Take Google Photos for example. Since June 2019, it doesn't sync with Google Drive. You can only see your own photos through their app. Getting them onto a computer you own became really difficult. Google Takeout still lets you export all your photos, but it's a rather clunky, manual process. Twitter makes it hard to get API credentials nowadays, so the API is out of reach for most. Fortunately, I had old ones I could reuse. Reddit's API only returns the last 1000 comments, so it's missing about a decade worth of comments. Many websites just don't offer any API at all.

In December 2019, Google and Facebook proudly announced a major milestone, which was echoed in news media all around the world: it is now possible to copy a picture from Facebook to Google Photos. This news came in mere months after we celebrated the 50th anniversary of another technological feat: the moon landing of 20 July 1969, when millions of households witnessed Neil Armstrong take a giant leap for mankind.

What do I mean by “better”? Computing aids and encourages humanity’s noblest pursuits: science, reason, art, philosophy. Computing directly supports improving the mental health, physical health, prosperity, and happiness of all humans. Computing help us master (or at least, doesn’t intensify) our problematic tendencies: addiction, status anxiety, socioeconomic divisions, tribalism, fear, hate. The economic and intellectual horsepower in Silicon Valley and the wider tech world seems to be pointed away from these goals. For example: algorithms designed to maximize watch time, the social media outrage machine, loot boxes and other psuedo-gambling, and smartphone notifications activating Skinner-box tendencies.