I'm not the most qualified person in the world. I've managed more than I probably had any business managing, largely by luck and obstinance, which certainly impacts the size of my ambitions. I tell myself that, in theory, I'd like to live a sort of "hobbit's life;" in practice I find I'm such an anxious person that I can do no such thing in the absence of a stable and self-sustaining society; I find that the fact that I think I can make an impact at all makes it impossible for me to leave that problem alone. I don't think it's at all controversial to say that the dominant society today, rather than being self-sustaining, is self-destructive. In the name of immediate profits and impatience, we've squandered the wealth given us and wasted our own strength creating disposable goods and, worse, forging the chains that bind us all. We are ruled and cowed by fools, and though we know it and chafe under their useless weight, we seem to see no way out.
I don't think anyone will arrive with a grand master plan to save us, and I don't know if we even can be saved. But I do know that capitalism will kill us all if left unchecked, and I do know that we need to grow beyond capitalism if we are ever to make for ourselves a sustainable society. The blind subservience to impotent, so-called libertarianism that dominates the (nonetheless! relatively thoughtful, compared to other corners of the tech sector) FOSS subculture has rendered it essentially unpaid labor for the very systems killing us all; it is not a meaningful source of resistance, it is a way by which capitalism is managing its own contradictions. Similarly, the reflexive cultural tendency to disregard the ethical dimension of everything and put all in terms that could be pitched successfully to the dead-eyed and delusional oligarchs running (and ruining) the world, terms that only speak of monetary profits and not of human costs or risks to others, constitutes a societal death wish. We make hell for ourselves, hell of our Earth, when we accept the disempowerment and dehumanization of others as fundamental. The road to damnation is paved with uncritical self-interest.
I have little to no background in formal verification or safety-critical software, but I see the world rotting around me, and while I know the software and technology I am capable of developing may prove to be marginal in terms of impact, I know it's at least something I can set my hand to. There are two sides to what I've in mind: one, the technology must be made carefully, by actual human beings, with care for craftsmanship, reliability, and (accordingly) labor-saving. This strikes at the current vulnerability of our moribund society, from my own situation within it. Since our technology prioritizes the profits of the capital class, it will always be as terrible as the market will stand. The forced adoption of LLMs is an expression of this tendency. There are and will be real, human costs to this approach, and it will slowly erode capitalism's own foundations. This creates a crisis, which the capital class may or may not successfully navigate (likely at the expense of us all, given the clear callousness of the current cadre), but which will in either case likely result in terrible suffering and loss of life. "Regulations are written in blood," after all. Capitalism bears no allegiance to humanity and is only turned back when physically forced to. This crisis will lay bare, for a moment, the fundamental problems at the heart of capitalism, and it will create the opportunity for something different to emerge. The failure of a dominant power creates the opportunity for competition to flourish. This is the point at which a real alternative, a superior (in human, ethical terms, or else what's the point?) alternative can emerge, provided it has been preparing to do so.
Two, it must be developed within an enclave that precludes capitalist cooption. If capitalism can readily incorporate work that resolves its contradictions, that saves it from crisis, it absolutely will. I don't know how this sort of enclave can be realized, save by "defense in depth." There is no mathematical proof that will keep one's work safe; protecting one's work is a matter of power and probabilities. A succession of tactics is all one has. The first tactic is secrecy. You can't coopt what you can't access. This tactic will fail eventually, but hopefully not before a self-sustaining ecosystem has been established, at which point the tactic of legal defense based on licensing might be engaged. This tactic too may also fail, especially if this technology and the post-capitalist ecosystem it will hopefully inhabit has not yet been firmly enough established. Beyond these obvious tactics, I fear I begin "writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future." While a strategy is an abstraction, in service of a goal, over a profusion of likely situations, tactics are always dependent on the particulars of a situation.
I can't invite to such an enclave people I don't know and trust to, at the very least, not be antagonistic to the goal of establishing a post-capitalist, liberatory society. Fortunately, I do know and know of people like this, both with technical talents and of other talents, and I reckon we can find a way to support each other in developing this alternative tradition. I write all this publicly to encourage others to start working in this direction as well. I may not trust you, dear reader, well enough yet to invite you in personally, but should you establish an enclave of your own, and should our enclaves meet and trust grow between them, I hope we can eventually find a way to join up and reduce the duplication of effort, or at least support each other. The end goal should be the establishment of a self-sustaining, post-capitalist world. If we can't manage this, then we're as good as damned. I can't see past working toward the realization of this world; at any rate, I've got to do something, and this seems to be what I've landed on.