"/>This is a pretty good summary of what has bugged me for years. Although, I must disagree when he said nobody noticed it happening. Some of us noticed the direction as soon as things happened, and it was/is very frustrating indeed.
That said, not all of the past was rosy either. It wasn't a happy land where everyone was getting along and helping each other. The past was full of egos, obtuseness and ambition just like today. I think my generation still knew in the back of their heads it was wrong, but didn't care because they didn't want to admit that concepts like that were valid and had moral value. That would have been restricting. They wanted a world were personal pleasure and power were the only forms of meaning. They got what they wanted, and built the corporations we complain about.
Today, much like the author said concerning technical concepts, these concepts aren't rejected, they simply don't exist as concepts in peoples minds. Much like no longer being able to troubleshoot a technical problem, people wonder why their lives are living hell. They were never given the tools to understand or the chance to choose the ideas for themselves. They were force fed a certain worldview for the sake of benefiting the desires of others.
I can definitely agree with the "stupidly overcomplex" of current software.
People are not building purpose built components, but just strapping existing things together. Strapping things together almost sounds like a good thing until you realise that the philosophy of plumbing very specific tools together to create a solution to a problem, which is a great way to do things, has been somehow perverted. Popular end solutions are now being plumbed together as if they are specific tools. This carries a tonne of complexity into the most trivial things. Not only that, people have stopped developing things entirely, and now just rely on cobbling together commercial "solutions". Rube Goldberg machines at their finest.
When you start worrying about provenance of your software, the problems become much more apparent.
I work with a lot of seasoned programmers, like those who wrote much of the OS for UNISYS mainframes. In fact, I replaced the retiring programmer who was prominent in the writing of their compilers. It is interesting to hear them discuss the madness of children writing software today compared to how exacting the art was in their early career.