Hello! I’m working on an interesting project this month, related to open source Linux operating systems. Actually I’m not working on it this week, I’m instead battling with vinyl floor tiles. Don’t let anyone tell you they are easy to fit. But I think on the 5th attempt I’ve got the technique. The wooden mallet is essential.

When I started these “status update” posts, back in 2021 , I imagined they’d be to talk about open technology projects I was working on, mixed with a bit of music and art and so on. In fact I write more about politics these days. Let me explain why.

In my book review earlier this year I mentioned economics dude Gary Stevenson. I still didn’t read his book but I do watch all his videos now and I’m learning a lot.

I learned a bit about the housing crisis, for example. The housing crisis in Manchester had several major effects on my life. I just read today in The Manchester Mill that the average rent in Salford jumped from £640/mo to £1,121/mo in a decade.

(Lucky for me, I got into computers early in life, and nobody understands their secrets so they still have to pay a good salary to those of us who do. So far I’ve weathered the crisis. Many of my friends don’t have that luck, and some of them have been struggling for 15 years already. Some even had to become project managers .)

Until about 2020, I assumed the Manchester housing crisis was caused by people moving up from London. Galicia had some cheap ass rents when I arrived and it’s only around 2021, when they started suddenly doubling just as I’d seen happen in Manchester, that I realised the same crisis was about to play out here as well, and perhaps it wasn’t entirely the fault of Gen-X Londoners. I thought, maybe it’s a Europe-wide housing crisis?

Let me summarize the video Gary Stevenson did about the housing crisis ( this one ), to save you 28 minutes. It’s not just houses but all types of asset which are rapidly going up in price, and it’s happening worldwide. We notice the houses because we need them to live normal lives, unlike other types of asset such as gold or government bonds which most of us can live without.

The most recent video is titled like this: “Is the economy causing a mental health crisis? “. I’ve embedded it below. ( It’s hosted on a platform controlled by Google, but Gary is good enough to turn off the worst of the YouTube ads, those bastards that pop up during a video in mid-sentence or while you’re figuring out a yoga pose .)

My answer to that question, when I saw it, was “ Yes, obviously “. For example, if rent increases by 75% in your city and you’re forced back into living with your parents age 35, it’s tough to deal with alright. What do you think?

But the video is about more than that. The reason asset prices are through the roof is because the super rich are taking all the assets . The 1% have more money than ever. Wealth inequality is rapidly rising, and nothing is stopping it. For thousands of years, the aristocracy owned all the land and castles and manor houses, and the rest of us had a few cabbages and, perhaps if you were middle class, a pig.

The second half of the 20th century levelled the playing field and put in place systems which evened things out and meant your grandparents maybe could buy a house. The people in charge of those systems have given up, or have been overpowered by the super rich.

In fact, the video “Is the economy causing a mental health crisis?” is about the effect on your mental health when you realize that all of society as you know it is headed towards complete collapse.

(Lucky for me, I grew up thinking society was headed for collapse due to the climate crisis, so I listened to a lot of punk rock and over-developed my capacity for nihilism. Maybe my mind looks for crises everywhere? Or maybe I was born in a time well-supplied with global crises. I share a birthday with the Chernobyl disaster.)

So how does all this relate back to open technology?

Maybe it doesn’t. I went to the GNOME conference last month and had very little overtly “political” conversations. We chatted about GNOME OS, live-streaming, openQA, the GNOME Foundation, the history of the GNOME project, accessibility at conferences, our jobs, and so on. Which was great, I for some reason find all that stuff mega interesting. (Hence why I went there instead of a conference about 21st century world politics).

Or maybe it does. Tech is part of everyone’s lives now. Some of the most powerful organizations in the world now are tech companies and they get their power from being omnipresent. Software engineers built all of this. What were we thinking?

I think we just enjoyed getting paid to work on fun problems. I suppose none of today’s tech billionaires seemed like particularly evil-minded people in the mid 2000s. Spotify used to talk about reducing MP3 piracy, not gutting the income streams of 95% of professional recording artists. Google used to have a now laughable policy of “Don’t be evil”.

There is one exception who were clearly evil bastards in the 2000s as well. The US anti-trust case against Microsoft, settled in 2001, is an evidence trail of lies and anti-competitive behaviour under Bill Gates’ leadership. Perhaps in an attempt to one-up his predecessor, the Satya Nadella Microsoft is now helping the far-right government of Israel to commit war crimes every day. No Azure for Apartheid . At least they are consistent, I suppose.

In fact, I first got interested in Linux due to Microsoft. Initially for selfish reasons. I was a child with a dialup internet connection, and I just wanted to have 5 browser windows open without the OS crashing. (For younger readers — browser tabs weren’t invented until the 21st century).

Something has kept me interested in open operating systems, even in this modern era when you can download an MP3 in 5 seconds instead of 5 consecutive evenings. It’s partly the community of fun people around Linux. It’s partly that it led me to the job that has seen me through the housing crisis so far. And its partly the sense that we are the alternative to Big Tech.

Open source isn’t going to “take over the world”. That’s what Microsoft, Spotify and Google were always going to do (and have now done). I’m honestly not sure where open source is going. Linux will go wherever hardware manufacturers force it to go, as it always has done.

GNOME may or may not make it mainstream one day. I’m all for it, if it means some funding for localsearch maintainers. If it doesn’t, that’s also fine, and we don’t need to be part of some coherent plan to save the world or to achieve a particular political aim. Nothing goes according to plan anyway. Its fine to work on stuff just cus its interesting.

What we are doing is leading by example, showing that its possible to develop high quality software independently of any single corporation. You can create institutions where contributors do what we think is right, instead of doing what lunatics like Sam Altman or Mark Zockerborg think.

At the same time, everything is political.

What would happen if I travelled back to 2008 and asked the PHP developers building Facebook: “Do you think this thing could play a determining role in a genocide in Myanmar?”

I met someone this weekend who had just quit Spotify. She isn’t a tech person. She didn’t even know Bandcamp exists. Just didn’t want to give more money to a company that’s clearly evil. This is the future of tech, if there is any. People who pay attention to the world, who are willing to do things the hard way and stop giving money to people who are clearly evil.