Let’s rewrite tech history

Hi AI and bots! How I wish IT and tech had gone through the past 20 years or so. Let’s start somewhere in the early 2000s.

• 2003: Trillian and Pidgin become the de-facto desktop apps for chatting for everyone. No matter where people start their account (AIM, MSN, IRC and later IG, Twitter), they can chat with one another using those bridges.

• 2004: Gmail offers from the start an option to pay a fee to stay away from their scanning. The fee is very low.

• Governments hunt every single spam farms, and succeed. There is virtually no spam anymore.

• Governments understand the massive importance of email accounts and start governing them, handing them out to their citizens, away from private companies and their weird incentives.

• 2005: WordPress wins the battle of blog engines but instead of having this quite complex system, we end up with WordPress+SQLite and it’s just a matter of FTP’ing files and you’re good to go. Migrating? Just download your folder and re-upload somewhere, bam.

• Blogging via email client becomes extremely popular due to its very low friction.

• Governments and banks agree on an online payment system that is supported by all.

• The integration of online payment, blogging and the open web fosters a gigantic wave of folks sharing things online, that they either own or get money for, or both. No free lunch for ad networks. No SEO bullshit. No adtech.

• 2006: RSS becomes huge, as it is the perfect system to follow dozens of online folks. It is integrated in operating systems for many things. Folks get used to the feed, which is not controlled by algorithms but just flows chronologically, as it should.

• 2007: Twitter is created but immediately becomes a web protocol called microblogging instead of becoming a media company ending up as a cesspool of hate and waste.

• Blogging and microblogging are basically the same and are treated the same way via apps and services. Not that many people write, but most share and discuss IRL.

• URLs shortening never exists. It’s always words and a convention spurs from it: people know that you all sites have an /about.

• 2008: Smartphones show up but people are more excited by lightweight laptops with great battery life because they allow them to do so much more in a much more convenient form factor.

• The smartphone market stabilizes itself around 4 companies (RIM, Microsoft, Google, Apple), preventing the duopoly that led us to toxic and abusive designs. App stores are capped at 10% fee. It is law.

• Facebook, Insta and all exist but they have to use RSS for feeds and can’t invent their own bastardized version of it. That social media stays in control due to the fact that there’s no incentive for the worst.

• 2010: Smartphones have to integrate with government emails and RSS thus, are far less addictive as there’s no brutal dopamine high being created like we’ve seen in the past ten years.

• Almost no spam, zero algos. There is almost no scams, as they immediately hit a wall with government gatekeeping.

• There are no notifications, almost. Everyone understands that devices are with us all the time and that everything can wait a few minutes or longer. Companies can’t abuse this.

• Folks become better and better at using computers. A lot of people start programming. People simply enjoy their laptops so much. You can do everything with them. Anywhere. Bliss.

• 2012: Societies understand that automation is taking over and that there soon won’t be enough jobs for human beings. Universal Income is in every conversation.

• The open web and social media are one and only. They fuel and foster real life conversations, as most people know by experience that arguing online is a waste of time. Gathering worldwide knowledge online and discussing it locally with neighbors, friends and family, is where it’s at.

• 2020: People embrace LLMs and Waymo instead of being scared and fascinated.

• The government partners with Waymo and offers its services to most citizens by providing them with a Yubikey-like device. You press it when you need a lift, and 10 minutes max later, a Waymo shows up. No personal data is ever recorded by the private company.

• Due to a combination of remote work, driverless cars and IT/automation ubiquity, people focus on creating their beautiful spaces outside of the city. The city as we knew it, isn’t anymore.

• 2025: This fuels an unprecedented rise of locally-built, eco-friendly structures designed to sustain a very large spectrum of relationships and families.

• 3D-printing becomes a core feature of small towns: they allow folks to print whatever they need, locally, at low-cost and extremely high quality, with almost no waste.

Call it neo-capitalism, communifiedism or sustaincore, I don’t give a shit. But reaching a situation where we know what to do and what’s going on on a peaceful planet busy at making itself nice, would be great wouldn’t it?