It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) ⭐

I returned to college to study computer programming in 1993 and spent much of the next few years working in a computer lab at the school. One of my clearest memories of this time is me and a friend, Brian, slowly downloading floppy disc images for Slackware Linux using the school's fast--for the day--T1 connection. Then, we would even more slowly copy those images onto physical 3.5-inch floppies, stacked like some real-world plastic version of Jenga next the PC, one by one.

Basically, we had a lot of downtime to chat and to think about how this might change everything. "What happens," I wondered aloud as my mind settled on a fairly obvious outcome, "when some combination of Linux and whatever office productivity suite does the 90 percent of everything that Windows and Office do, but for free?"

What happens, indeed. Let the history show that nothing happened, not really. I can't point to a place and time when Linux and some office productivity suite hit that milestone, but I think we can all agree it happened. And then we all just kept using Windows and Office, aside from a small crowd that used a Mac and Office. This, I cannot explain. But it probably formed the bedrock of my thinking these days around familiarity, inertia, and fear of change having more to do with the popularity of personal computing platforms than anything else.

Over 30 years later, things are finally starting to change. But this change isn't driven by improvements in Linux, office productivity suites, or any other open source software, not really. Instead, it's being driven by what we belatedly realized should have been obvious in retrospect: Having achieved market dominance, today's Big Tech companies--not just Microsoft anymore, but also Amazon, Apple, Google, and a few others, plus gigantic tech-adjacent companies like Spotify, Netflix, and others, are all engaged in the inevitable end stage capitalism death spiral. They are enshittifying their products and services to wring more profits and more growth from each customer. They are making their offerings worse and charging us more.

This terribleness takes many forms. Among the most egregious is the rise of subscription services, with ever-higher monthly fees, replacing the previous model by which we would pay for some version of a product, use it as long as we wanted, and then upgrade only when some future version emerged that offered a good enough value to justify the cost. Subscription services aren't inherently evil, but they are cancerous to the companies that offer them. And the worst crime here is when a company only offers subscription access to products and services that were once paid products without offering customers a choice.

Adobe is the key abuser here. And this one is complicated, because all the best moral conundrums are complicated. That is, Adobe makes terrific software, it has done a commendable job of transforming itself and its products for the AI era. Its software used to be very...