alt Hacker NewsThe financialization of everything is what's ruining everything. In the computer and internet realm, there's warm nostalgia from hours spent tinkering, building one's own PC, reformatting C drives due to malware, searching for "snippets" to add a forum or pimp a myspace page. But inevitably the money incentives come to dominate. It's all of our doing, we all dream of a better life to put it charitably.
Now everything is a means to a commercial end. Tinkering for fun and knowledge just isn't profitable. And it matters less and less what each our stance is on money and capital if the people that optimize for money and capital gobble up all the money and capital. Of all that's going on, the wealth gap is what's most troubling to me, closely followed because it's closely related is "post truth". I think post-truth is roughly caused by the fact that people are happy to believe what they want to believe toward some commercialized and/or idealogical end. You're much more likely to hate and blame your neighbor when you look around and you're the one not doing too well.
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"warm nostalgia" "reformatting C drives due to malware"
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The real problem is the philosophy that arose in the 1970s that "maximizing shareholder value" is the point of business. As a society, we've become obsessed with optimizing this one variable at the expense of all others and "growth" has become a religion. At it's core, the most important thing we should be optimizing for is "does this business improve the world while turning a robust and sustainable revenue stream" not "how much money can we make for investors". The latter will always optimize for incredible wealth disparity, enshittification, and mostly useless people like Elon Musk becoming stupidly wealthy because it's basically impossible for them to lose money no matter how bad their ideas are (once you're a certain level of rich, your passive income is just immense). I'm not saying shareholders/investors shouldn't be considered, but it can't be the only or the most important metric. We've completely lost the plot on the social and market purpose of a corporation.
In my mind, 'tinkering for fun and knowledge' was never meant to be profitable - if you're tinkering with the express aim of making a profit i'm not sure you're really 'tinkering' so much as you're trying to create a product/service/output for someone else to pay for?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that - I'm just not sure the 'ethos' of tinkering has anything to do with trying to make money and is usually reserved for describing someone playing about with something for their own enjoyment/fun with no desire to make money.
Now, of course some people did find that their tinkerings were able to make them money, but I think at its base it's a term I'd tend to say implies doing something for fun/for themselves, rather than doing it for profit?
In my experience there's still plenty of people out there tinkering just for their own personal satisfaction, but of course there's almost certain a whole load more people out there 'tinkering' to try make a profit.