Why Is This Stuff Important?

The Internet as a human invention – and accomplishment – is not just some arbitrary thing. It is built upon actual technologies that consist of different components which provide different functionalities all of which enable the Internet to function.

Not everything is what appears when people visit a web page with their browser. There are underlying components at work which most people know nothing about but which nonetheless are important and essential.

Also, the Internet is designed to be free, open, and non-centralized, although increasingly there exists pressure for it to be closed, non-free, and centralized. A closed, non-free, and centralized Internet might be like a technological black box, out of control of the average human being. Such a model is a sick and wrong one.

The other model, that of a free, open, and non-centralized Internet, is important and essential. People devote themselves to creating and learning about the core technologies that make the Internet – and any subnet networks, private or public, that exist – operate.

Why do I sometimes spend several days studying how some system or technology that provides a certain functionality works? Why do I spend hours investigating how various components work or how they operate and depend on each other, in order to achieve some end?

Because these are important tools that are used to build and create things in information technology. They are not concrete things that can be touched, yet they are very real and very important.

The technological landscape in information technology is vast. One can spend one’s career on only a very small subset of it. There is a potentially overwhelmingly vast amount of material to absorb in a wide range of disciplines.

But people focus on different things. I focus on aspects of infrastructure that relate to being able to operate servers that provide data to users. I usually don’t concern myself with the content of the data, but I find the technology that is involved in the operation of the backend to provide the data very interesting.

The rewards are not usually monetary, but there is satisfaction in working with Open Source technologies and when you learn how to create or accomplish something. One has to constantly challenge oneself to stay up on the latest technology and developments. But it’s fun.

I was always the type of kid who could be happy playing by myself in the sandbox for hours, completely immersed in my own world. In a way what I do now is very similar.

Every now and then I connect with a community of people via online formats to ask questions or to give advice. There are other people out there like me who enjoy doing the same things, and we like to share with each other.

It’s sad to me that there are a lot of people who make catastrophically bad and harmful decisions – the so-called elite classes of society – who seem to only demand that things ‘work’ without any regard as to how they work. Those types of people inflict a lot of pain and damage in the world. They have nothing at stake in the game of brahmanic cultivation therefore they have nothing to lose if they fuck everything up.

I think those types of people are unfortunately the people with power in society and the ones who are happy to import tens of thousands or even millions of foreigners, even while the system in the USA to promote brahmanic cultivation – to promote the development of human beings – is so irrevocably fucked up.

As long as there are teams of slaves to work their high-tech plantations, they are happy to do it, so that Big Line keeps going up and their pockets get filled with money.

It’s sad to me that that USA has turned its back on tech workers like me, the people who aren’t elites yet who actually enjoy and dedicate themselves to technology. Rather than build a better environment in which to foster knowledge and learning, it has thrown us away as worthless human beings.

There’s something deeply wrong with such a society. Whatever it might manage to accomplish in the short term, such a sick society will not last for long. The institutions of society are supposed to exist to support the people, not the other way around.

But the chorus that is heard constantly from every corner is that it is the institutions which are above the people, that the people exist to further the institutions. Such a system is a sick one, and no different than enslavement.