The Moral Imperative for the Public Good
Inspiration
Spicy take:
Funding via small dollar donation begs are never going to be sustainable and reliable ways to fund projects.
The only way that those are regularly and consistently able to be funded is either if the project runners have outside employment/are retired or are otherwise able to pay rent and hosting fees without donations.
There's a bit more to the post. We'll get to it in a moment. I want to address this part first.
I left my gig three years ago. I've been riding on saving. Folks have a hard time believe that, but I'm a single guy who had a decentmoney tech salary for twenty years. I'm not really retired. Just taking a break from the working worldjob.
Based on my experience, Jess couldn't have said a truer thing.
Work on Web Tools
I spend most of my time writing code. I started by working on a personal set of tools to make websiteslinks. A response to the frustration I felt with existing offerings. They take too much work to set up, are hard to use, and have a tendency to break for no reasonbreaking.
The more I worked on my tools, the more I realized how high the barrier to entry for making a site had becomewp. My focus started to shift. I started kicking around ideas for how to make thing easier for other folks.
The more effort I put in, the more a thought kept jumping into my head:
How the fuck is anyone supposed to be able to do this work?
The work is a full time job. Makes sense. We hire people to write software full time, after all. But, if you do it full time, what pays the bills?
The Other Option
There's little doubt that I could get VC fundingvc. An injection that would let me focus on making software without having to worry about money.
Except for the part where that's a lie. It would let me work without having to worry about making rent in the short term. But, a quick reminder that "VC" stands for Venture Capital. While I'd see it as "funding", the real word is "investment". And, the entire idea behind an investment is to get more money coming back than was dished out at the start.
The motivation behind the work changes. It's no longer how to make things for people. It's how to make things that get money from peoplegoals.
The Full Post
That brings us back to the post. Here's the full thing this time:
Spicy take:
Funding via small dollar donation begs are never going to be sustainable and reliable ways to fund projects run by minorities and marginalized people.
The only way that those are regularly and consistently able to be funded is either if the project runners have outside employment/are retired or are otherwise able to pay rent and hosting fees without donations, or if they have the ability to attract "whales" or corporate donations. Which all of these criteria overwhelmingly are only met by cis het white guys.
The discrimination is structural all the way down.
I'd never thought of it that way. Not as discrimination. Only as an environment that made it incredibly hard for anyone to put in effort to make things for the public good. Of course, I'm a straight, white, dude. I'm not the target of discrimination. Either explicit, implicit, or endemic.
The Question
But, there's a way discrimination doesn't matter. Or, better said, an obligation to be fulfilled before considerations of discrimination enter the picture. I'll phrase it in the form of a question:
If you're in a position to contribute to the public good, how can it be anything other than a moral failing not to?
My answer is that it can't be.
Without that effort, every public good becomes a capital good. The collective efforts of society go not to improving the live of our fellow travelers, but to reinforcing the structures that capture the goods of the public to serve self-interest.
I see no other option.
Those of us who have the means to contribute must.
-a
Endnotes
I was already on this train before thinking about it in terms of discrimination. Adding the light of that framing only strengthens my resolve.
While I won't be going after VC funding, I will be going after big donations. Hit me up if you've got several zeros to put into making the web a better place.
Open this to learn more about the thing I built
The first big thing I built to make things easier for folks to make websites is bitty. It's a web component that lets you make interactive sites and pages without requiring a framework. It works great with static site generators like 11ty, Hugo, jekyll, and zola.
The purpose of this post is not to promote bitty. But, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it since it's literally what I'm talking about. I'm dropping the mention in this expansion box as a compromise.
Check it out if you're interested: bitty.alanwsmith.com
Footnotes
I made a good salary compared to most folks, but could have made way more if I'd been willing to jump around more. But, I had enough to do what I wanted and was largely in control of my time. That last fact being worth more than some percentage increase. Even a big one.
I don't think I'll be able to enter the corporate world again. I had undiagnosed/unmedicated bipolar 1 disorder for most of my career. Then, I had a manic episode the ended me up in the psych ward. I can still do work. In fact, I get more done now than I ever did in a corporate environment. Surviving in that environment again is not something I believe I can do with the meds I'm on now.
I love making websites. I've got a hundred or so. Most are silly, but every time I make a new one it helps me think about how to make it easier for other folks to make them too.
My hypothesis is that you can't really make things without starting to think about the folks who'll see it. That thinking is a tiny bit of empathy. Hence, the more folks we can get making websites the more empathy there will be in the world. Something we desperately need.
For the pedantic, your right, it's not that the Next.js site I was working broke for no reason. It broke because a dependency that was outside of my control changed.
My experience was: publish site one day, it works. Change a single typo and publish again and it doesn't work. I call that breaking for no reason.
There are tools like WordPress and a host of services where you can make a website. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about sites for folks who want to tinker with the behind-the-scenes bits. Poking at the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to see what happens.
The tools I've seen for doing that have a non-trivial overhead to getting started. That's the part I want to make easier for folks. Things to get away from the idea that you have to learn React to make a site with buttons that do something when you click them.
I've got the skills, resolve, and more than enough drive to be a co-founder. I can talk the talk, and I look the part.
I've got no problem with folks making money from their work. For example, I want to pay people for the software I use. That's how they get to continue to keep making it without stacking it full of ads or running grifts that sell off my privacy.
But, there are things we shouldn't have to pay for. Or, better said, that we should all pay for together: The Public Good.