The Power of Technology
Since the industry works with information, its gatekeepers are the most powerful information-brokers on the planet. Information is the key to understanding anything, so the manager of information technology is the de facto gatekeeper to understanding. Every CEO of a large tech company has more knowledge power than the collective entirety of Ancient Rome, and far more efficiently without the breakdown in information transfer from before messages were sent electrically.
In practice, there are only several classes of individuals and groups who maintain all the power:
- Corporate executives who approve gigantic and revolutionary projects, with the intent to make lots of money through being the pioneer of an industry.
- Large corporations who capitalize on established, reliable technologies, with the intent to make lots of money through mass-produced distribution of those technologies.
- Small, individual developers who are lucky enough to become #1 or #2, with their own political agendas and management style changing as they ascend to power.
- Independent open-source developers who are typically too geeky to climb to social power, and often value complete software freedom enough that they’re not making a ton of money but contribute to an immense public good.
As long as young people obsess about trends, they’ll likely never see those power dynamics at play, and the cycle of power changes will repeat endlessly.
The only redemption to tech is that the trends move so fast that no singular corporation can theoretically corner the market, since their technology will become outdated as soon as they blink. There’s also enough pressure by the younger generation to advocate for open-source code, so those large entities must constantly shed at least some of their power to the masses to avoid all the smart kids condemning their business practices.
Like any popular form of power, the technologies of today will probably grow until people feel threatened by it. Then, other forms of power (like governments) will subdue it and regulate it, and everyone will move their attention to yet another technology that gives a new form of power. The internet or AI is doing it right now in the 2020s, and it may be augmented reality or biohacking in the future.
Big Tech Counter-Culture
Typically, an open-source implementation arises once a company fails spectacularly at providing all the features and conveniences they pioneered. Some people in the industry have severe trust issues with the powerful movers and shakers of the technologies and want a free, open society. They range from libertarians to communists, but have a shared hatred of centralized control under the organizations presently running those systems.
These vigilante-style programmers tend to find solace in passion projects directed at things like open-source OS development (e.g., GNU/Linux) that work directly against the interests of FAANG. They tend to build free versions of what already exists, but continually give power to people within the public who are nerdy enough to read the documentation.
Their innovation is often a response to the power plays (e.g., making a video hosting alternative when the primary hosting solution becomes Orwellian), so FLOSS tends to follow the for-profit actions of FAANG companies. Their actions are, therefore, never typically on the bleeding edge of the trends, but can sometimes come mere months afterward. And sometimes, companies can screw up the paperwork revolving around the complexities of intellectual property and accidentally release something open-source that plants the seeds for a future competitor.
Many in the open-source community imagine closed-source will be overtaken by open-source (e.g., Facebook made React), but that reasoning doesn’t resonate with reality. People like to own things when they can profit off it, and people still find a type of profit in open-source through free marketing and free debugging.
After all, young people are willing to volunteer for a cause they believe in, even when it’s silly.