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Lately, I've been more and more disillusioned with the existence of industry. I've been infected with some sort of memetic parasite, that exists at the boundary between money, the necessity of work, and the way industry is organized. It did not however start there. In the trail it left I can clearly see the destruction of my belief in computers, and because this was a load-supporting idea in the castle of my mind, with it's fall, many other ideas where damaged. The role my computer skills possess. What it means to do good. But these ideas appear to be merely incidental, the "attack vector" as it were, specific to my mind. Reading through CollapseOS, watching 100Rabits speed run modern computing with uxn. These made me question what role personal computing has in our lives. Seeing these realms of possibilty that existed entirely outside the Software Industry™, I began to question the role of industry altogether. Ishmael) and Beyond Civilization furthered these ideas, but I think it's the misinterpretation of Daniel Quinn's ideas. The parasite wants to convince me that Industry as a whole is problematic. What I think I'm beginning to figure out is that it's not Industry that is the problem, but the social and political effects the organization causes. I believe this is particularly pronounced in not just the computing industry, but the very existence and purpose of computers. They exist both because of, and to serve, the current structures of Industrial Organization.
Perhaps it's good to step back and talk through what this intellectual adversary had convinced me of. Perhaps it's most powerful attack took hold of me while reading a Merveilles Forum thread, which @akkartik had started about "What are computers for anyway?". In this thread category a) caught my particular attention as it encompassed so much of what computers are used for, but had so little interest from the members of that thread (myself included). This set the ground work for what would later become disillusionment with concept of industry. Industry though, is merely the organization of people working in a particular sector. There never was a time that there weren't industries. Perhaps before Agriculture and Taker ideology [#]_ took root, every tribe had to do everything for themselves. I think this is how it took hold. This is why "return to monke" seems to be a consistent theme in my writing recently, because there was a time when Industry didn't exist, and computers are largely for industrial pursuits, and most crucially, the software industry is particularly malign, as I spoke about earlier in Frustration at the Web. Being particularly unsatisfied by the employee / employer distinction I generalized my disdain for the current organization of industries with the usage of computers for industrial purposes at large. This was further complicated by the oncoming collapse and the role of computers in a world ravaged by climate change. I felt (feel?) helpless and enraged at the Software Industry not just because it's unable to combat climate change, but because it's egregious usage of resources is a significant factor in the problem.
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# An idea from Daniel Quinn, that is composed of the axioms of Civilization