Everything is a Tool
Last updated:It is obvious when you think about it, but I hadn't realized it until John Vervaeke pointed it out early in his very good series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis: Nearly everything in our lives is a tool. Our homes are tools to keep us warm or cool, and out of the rain, and to contain our other tools. Our car is a tool to take us places farther, faster, and with much less effort than our legs. Our clothes are tools to help keep us warm and modest.
When you look around, basiclly only your naked body is not a tool. Also, food isn't considered a tool, but we do use a lot of tools in its preparation. We can even say entertainment is a tool to assuage boredom, pass the time, or just help is to feel better or at least forget our troubles for a short while.
And so, with everything being a tool, it is important for our tools to have proper utility. They should work for us, in a way that makes sense to us, is malleable to each tool user's needs, and can be combined with other tools to help complete a task. Looking at some of our high-tech tools, like our phones and tables, social media services and search engines, these tools while initially quite high in utility, also have many features which are not beneficial. They are not our tools, but somebody else's (or, rather corporation's). They are not designed to serve our needs but rather there for us to serve someone else's.
Big-tech Tools
For many on the indie side of the internet, there is clear awareness that these tools do not serve us but rather make us tools in the service of others trying to make money off of us. And so to take back our tools, and make them work for us, we opt out of participation in corporate-owned media, or use of corporate operating systems.
This is great, but when we notice that, we can actually go further. Not only can we recreate our tools for our own use, but we can create them without the constraints initially put on the big-tech tools. Mastodon is in many ways similar to other social media. I don't use it but what I've seen of it kind of feels like X (which I also don't use). The Gimp is in many ways similar to Adobe Photoshop. Let's think about what software and tech services could look like with zero corporate influence.
Here are some more subtle ways in which our tools may not be the best fit for us. One example that many people probably now take for granted is having to save a file when working on a computer. This is not a concept that ever occurs in the physical world. Not only do we not need to save, but we shouldn't even have to consider the differences between memory and storage. This is called orthogonal persistence. Apple has only half-heartedly implemented this. But, Multics had such capabilities in the 1960s.
How
about the way software is silod? You use one program to write a document, another to browse the web, another for email,
etc. Or rather, you have a different tab in your web browser for each activity. Either way, the problem here is that
each piece of functionality is separated off from the rest, not designed to be integrated however the user wants.
Alan Kay wrote a nice article back in 1979(!)
predicting tablets and laptops, but his vision coupled them with fully exposed programming capabilites.
FOSS
Free and open source software is in a unique position to be able to deliver more fully on Alan Kay's vision. We don't need proprietary software with proprietary formats. We don't need software startup splash screens, and consistent branding. Take for example the Unix pipe concept. It is a simple one, but rather powerful. With it nearly all programs which output some form of text automatically can be composed with other programs, totally without the original authors' knowledge or design for it. The result is more powerful functionality through the use of small programs building a bigger tool which does just what the user wants.
What if the Unix pipe were extended beyond just text? How about if every piece of software was just a component to be plugged in with other components to build whatever tool you need at the moment? Maybe The Gimp, instead of being one large program with a bunch of plugins, could be a bunch of small programs, and the default UI is just a script tying them all together. All of your bookmarks, and tabs and web browsing history could be instantly retrievable not only to revisit a site, but also to add to a research paper, or to share via email or other communications with others whom you think might be interested. Of course we do this now with copy-paste, but that is more cumbersome than it needs to be.
These are just some ideas I have had in recent months as I've surfed the 'net and found others trying to radically rewrite what an operating system is. I've touched upon them in other articles, Operating System Ideas and More Operating System Ideas. Other folks are or have experimented with new and old OS concepts.
Of cource radical change can be hard, but it can also be fun. Maybe this inspires someone to try.