> I feel that modern tech first took away the passion

As soon as something becomes potentially profitable, the MBAs enter the room, and the fun goes away. The more profitable it gets, the more toxic it gets, too.

+1

There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.

Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.

> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.

I used to think this, I would repeat that old quote "It's not a conspiracy, the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control"

Then comes stuff like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#:~:text=th...

and

https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...

and

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-plots...

and

https://cybernews.com/cybercrime/meta-fortune-fraudulent-ads...

and

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+inauguration+zuckerburg+musk+trum...

and

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dem-orders-congressional-probe-eps...

and I'm left thinking well, if none of that covers the definition of evil cabal, then what does? How far can we move these goal posts?

the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere. The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.

Eutrophy is good! Atrophy is not.

Personally, I think it's good that volunteers build the internet and do things like that, but fundamentally, the barrier to the web has become too high. In the past, making a website was easier than you'd think, and the legal side was a bit more lenient, but these days, as laws accumulate precedents, there are many things to pay attention to, and starting with security, the number of things you need to worry about has increased.

The problem is that in the early days of the internet, people needed time to grow together. But these days, the barrier to entry is fundamentally higher than before. And even when making one site, you have to worry about various things...

In my view, there is also the point that people forget the fact that as business becomes more sophisticated and technology develops, the basic skills of the people involved need to increase accordingly. The reasons the internet has gotten worse are complex. For example, there is definitely the problem of people trying to make money through advertising and such, but fundamentally, the technical barrier to attracting people's attention has also risen a lot.

The amount of technology a single individual developer has to handle has also increased a lot.

Modern tech did not make anything a product, people using the tech did. But not all, many of us do things for fun and passion still, just don’t expect money for it. Not everything is cloud, I still use mostly things that are not cloud based. And I have lots of libraries and little utilities I maintain, none of which are related to cloud, anyone can keep doing that forever, there are lots of other developers and even normal people who still want to use those tools and apps. And come on, AI doesn’t do anything to you, it’s you who chooses when and whether to use AI for whatever purpose, and as a helper for when things get tough, AI is amazing, like a private, infinitely patient and knowledgeable personal assistant. You don’t need to let it do everything for you , keep doing things the way you enjoy it, ai can be just an infinitely superior version of StackOverflow. Or a tutor. It doesn’t need to replace you.

I dunno the leadership of at least US tech has been trying to market themselves as a cabal for a bit now and are doing a more convincing job of it than I thought would be possible

There is the incentive too which LLMs destroy:

- If you embrace agentic development and prompt/produce something, a rando with spare money and a better clanker supersedes your efforts.

- If you ignore LLMs and write and design the product yourself, the LLM corpo says "All the better for me! Moar free untainted datasets for me! I'll make you buy tokens from me in the next 6 months anyway..."

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.

Don't you believe it.

You don't need a "evil cabal" in the image of a movie caricature. It is enough to discuss with a wink-and-a-nod, shared incentives, product roadmaps, sharing profits from a global pie, circular deals etc. for a concerted group to form and start gaming the system behind the scenes.

The Computer Revolution was first and foremost a "People and Individual Freedoms" revolution. Cheap open PC hardware married to free open software made it happen. Networking and Data-Sharing were supposed to be neutral. Device control was taken away, specifically with Apple's iPhone showing the way, and then Network/Data control by Cloud companies showing the way.

The propaganda is always the same viz. "for the ultimate benefit of the end-user". Don't think/learn too much and just pay us the money to do it for you; You are nothing but just the source of revenue/profits for us.

The same thing is happening with AI where it is impossible for an individual to play due to scale and money involved.

Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, Walter Lippmann, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky would all feel deeply vindicated and proud.

>> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this

There is. It is called Microsoft. The recent dustup over VLC being the latest battleground between the darkness and the light. My experience of the front: work wants me to install MSTeams on my personal phone... which runs GrapheneOS.

(lol, windows wants to spellcheck MSTeams into "MS Teams" but refuses to acknowledge GrapheneOS. Another MS microaggression.)

> who had the skills and the means to do it.

emphasis on means. The means to spend ~8 hours a day contributing instead of dedicating that time to a full time job or a second job.

But the gravy train is ending...

I agree to some extent; however had I still contribute to Wikipedia and Wikipedia, while it has problems, is still fairly good (quality-wise could be better, a lot of content from discussions should be added to main articles but I usually confine myself to just suggest things on discussions and let others make a decision then).

> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.

Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.