark – for what are shareholders caring about? Money first and always.

But what actually to do? This is the question… Maybe we’ll explore it here, maybe somewhere else, who knows. This is actually just filler text to start seing how Hugo works and maybe letting off some steam.