We Should Want Less Technology, Not More

Technology has always existed to make us more human, and the proof isn't the smartphone or the model. It's the wheel.

Not that the wheel was literally the first piece of technology; that's anyone's guess, honestly. But it makes the point as well as anything.

Someone looked at a load too heavy to carry and built a thing to carry it instead, and that single move is the whole lineage of every tool that came after. People are innovative by default (dare I say, to innovate is to be human), so from that first cart to the last data center the job has never changed: technology takes the part that never needed a human, so the human is freed for the part that does.

What technology is for

That freedom is the thing worth protecting, which is why I hold every tool to one line. The wheel carried weight and the airplane carried distance, but the journey itself never stopped mattering, because where you were going and who you were going to see is still the entire point.

Side note: I still love walking, and the wheel never made that any less true. Nothing about a cart says you can't take the long way on foot when you want to.

What the wheel took out was the part that was only ever cost: breaking your back hauling a load across a distance, or waiting weeks to reach the people you were trying to reach. That was never the journey. It was just the toll the journey used to charge, and it was non-negotiable.

Technology turned that toll into a choice. You can still take the slow road if you want it, but you are no longer forced onto it. And more and more people get to feel that same freedom, which is the whole good of it spreading.

So the only question worth asking of any technology is whether it carries the load, or reaches for the part that was supposed to stay ours.

Less, not more

Ask it honestly and you end up somewhere strange: what I actually want is less technology in my life, not more.

I want technology so good that it disappears, running in the background and asking nothing of me, so that I spend less of my attention on it and more on everything else.

That is the mark of anything well-designed: it asks nothing of you and still hands you the benefit. A sidewalk, a flight of stairs, the behemoth of a breakthrough that the internet is: each one quietly carries an enormous amount of work, and the labor of countless people you will never meet, and it just works the moment you reach for it.

I no longer queue at a bank for an afternoon. I move money in a few seconds and get the afternoon back, for my family and the work I came here to do.

And it was never only the bank. Translation lets you understand someone whose language you never learned. A video call collapses an ocean into a face on a screen, close enough to read. Accessibility hands someone a door the physical world had quietly left shut. Every one of these is the same trade: time, distance, and difficulty taken off your back and handed back to you as life.

That is the only scoreboard technology should be playing on: how much of your life it hands back to you.

Which part stays ours

The closer technology gets to doing that well, the more it can feel like it's coming for you instead of working for you. The courier felt exactly that when the wheel arrived, and the wheel never took his job.

He was still the one who knew the routes, knew the people, and knew which door to knock on. The cart only took the weight off his back. The human part stayed human, which means what's being asked of us now isn't to race the cart, but to remember which part was always ours.

The thankless heroes

Hold onto that and tech for good stops being a slogan and becomes a plain instruction: build the thing that carries the load. The best part is how little that takes — just a real problem, and someone who cares enough to solve it.

We quietly built a status checker for UVLe, the UP Diliman learning portal, because it goes down often and we only wanted an easy way to know. We never announced it. Then the team that runs it emailed to ask if we were the founders, because they thought it was cool, and now we're in touch. Nothing was ever supposed to come back from that, and that is exactly the point.

The same instinct holds up the entire internet. Most of what you touch online runs on software that people build for free, for nothing but the love of building it.

When your phone, your car, or your TV quietly talks to the internet, it is almost always doing it through a small program called curl, maintained for decades largely by one man in Sweden, now sitting in billions of devices whose owners will never know his name. Except us, of course: it's Daniel Stenberg.

And every time you watch a video, make a call, or open a photo, another free project called FFmpeg, built and kept alive by a whole community of volunteers, is the thing decoding it underneath.

These are the thankless heroes who carried us into this century, and they did it because the problem was real and they cared. That's the entire formula, and always has been.

What we build on

That formula is the one we run Bscale Labs on. (Yes, this is the company walking into its own blog post. Trust me on this one.)

What I tell the team is that this is the place to be the most passionate about your thing, and we'll grow the company around that passion so we can bring more people in to do the same. We don't really see this as a job. We see it as a way to chase the thing we actually care about, which is why we don't believe anyone should be stuck with admin work, boring work, or work that doesn't grow them as a person.

We carry that same belief into every company we partner with. Honestly, we don't mind taking the load off their people, because the point was never to take anyone's job. It's to take the tasks, the ones tech was always supposed to handle, and hand those people back the work that actually scales the business and grows them as humans.

That's also why we won't take a deal we don't believe will genuinely help the person on the other side of it. And if that reads like a line, ask our clients, because we take their problem and hold it as our own.

What we'll do to play our part

A few things are coming from us soon, built to help people tell what's real from what isn't as fake news and AI keep blurring the line. They come straight out of everything I've just described.

I'll be sharing them as they take shape, so if you want to follow along, you can find me here.

Technology should be the one innovating our lives. Not the other way around.