Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes.
To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the toxic community that came with it.
I sought a new community in cyberspace, and the world claims that this space rewards you. But looking at it now, that structure also seems reserved for a very specific class. Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
Cyberspace, which I chose as an escape, is ultimately dominated by real-world capital. And if you want to catch up to the early settlers, there isn't much you can do as a citizen of the Third World. Between China's self-sustaining ecosystem and America's global standard, there is no place for me. The physical frontier is closed, and I arrived too late even for the cyber frontier.
Language barriers, capital, platforms—they form just another rigid hierarchy. To enter the open-source world, someone from the periphery must learn English, assimilate into its cultural nuances, and master programming languages that are inherently far more difficult to learn if your native tongue is not English. There are countless more gates to pass through, yet the seats are strictly limited.
This essay spoke of a free and open frontier, but for someone like me, it is merely standing outside a shining castle, longing for it, shouting for someone to open the gates. But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I have merely migrated from a physical colony to a digital one. How much longer can I be consumed like this? Sometimes, the inside of that castle—as seen on HN—looks so warm. But my reality is always cold. I simply envy those who were privileged enough to experience the 90s cyber-romanticism portrayed in this essay.
You don’t have to be privileged to live in the physical world. I quit programming to make candles for years, then apartment maintenance, now in the trades. I make 1/3 what I was making doing digital work, and I’d take a pay cut before returning.
The reasons I had for leaving were manifold, but the big two were wanting to quit Adderall and having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a hard road to live a life in which I want to maximize the /quality/ of my minute-to-minute experience. It involves being very honest with myself about what I want to and don’t want to be doing. I know I want to look at a screen for work like I want a hole in the head.
If you want to jump into the physical world, become a janitor. The work is surprisingly satisfying. You spend all day fixing tangible problems that increase everyone’s quality of life.
You may have missed that they're from the developing world, where menial labor is far less well paid and far more backbreaking and dangerous than in the US.
Korea is hardly the developing world, but they're from not-US, basically, which might as well be the developing world as far as the conversation is concerned.
Hmm, yeah I'm confused, they said "as a citizen of the third world" but then noted working in Korea and Japan.
The point that is often misunderstood is this: Korea is a wealthy country, but that wealth is highly concentrated in Seoul. Once you leave Seoul, the quality of jobs often drops significantly.
I think Barlow, like all counter culturalists or hippies, was first and foremost a romantic. Him entering the new information age only after leaving his farm in -87 is quite apocryphal - dude hanged out at Warhol’s Factory and wrote songs for Grateful Dead for crying out loud. He is cleverly using the romantic image of Wild West and the Cowboy criticising its commercialisation while at the same time claiming its authenticity to himself and using it for his own purposes to market something else than cigarettes. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is what it is.
I was driving on a work trip in the rural regions of my country passing a railway crew. They were replacing the tracks I had been laying there as part of a crew some 15 years ago. I liked the outdoors, being middle of the literal nowhere middle of a bright summer knight, the manual labour, the fact that you were constantly up against the elements, even the rain, cold, scorching heat. I didn’t own a smart phone back then and little use it would have been with no connection. So I know a little bit what Barlow writes about.
Now I earn my weeks salary laying down railway tracks by driving 250km to punch bunch of digits into a machine to make it connect to a network and then driving back. The great planes were taken over by robber barons, oil titans, mining companies, the Rockefellers and Hearsts, the Electronic Frontier is now filled with barbed wire and information mines by the new Cyber Industrialists of the likes of Zuck, Bezos, Altman, Musk. Barlow is a Marlboro man of the Electronic Good Ole Days gone past.
I don’t really have a point. You can still go and run in the rain or snow, you can carve things out wood or fix things with your own hands. You can remove yourself - you must - from these virtual madhouses Meta etc. shove your face constantly and try to find your own tribe elsewhere. You can install Linux on old machine and start coding your own tools in C or Python without language models doing your thinking for you. The world is full of great books and great art accessible 24/7 for free, if you know where to look for.
You can be free still. But lamenting after the last cowboy won’t help. We must accept that we live in two worlds constantly today. Schizoid as it might be, having our toes dug into the moist dirt might keep us sane in the maddening glass world of the virtual casino the world has become.
Good writing! Thanks
> Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out.
Why? Just go build stuff! AI makes an excellent tutor assuming you can exhibit a bit of self awareness and ask directed questions.
> yet the seats are strictly limited.
Why do you say that?
> But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire.
I appreciate the seemingly unfair added difficulty of integrating as a foreigner. But as far as not possessing the desired skills, what's preventing you from learning them on your own?
In poor countries like mine (and looks like GP's too), IT positions are very limited indeed. Nevertheless, it has been one of the very few sectors open to nobodies, helping us to pull ourselves out of poverty, open to those who weren't born to the right family with the right connections, or to a sugar daddy who can cover the first 25 years of our lives to go get a good education in Europe or the US.
Looks like it's being slowly taken away from us to make a few billionaires into proper trillionaires. Can't see this ending well for humanity.
And the common advice you hear on this site ("just migrate to country X") doesn't really apply to most of us. Even if you can name many examples of people doing just that, you're seeing a very narrow slice of the population; I can find many more counterexamples for each one of them.
Your weak passport won't impress anybody, almost all of the world is closed to you, you can't travel anywhere (forget migrate) without going through a lengthy and expensive process where you're treated with suspicion, and can be denied with no compensation, on every step of the way. I'm still talking about traveling here; finding work is much more difficult.
So it's really hard to move anywhere decent if you're not at the top of your profession, which in large part depends on your innate abilities, not just how many hours you put in.
I've become jaded and extremely cynical; if worst comes to worst, there's always one universal way out, which is what keeps me going for now.
Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere. In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor I'm constantly astonished by it myself.
However, the difficult part about what you said is this before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment.
Of course, I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that. The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP. My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding.
But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast.
So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges.
It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.
To be fair, being from a small country can help too. (Hi from Lithuania.) It helps with marketing, because while it's difficult being Worlds Amazon, it's easier and more marketable to be lithuanian version.
Yes, it has downsides too, as economy and people resources work depending on scale - smaller community is going to be smaller - but it's a way to startup and build a base solution, while thinking of something else that may change the rest of the world later.
Of course, yeah, in the end it's just different...
P.S. I'm in same boat technology wise. It's difficult to learn everything, and learn it "on time" :)
We are both navigating a challenging road. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors, my friend.
I sympathize strongly with you, but your cyberspace escape is getting worse by the year. I'd say I'm planning my escape but I'm working in tech and I'm not sure I have a path out.
I disagree because the tools for self-learning, self-instruction and self-expression which exist now through cyberspace and computers are better than ever for those who are motivated to use them.
My guess (and hope) is that next generations will find more meaning in physical labor, communal living etc, partly out of necessity (what young person can afford to buy even a small, simple home these days?) but mostly because they seem to understand that we've screwed the environment enough at this point and the novelty with things like social media is beginning to wear off. As much as kids are glued to their iPads, they also seem to understand that what we are doing to the environment is not sustainable and that unchecked capitalism is not as great as it is hyped to be.
We already see things like tiny house movement taking off (lots of young people even building these tiny homes themselves). As older farmers retire/die, now is a good time for younger folks to get into farming, even if it is too damn hard these days for small farmers.
This was beautifully put. Lovely writing, and I agree; the current system is a recipe for anxiety.
Beautifully well said.
What? Go volunteer at a botanical garden or something.
That's a weird take, IMO, the physical world is much more oriented around not being wealthy and you can still find plenty of community online.
And your English seems fine.
90s / early 2000s internet was awesome though.
I'm writing this from East Asia, not the US. Over here, there is a suffocating cultural expectation: if you aren't in a specific tier of jobs by a certain age, you are branded a loser. Furthermore, the economy is so heavily centralized that there are very few tech jobs outside of Seoul. I tried to make it there, but after being heavily scammed, I had no choice but to return to my rural hometown.
My English is also a constant work in progress. I depend on standard Google Translate for about 30~40% of what I communicate. For now, I'm making ends meet by doing Upwork job via an agency. It's an uphill battle, but I am determined to push myself to study more by reading English tech articles moving forward
Keep going and don’t listen to the noise.
Remember also that if you’re having an atypical experience you likely have a different perspective on the world, and what it needs, than others do. That different way of looking at things could turn out to be very valuable.
Good luck man, keep at it.. rooting for you! now that I am in my 50s and being passed over for tech jobs thanks to a bad market, ageism, AI fears etc and I had to build my own career again and dived into the startup world, its not been easy but keep looking at all your options.