Where Did Personal Computing Go Wrong (2020)
This is a great article &amp; accurate in so many ways. We are lucky to have such great writing &amp; distillation of the times as this; a fine treasure. This pairs very well &amp; adds a lot of context to <i>&quot;What I want from the Internet&quot;</i>[1], which was submitted yesterday &amp; which I am also very aglow over.<p>Both the rise of platforms &amp; the smartphone are tightly interwoven around a new <i>connected</i> axis of computing emerging &amp; being useful. McThrow somewhat generously includes the web in his &quot;personal computing&quot; vision but alas, even as a huge web fan, it&#x27;s pretty clear that the brief <i>&quot;intertwingularizing&quot;</i> moment (which was extremely pro user) was giving way to Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), to a de-personalized experience. The relevance of desktop faded, and relevance faded <i>because users were well served</i> by new connected services. Software effervescing, sublimating up into the cloud made it easier to share, made it easier to access to demand, freed us from worrying about backups.<p>I think this is one of the critical junctures that Linux and the rest of the Desktops has failed to internalize, as a new need: the need to be connected. The need to be more than just isolated personal, the need to be available, the need to be connectable. I don&#x27;t know quite what this future looks like or what it implies, but the &quot;Linux on the desktop&quot; spoke of competition with an outmoded, fading mode of computing. What was really needed was a further push onward, was a backbone for inter-app systems &amp; development.<p>One of the few efforts here is one people love to hate on (even though I think most have a superficial <i>at best</i> grasp of the technics): <i>One Laptop Per Child,</i> OLPC&#x2F;XOPC. My word what a wonderful &amp; interesting system, powered by a grand already-well-adopted-on-FreeDesktop&#x2F;Linux desktop bus (DBus) that underpins a wide variety of the software matter about. And then the team went further &amp; built DBus Telepathy[2], to connect DBus instances to one a other, across the local 802.11s mesh the laptop had, to create a very compelling shared multi-player object stage that apps could use to create shared experiences. Stunning smart extension of existing highly personal intra-desktop tech into a connected form, a connected media; simply brilliant.<p>There&#x27;s a couple reasons for hope in my view. First, the connected age is new &amp; we are iterating &amp; learning what broader connectivities work, and in there I think is the real base of power, the higher path that will be compelling for folks to get into. Nostr in particular has a very grand set of Nostr Implementation Possibilities[3] that shows how flexible the simple protocol is. But works like Dat, Hyper, ActivityPub, AtProto&#x2F;BlueSky, Solid show a hunger &amp; willingness to find out, to explore, at the base of a big tree of possibilities that more personal yet connected futures might emerge upon.<p>I&#x27;m also happy to see computing operations getting mature. It was a free for all, learn everything do everything, everything is different &amp; unique, there are no standard all-encompassing routes until the last half decade. Love it or hate it but there is nothing as integrative &amp; consistent for operating computing resources as Kubernetes. It&#x27;s an incredibly simple pattern at heart, applicable to almost all computing, and its aspirations of being autonomic, self-maintaining, are such a compelling human-liberating spirit that server-hugging desperately needed. Even if it&#x27;s not Kubernetes in the end, the spirit of an integrating platform for computing that can reasonably self-manage is a must, if we want personal computing to win. Personal computing has to become more than a machine, it just has to, the demands are too high, and we are not going back, and thankfully, we now have good mature sensible ways to weave together the thousands of different threads of running these online endpoints ourselves. We&#x27;ll keep getting better with smarter packaged implementations, and better tooling; the momentum is for real on &amp; it&#x27;s so good.<p>The hardest to hope for win is the Web, but it&#x27;s to most essential. The web has a lot of good-hearted people who care about personal computing. But the forces stacked up are huge; the industrialization of the field has been epic. (And getting ghastly worse, with WebGPU canvases threatening to turn the screen into just a bunch of pixels, see Hixie&#x27;s <i>Towards a modern Web Stack</i>[4] and Flutter CanvasKit implementation). Alas in my view many of the good, spirited radicals differentiate themselves negatively, regressively, with back to the land ethos rather than having willingness or interest in forward advancement, when what we need is ambition &amp; striving &amp; exploration forward, particularly by rejecting industrialized best practices &amp; asking ourselves again &amp; again what best serves the user, what is the most open &amp; empowering routes we can find? What course forward would we lead?<p>I think there are some HyperCard-ish futures about in easy-ish reach, some explainable observable quick &amp; interactive modes of computing, if we go hunting, and that the web is already almost the perfect material&#x2F;medium. WebComponents are a key abstraction, and I&#x27;m not ashamed to say how thankful I am that the biggest most powerful tech companies are quickly adopting it en-mass &amp; seeing great success (YouTube, GitHub, Google, Salesforce[5]), and that although underpublicized, it creates learnable moments &amp; good offshoot tech (Stencil.js, Github&#x27;s Catalyst, Google&#x27;s Lit). Embedding app state into the DOM makes it malleable, makes it learnable in a way code isn&#x27;t. My hope is we can start to create more visual editor like systems, where the page itself exposes it&#x27;s own tools to better show the user the objects on the screen, and let&#x27;s them play and explore more. Make the medium more live &amp; interactable.<p>Yet this is still not enough. A more user-friendly web page medium still, and better ability to host endpoints, still leaves a whole question of what&#x27;s in the middle &amp; how does it work. It returns to the protocols like Nostr I mentioned above. Figuring out how to personalize the protocols, how to <i>Augment Intellect</i> (the highest mission, the Engelbartian vision) in computing needs so many levels of the stack to be illuminated &amp; graspable.<p>And above all that stack, what is the experience? The world of applications, what most users use, is a lot of isolated systems. This hearkens back to the point of this submission, that personal computing had fallen, and in many ways it&#x27;s because the at hand value to capture was upmarket, was higher level concerns: apps. Personal Computing fell away because each app is it&#x27;s own fief, it&#x27;s own walled garden, and we didn&#x27;t emerge a broader system of computing that meaningfully intersected with and connected with thr apps. Isolated industrial experiences has been the name of the game for decades now, that brief Intertwingularity&#x2F;Cluetrain Manifesto zeitgeist the late aughts aside. I&#x27;ve talked a lot about stack &amp; technics, but ultimately a more integrative holistic stack has to be here to be useful, to serve the needs we have. Making HyperCard-y experiences that can interlink &amp; coexist together on the canvas feels like a maybe possible vision here, something works like OpenSocial[6] were trying for during the greatest headiest API-based moments of computing history. It was a greater effort, but that attempt to stitch together widgets &amp; data has some notable overlap with above mentioned Solid.<p>Overall, I&#x27;d emphasize that for computing to be personal, it has to be personalizable. It has to be the users, in some degree. On these simple grounds, I can think of no more direct &amp; overarching a cause than the Malleable Systems Collective[7], which is a wonderful home-base for exploring what computing do, how it might get out of the imprisonment of the data keep, oops i mean data center, &amp; back into the hands of users.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chrbutler.com&#x2F;what-i-want-from-the-internet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chrbutler.com&#x2F;what-i-want-from-the-internet</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35852516" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35852516</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aosabook.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;v1&#x2F;telepathy.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aosabook.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;v1&#x2F;telepathy.html</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nostr-protocol&#x2F;nips">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nostr-protocol&#x2F;nips</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;d&#x2F;1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0&#x2F;edit?resourcekey=0-bPajpoo9IBZpG__-uCBE6w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;d&#x2F;1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34612696" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34612696</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;levelup.gitconnected.com&#x2F;web-components-at-big-tech-companies-youtube-84266bb507fd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;levelup.gitconnected.com&#x2F;web-components-at-big-tech-...</a><p>[6] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OpenSocial" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OpenSocial</a><p>[7] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malleable.systems&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malleable.systems&#x2F;</a>