Tea and Sympathy

A waste of good pixels

I finally got off the morning shift.  04:00 wakeup every morning was getting lame.  Good news is that tomorrow is my 12 year anniversary on the hill and is the official start of the two-year countdown to the genteel poverty of retirement in a failing state.  Sounds fun, huh?

Nothing that I can do about it.  So truthfully, I am oddly content.  I am completely aware that the game is changing around me, and this little plan might just go up in smoke, but since there is nothing that I can do about the antecedent conditions, might as well run with the plan and make adjustments as I go.  Folks always seem to forget that retreat or withdrawal is a plan too. 

Screed

I am wondering how things will work with my writing habit when access to the internet starts becoming increasingly limited.  I am guessing that this will take a couple of years yet, but as it stands right now, the current structure of the internet is not conducive to profit in a declining economy (actually, nothing is, but that point seems obvious:  Does this count as a tautology?) As the internet becomes more "pay as you go" and more folks won't be able to handle the "pay" part, the internet will start fading away over time. 

Now, there are those out there who will scream and launch into spittle-flecked tirades about just how the "Internet is the Future" or "we can't run the country without the internet".  Now, both of these sentiments are true and false.  Let's start with the most audacious:  The internet is the future.  That is true.  But not in the way that folks think.  The internet is a means of communication.  It is remarkably fluid and can pass information faster than anything.  But truthfully, it has a bad case of giantism.  The current structure that has been spackled together over the past twenty years is just to unstable and fraught with fast-buck schemes to be economically viable.  The world changed recently and all the efforts being made to allow the internet serve as everything to everyone will come to naught.  I really see the internet reverting to something akin to 1995-2000.  Much smaller, much more focused, more text based, more useful, less frivolous.  This will happen on the server end first.  Google's massive server farms are the Argentinosaurus of the pre-asteroid internet that we now hold so dear.  Things are going to have to return to a couple of steps up from the Darpanet that this monstrosity evolved from.   I will still be useful, it will still be fast, it will still be a lot faster than any other system, it just won't be as effing fatuous.

The next part will be the network end.  My guess is that the patched together network will be just as well maintained as our roads and our power grid.  I really don't think that I need to say more than that. 

The final part will be the client.  Truth be told, this will be the most interesting to watch.  Moores law might be weakened, but it ain't dead.  But more important will be the blowback from the first two issues when confronted by the this aspect.  Right now, the business model is that someone sells you an expensive piece of silicon, which you hook up to an expensive network connection that will connect you to websites that sell you things, let you snoop on your neighbors, and raise your blood pressure.  I really can't see how this kind of thing has a place in a declining economy.  Now, perhaps this has become so ingrained that it has become a shibboleth that folks won't give up, but I don't see that happening.  Folks will respond that work from home will allow the internet to survive, but my strong belief is that if you can do your job from home, the chances are that your job is what is known as a "Bullshit Job" and will go away in the upcoming compression. 

Who knows what will happen.  The chances are that I won't see the final moves of the endgame we are entering.  I am just looking at the pieces that we moved into place over the past forty years and trying to figure out how long until I have to lay down my king.