I haven’t made much progress on my plan to take a detour in my life. This is in most part due to the fact that there really is no rush whatsoever. Life continues under lock-down and moving won’t be sensible until travel is no longer potentially a danger. So at least for the time being, I’ve got plenty of opportunity to stop and reflect about what I want to do and where I want to go.

This time under lock-down has given me a renewed focus on the things that really matter to me and what I ultimately want to live for. I’ve spent a lot of time building my own software and writing but also making music, and simply enjoying the strange freedom of being locked inside.

First and foremost, I want to live to spend time with the people I care most about. Oh and skiing. There’s just something I find so enjoyable about hurtling down an icy slope in a blizzard - … I mean gracefully swooping across deep powder under a blue alpine sky that I very much enjoy. Preferably with people who also actually enjoy it. These go without saying though, so what about everything else?

Part of me wants to live to create. I enjoy making things that bring joy, it’s ingrained in me. “I want to make, to make people happy” :)

Another part of me imagines a certain utopia where everyone is happy just dancing to the infinite songs and happy for their whole lives just dancing. I dislike this idea that we can live happy lives and ignore what’s happening to our planet and our society. There’s nothing wrong with writing music and giving that chance to people to feel something, but it’s clearly wrong to do it and ignore the pain of others.

Another part of me wants to build a creative and open technology community that would build software for good and protest in the face of Big Tech by attracting the most morally centered, respectful people to join a movement so big, it would become “Big Tech”. Really it would be “tech of the people”. The “people’s tech”. I’m talking “Anonymous”-style and scale but instead of hacking, building things in a way that brings moral balance to every decision. Instead of hacking a firewall, you’d be making sure a webpage is accessible to someone using a screen reader. Instead of finessing your latest malware, you’d be setting up a local charity’s webpage and discussion board, plus team management and messaging solution. And after working in this community, each developer will have been trained to embody a set of principles, maybe even influencing others in industry to follow the same principles.

I think about this a lot and a few movements seem like they’re on the same lines, e.g. “Tech For Good”. I think I want to see what it’s like working for the sole purpose of having a positive impact on society, but I worry that Big Tech is by nature doomed to not be “For Good” by nature.

I feel like the entire tech industry is missing vocabulary around these concepts. Accessibility is one that comes to mind, but then this too can be adopted to create products that ultimately could be considered to cause harm. Making sure a piece of software can be used by everyone is really a very small step towards ultimately creating software in a way that is ethically sound.

Actually, the vocabulary has been here for a long time. Ethics is a well-studied field, especially in the context of technology.

TIL this area of study is called Technoethics and I’m honestly surprised that people don’t bring it up more because it has a cool name. I’m pretty sure most web frameworks only survive because they have super cool names, I mean jQuery. wow. lodash? oof.

In conclusion I now really want to read more about the ethics of technology and why there seems to be a systemic avoidance of applying generally agreed upon ethics in a technical context. So, you know, just some light bedtime reading.

The building of my plan continues very slowly, but that’s ok. It could be over a year before I actually find the opportunity to move so in the meantime I will continue to absorb, reflect and save up. In the end I know I will be happier and wiser for it.