I want to return to blogging, the easy-going, breezy kind. The world is quite scary, if you think about it, so it makes sense not to think about it, especially not in the form of publicly available, archived-for-posterity blobs of (un)intentionally revealing text. And yet, some part of me yearns to, so let’s essay.
I lost my job at the beginning of this year due to layoffs, and spent a few (a lot of) days in a haze, catching up on One Piece, reading light novels, dreaming of starting my own software firm that would do the right things in the right way. Oh, and job searching, of course. Job search always hovers in the background, making any scene uneasy, where even the protagonist cooking an omelette in the morning looks to the audience like he’s avoiding the real issue. I would go out with friends, and a thought about job search would needle me just enough to make my smile unnatural, just enough to miss the joke.
And yet, what would a job even look like? Before, I thought of myself as a software engineer trapped in web development jobs. Now, I can’t even muster that, the thought of being reduced to copy-pasting task tickets to LLM chat is nauseating. The markets, as they say, can be irrational longer than you stay solvent, and that is indeed what happened.
Another wrinkle is my snail-paced radicalization towards technology, the pathway marked by Ursula Franklin’s Massey lectures, Seeing Like A State, and the like. I can no longer naively believe that all technology is good. Unfortunately, the experience I acquired over the years allows me to make and use primarily that bad kind of technology: web apps. Web apps that should have not been created, creating legibility where it’s not welcome, replacing human expertise with automated mediocrity. And even deeper, my expertise lies with frontend of the web apps. Namely, React. So you can see why I’m conflicted.
Even if I were to put that train of thought in the depot for a moment, the vector of React world evolution is troublesome to accept, yet difficult to argue against. It’s not idle spinning, but sure feels like it. Each new post about supply-chain attacks (not really a supply-chain until one has a real agreement, but I digress) reminds me that most web apps are simultaneously over- and under-engineered, if engineered at all.
AI changing the world (it doesn’t need to be true “AI” to do that) is not helping either: worried about my next rent payment, I’m sending out CV to any not-outright-terrible company that has frontend vacancies, only to be met with silence. I’m beginning to doubt myself, and have to keep firmly in mind that a lot of companies screen resumes with AI, which makes sense in a world where every job posting receives hundreds of AI-generated applications. It seems like a circlejerk of fakeness, and I’m standing in a corner, mourning the loss of profession I didn’t even know I liked that much to begin with.
To walk away, to begin anew is tempting and too far-fetched at the same time, I’m in too deep, and also, painfully, not deep enough. In a sense, the me-shaped hole indeed could be filled with artificially generated text, to the first approximation.
I found a temporary refuge in fiction: first, consuming lots of it, then started writing my own. Generating text myself, so to speak. Drafting, thinking through the intricacies of an imagined world, reading about the craft of putting words in a specific order. The web novel I write is about the world where programming is literally magic, trying to remember and recapture the feeling of awe I once had.
It’s not a solution—unless some patron would fund me, that would be magic too—but a way to cope, for now, with the real world losing its luster. Ah yes, the depression. I should probably check up on that.
It’s easy to paint the current world as being wrong: we should not live like this; this couldn’t be it. Yet I don’t have the answer of what the future should look like. One book I read recently is Could, Should, Might, Don’t, a typology of different modes of futurisms; the one I’m immediately drawn to is, of course, the “don’t” one. It is not a constructive picture, but a warning. The kind of warning that helps you see the train wreck in advance, with no power to prevent it: the train operator is too busy playing gacha with text to watch the tracks.
So, that’s where I’m at, more or less, right now. I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling that way—too many people living on Earth for that—but still I am the one who has to feel it; maybe then I can find a way to walk forwards. You can’t delegate mourning to a chat bot.
Well, that wasn’t breezy, was it. Sorry about that.