Modern Software Insults Our Intelligence
Over the past few months, I’ve been making a conscious effort to use my computers more like an average person might. For most of the last decade, my machines were primarily development tools—quiet, obedient servants running code I’d written to solve specific problems. They answered only to me, rarely interacting with cloud services. When I wanted an application framework, I built one. That framework then served as the backbone for blogging engines, school management systems, and countless utilities. When development tools began demanding money for features that once came standard, I wrote my own versions. Sure, this often distracted me from the primary problems I was trying to solve, but there was satisfaction in the autonomy, and a kind of sanity in not needing to engage with software ecosystems that had grown increasingly hostile to people. But recently I thought it might be time to change that. To “rejoin the mainstream,” if only to better understand the current landscape and be prepared for whatever comes next. Use off-the-shelf tools. See what the rest of the world sees.
The result has been, to put it mildly, frustrating.
It’s not just the software—it’s the entire philosophy behind it. In 2015, when I stepped away from commercial applications, I noticed a disturbing shift: everything moved to subscriptions, even simple tools I had already paid for. Ads appeared in paid apps. Basic functionality—once considered essential—was suddenly gated behind arbitrary payment walls. That was the turning point. I stopped trusting software made for “everyone” and quietly retreated into a world of self-built tools. That decision kept my work clean, my machines fast, and my frustration levels low. To this day, I find any application that requires more than two seconds to open unnecessarily bloated. My four-year-old MacBook boots in under eighteen seconds. If a single app takes that long—I’m looking at your crap, Microsoft—it’s bad software.
In the years since, things have only grown worse. Every application seems to demand access to my location, even when managing email. Search engines insist on sign-ins before showing generic results. Sure, the interfaces look polished—rounded corners, soft colours, elegant transitions—but under the surface, everything feels engineered to extract. Extract data, extract money, extract attention. A pretty interface doesn’t excuse a manipulative backend.
More than once, I’ve sat staring at the screen wondering: how do most people tolerate this? When did we collectively decide this was okay? I don’t think people enjoy this state of things—but they’ve grown used to it. The erosion of our digital sovereignty has been disguised as convenience, numbing people to the underlying intrusions. Maybe they don’t throw their computers out the window because they no longer expect their tools to respect them. That, more than anything, is what makes me feel like a relic.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just being difficult. Too particular. Too demanding. I think about characters like Foster in Falling Down, or even Terry Davis with TempleOS—not because I’m close to breaking down or retreating into a bunker, but because I see how easily a principled person can be pushed into isolation when the world stops making sense. But this isn’t about eccentricity or stubbornness. It’s about standards. When you’ve used good software—honest software—it’s hard to accept what now passes for normal.
Trying to be more like everyone else hasn’t made me feel more connected. It’s made me feel more alienated. And maybe that’s the real lesson. I don’t need to rejoin the mainstream if the mainstream is headed somewhere I can’t ethically or practically follow. I’m not nostalgic for some golden age of computing. I just want tools that do what they promise, without extracting more than I agreed to give.
So maybe it’s time to stop trying to make peace with modern software. Maybe it’s okay to write my own tools—not out of spite, but because they fit the way I work and the way I think. There’s a quiet kind of rebellion in building things for yourself. It may not scale. It may not impress anyone, particularly now that just about anyone can have AI build them custom software in seconds, but it might just be enough to stay sane in a world that’s forgotten what software is supposed to be.