As a community we need to create more tools like WordPress that decentralize wealth creation and create jobs. We need to create fewer tools like Medium that centralize wealth creation and eliminate jobs.
I appreciate your passion for decentralization, but these issues go a bit beyond what kinds of software we write. The issues this election raised aren't going to be solved by writing code.
If you want to start steering political life according to your values, next election cycle, pick a candidate for city/state/federal/whatever, or cause that matters to you, and give them 10 hours a week of your time.
They might win, and you might have your issue or values better represented at your city/state/federal/whatever.
If they lose, you get up and do it again the next election cycle.
It's not just the kind of software, it's the kind of business model we enable with our software. The only way to create local jobs in communities across the United States is to empower people across communities in the United States.
If we look at mature technologies like plumbing we see an industry around them that enables small, local businesses. Yes a relatively few companies make plumbing components, but hundreds of independent plumbers are able to use those components distributed through local shops to solve local problems.
WordPress has done that for software. Through it's decentralized design it enables jobs for consultants, plug-in vendors, theme vendors, designers, web hosts, and content authors. This industry around WordPress employs many, many people. Further, it creates an opportunity for geographically targeted businesses to be built around WordPress.
The architecture of the tools systematizes the business models those tools enable.
>The issues this election raised aren't going to be solved by writing code.
I agree, but I would say that actively selecting what kind of code you will write using criteria that value wide economic utility -- much wider, say, than the goals of the average me-too unicorn chasing project -- is a healthy and all-too-rare thing.
