"What is this?"

Computers are an important part of daily life, there's no doubt about that. Over the decades, though, people have largely spent more time (and money) coming up with ways to care about computers less. As computers have evolved, they've gotten easier to use without really understanding what they do and why they do it. That's good and all, not everyone is technically inclined and not everyone can (or should) get degrees in computer science. But here's the thing: there are a lot of problems people pass on to technologists that they don't need to, and it's ended up resulting in a lot of harm.

This set of blog posts will walk through how we got here and why we need to do better. Through the next few posts, I'll explain non-technical parts of a popular technology, social media, to understand what the computers are doing and why they do it.

In order to make the whole thing easier to understand, I'm going to relate all of the different parts to a different system that everyone's used to: ordering at a restaurant. We'll go through the different steps and understand how the two are basically the same along with how a lack of understanding of this process has lead to the toxic social media landscape we have now, and education on how we can do better.

Part 1: Non-Technical Problems for Technical People

This whole thing started with the advent of the personal computer. It was a new thing that people didn't want to deal with...so they just didn't. For decades, computers were super complex tools and you had to be a programmer to understand how to do anything with them. Technologists needed to find ways to make computers easier to use, and over time, the general public started to have the expectation that they didn't need to understand computers and that every misunderstanding was the fault of technologists. This first section discusses the proliferation non-technical issues being punted to technologists simply because they were on the computer.

Part 2: How Tech Companies Have Weaponized Ignorance

This section talks about what tech companies have done with the general ignorance of the general population. Because people don't have a working understanding about how the technology they use works, they don't understand the risks inherent to certain types of technology. At least not all of the risks. Or the costs.

Part 3: New Technologies and the Importance of Understanding the Difference

In this section, we'll cover the plumbing that makes a certain social media site, Bluesky, so interesting and how it makes a revolutionary difference in how the apps we use work by themselves and how they work together (and it has nothing to do with the company). It's important to understand the plumbing behind Bluesky and how it protects us from companies like Facebook, and even Bluesky itself.

Part 4: Putting It All Together for a Better Internet

This final section takes all of the different pieces of what we've discussed and puts them all together to understand why understanding how the technology works is important, how it can be done with no technical understanding, and the power that this understanding gives us as humans existing in the world.