You are still loved Chris ❤️

For a while now I’ve been thinking of my devices as extensions of my will. That flatters me more than it describes anything, because the relationship is lopsided. My phone tracks me, knows me a little too well, and sits between me and nearly everything I want to do. I depend on it for work and for staying in touch with the people I love. So I keep landing on the same plain point: a device should do what its owner tells it to.

When the company that made it steps in between what I want and what happens, it’s saying it knows better than I do how I should live. A phone that won’t let me delete an app, a printer that rejects ink it didn’t sell me, these are small things, but they’re somebody else’s hand on my steering wheel. And if that hand causes a crash, the liability should sit with them.

I used to read this as an argument about technology. What interests me more now is what it says about law and about our own judgement. Societies like ours love to hand their thinking to the statute book and then say “it’s the law” as if that ends the conversation. Slavery was legal and it was still wrong, and you don’t need a degree in jurisprudence to feel that in your gut. In India we watched Section 66A get used to arrest people over tweets, and then watched it get struck down. We’ve watched TRAI write rules about call drops that nobody paid attention to. The law isn’t a shield. It’s a tool, and somebody has to pick it up.

We give laws their meaning by how we treat them, so when one starts working against the people it was meant to protect, it has to change. Somebody has to ring the bell first. I don’t think that has to be a minister or a judge.

Awareness is the first step, and it’s a cheap one, which is why I’m wary of it. I read a lot and scroll more than I should, and I’ve caught myself many times feeling informed and useless in the same breath. Information on its own pacifies you. You slide into a very comfortable doomerism where you’re sure nothing can be done. What turns any of it into power is organising, and organising starts embarrassingly small: in your building, in your office, in the WhatsApp group for your child’s class.

And you’ll fail at it. I’ve failed at more things than I can list, and the 3D printing startup is the one I still keep apologising for. Failure is normal, that’s the boring part. What matters is failing a bit smaller and a bit faster each time, until fixing your own mistakes is something you trust yourself to do.

Nobody is born knowing how to do this. We become people who can, mostly on ordinary days when nobody’s watching.

If you’ve ever organised around something this small and local, tell me how it went. I’m @troysk704.