Just say no (to proprietary SaaS)
2025-11-13
Some things advance too quickly for us humans to intuitively keep up.
For example, our brains interpret sugary foods as tasting good despite them not exactly being full of nutrients. The level of junk-food firepower we have access to today is completely unnatural. Our brains haven't had the time to "realize" that these foods are actually harmful and therefore they should probably taste bad.
Consider drugs that overwhelm our dopamine reward system in ways that aren't possible otherwise. Our bodies are tricked into craving those experiences again and again which is called addiction. Since drugs are a brand new invention in evolutionary time scales, we can't rely on our primitive instincts to avoid their harm.
Luckily as humans, we have some higher-order thinking that we can apply to these situations to make up for when our instincts fall short and tell us to just do the destructive thing that feels good.
Now let's take these analogies to computing.
Proprietary SaaS is a deal that's too good to be true
By now, many people are aware of the shift occurring as software transitions en masse to the Software as a Service paradigm. Or should I say transition back as this model is conceptually similar to the mainframe/terminals of the 60s and 70s.
SaaS today offers considerable benefits over the more decentralized computing paradigm made possible by groundbreaking hardware advances through the 80s to 00s. For example:
- SaaS is the easiest way for users to consume applications (no installation/configuration required)
- publishers can manage the software lifecycle (updates) more easily which usually leads to a better user experience
But, as you read the title of this section, SaaS in practice is usually partly good and partly ominous.
SaaS offers enticing features that we couldn't get before at (usually) no cost. How could you, before the cloud, effortlessly collaborate on documents in real-time and be practically immune from data loss? It was impossible when we were sharing files via CDs back in the day.
If this next generation of computing is truly better than the last, shouldn't it at least cost something? This contradicts our natural intuition. If we suddenly have more AND it's free, that should trigger some concern. If you asked a random person from the 90s, it's a deal that's too good to be true.
And the more times we take the deal, the more likely we'll be to do it again in the future, effectively normalizing SaaS.
The users are the product
This is such mainstream knowledge now, it feels cliché to actually write it down. The reason SaaS can be offered for free is because of the enormous value of our collective data and the enormous value of our attention. The features are really just bait to harness users, unaware of the actual deal they're taking by using these services.
But we accept the bargain anyway, unable to resist the baiting features of "free" proprietary software.
Since there's so much complexity and abstraction in today's software, we can't easily tell when we're being used either. This stuff is too new for our intuition to have developed adequately.
It's all about control
Control is power and power is control.
Software companies/developers already had some level of control simply by virtue of having created the software, but SaaS elevates it to a level hardly possible before. Previously, you could expect software to generally protect your interests and privacy. Today, companies can't resist exploiting users' privacy because it's become too easy and too profitable.
If you don't control your software, "your" software will control you. You now have to be intentional about protecting your computing experience.
What can we do
TODO