Solutions Over Problems: What IT Is For

Information technology does not create problems. It reveals them, and then it hands the fix to more people than could ever have held it before.

You have heard the opposite: technology makes more problems than it solves. That is true in one specific case, and only one. It is true when the machine is a box you are not allowed to open, one that keeps adding dependencies while your ability to look inside it keeps shrinking.

The problem is not the technology. The problem is the tenancy.

When the machine is (I describe the system I want, and a rebuild produces it), (it runs on the hardware I actually own, not only on someone else’s server), and mine to inspect because I am the one paying for it, the ledger flips. Idle overhead drops, the cost of merely being switched on drops, and the set of problems I can solve without asking permission gets bigger.

The same failure mode

A Windows install that has been running for six years, a laptop that shipped with a pile of software and never stopped accumulating more, and an that adds a rule in an afternoon and almost never removes one: same shape, different scale. All three add processes more easily than they remove them. All three justify each addition as coordination or protection. All three raise the baseline cost of existing inside the system. All three make subtraction the exceptional case. You end up a tenant in a configuration you did not write and cannot rebuild, a guest in a house where someone else keeps the keys and the receipts.

The declarative method

Declarative systems turn the arrow around. A configuration (NixOS being a where the whole machine is described in one file) states the machine you want, and a rebuild produces it. Yesterday’s generation stays on disk, so if today is wrong you roll back instead of arguing with a wizard. Nothing undeclared runs. Every line that touches your machine is a line you can read. Imagine applying that to institutions: every new agency, reporting regime, or compliance rule would have to be an explicit, visible addition, one that could be removed without a multi-year political campaign and a royal commission into whether removal is allowed.

Sophistication is not the dividing line. Closed platforms that phone home about everything you did can be very sophisticated indeed. The dividing line is whether the person who bears the cost keeps the ability to read, modify, and rebuild the configuration that governs their tools, their data, and their attention. Keep that, and technology is a workshop. Remove it, and every new feature is another problem with your name on the invoice.