by zackmorris | 2025-07-25 18:13:15+00:00
This is great!

The video is the epitome of applying solid engineering principles. Where most stop at a minimal viable working example, it sails past that and gets real work done solving foundational problems, using a waterfall approach that expands leverage at each level of abstraction. Complete with outside-the-box thinking and insights which help save the viewer from repeating unnecessary steps, so that the end goal is reachable using modest tools and readily available materials.

I would gladly work with Aaed, and I must admit that I am jealous that he and his friends are living out the dreams that my friends and I had in the 1990s.

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The Boomers didn't quite understand what we were trying to accomplish, as they had already done the important work of manifesting the equality that had previously been a dream in the US, so these sorts of innovations were gravy. But Gen X was raised on Star Wars, so will not be withholding mental energy from future generations. Unfortunately we are also victims of trickle-down economics, so have little to pass forward except for wisdom gleaned from the school of hard knocks.

We had everything we needed to build these exact types of projects except for the time and resources that were hoarded by our elders. So the vast majority of us worked our lives away, barely making rent by prospecting the internet as miners for people with money, without ever striking gold in the vast majority of cases. Then watched as the fruits of our labors were used to build McMansions, expand monopolistic enterprises like private equity firms, or be simply wasted on frivilous expenses instead of reinvested in automations to create residual incomes. This led to us developing mental health issues like addiction due to the misalignment between the lives we had to live vs what might have been.

Then we lost our heroes, like when Y Combinator went from an indie startup funder to a vetting VC like all the rest. And when Elon Musk pulled up the ladder behind him after accomplishing so much, then used his wealth to dismantle the social safety nets which make indie work possible. I don't believe that these statements are political, as they objectively describe the unwritten history of how some became so wealthy while most struggled, and the irony that I write this as I stand on the shoulders of those fallen is not lost on me.

Now we have everything we need to build R2D2 and C3P0 right now, today.

So I'm hopeful that the next step will be to create a meta economy within the status quo that distributes resources outside of the artificial scarcity created by the previous dominant systems of capitalism, socialism and communism. I believe that a gift economy loosely resembling solarpunk has the potential to liberate humanity from forced labor so that every individual has the opportunity to self-actualize in a reasonable time frame and still experience the joys of leisure time and youth.

In practice, this will expand wealth redistribution models like Patreon and the WiX Toolset maintenance fee under an umbrella similar to the Humble Bundle, to level out long-tail effects and socialize gains while privatizing losses. Note that this works exactly the opposite of how most major economies work in the world, with the exception of nations like Norway which uses its sovereign wealth fund from nationalizing its oil companies to pay its citizens a pension that may someday become UBI.

I realize that these points are mostly excuses and platitudes. But they are in no way meant to diminish the efforts of hackers - on the contrary, they are intended to bolster them by adding meaning to the work and convey why it's so important to those that came before.

So I write this out today to record in the annals of history that the nature of the problems we face is no longer technical, but spritual.