IT is broken. It's not working, to the point where people are ready to give it up, just like they would a mangled hammer.

The problem lies in a lack of humanism: it doesn't work for people; it uses people towards the builders' ends. This issue runs deeper than that, and I'll explore it further while also providing some clues on how to get out of this stuck situation.

As a journalist, I'm on the edge; I shouldn't be publishing this in the usurious world we now live in. Any business person would tell me to build it and sell it if I am so certain it's useful (and I am). But I freaking love information. If we don't pull this back — if we don't start offering nodes where it works again, showing through juxtaposition that the brokenness is a product of decisions rather than fundamentally bad tools — we lose IT.

Information technology — internet, genAI, software, all of it — is stuck. I've heard more people in the past month want to walk away from using what they consider irredeemably broken tools than I had in the three years previously. The first time I heard it was from a developer, complaining around seven years ago about all the 'move fast and break things' brokenness.

This isn't a sudden awareness of an idea, but an escalated spreading of a stance. It's supported by the recent upswing in people deciding to return to analog media, concerns about how to fix the infrastructure AI is breaking, so much fuckupedness in what AI is enabling, deeper usury of platforms, degrading previous workhorse products…and so much more.

Really, the shift is that it's so bad non-technologists think its broken. People get stuck, not knowing how to break a cycle, a routine; sometimes not even able to pin down this sense of disquiet and frustration to, “oh, I'm stuck.”

Information is constructed and documented information. When you build information to spec, manipulating it at the source is incredibly tempting for some of our individuals.

The way out of this is both incredible simple and incredibly complex, and it is almost the same phrase. Understand the domain. In other words, understand the context; reach for the yes-and that adds nodes to transform, not just a heightened expression of what's already there.

All the human behaviors that so many of us have decided need to be shamed, or denigrated, or dismissed, or non-existent to perception still affects our information.

All the manipulation that some of us do so well, and others of us are copying in hopes to increase some facet of sensed success, still affects our information.

And all of our ability to love, find connection, and to work together, fix and build — it's all in our information. And all of that — all of the complex structure, all of the humanity — are in time.

I have two forms to help people more easily see it is possible, as well as how I understand information. Both forms are based on work done in my own time, outside of NDA, and were not a financial zero-sum situation; they came at a cost to me.

Using it, or springboarding from it in the same general form? Pay me. Business or invested startup, pay me like you would your best experts. Bootstrapper or non-profit, buy me a coffee.

No AI was used to research, create, write, or build any of this. Search right now is returns based on all kinds of information being smudged for us in the background, not by us as the immediate problem solvers.

It's a bit of a mental twist, but not a huge one. Look at it. Exists already, right? Look at it again. It's not that it exists already (at least as of this writing, that I or my longest-standing IT cohort are aware of). It's that it's very closely aligned with how people think outside of the binary.

And yet, it smudges the binary — making the returns slightly imprecise — by using multiple binaries and a precise data set. If someone had seen it, we could have done it ten years ago.

Links for payments and all three documents are on https://www.lenthic.com/humanist-it

In my grandest dreams, I hope that many will use them. A single point of entry, while capitalistic and keeping me fed maybe at some point in the future, is too small a ripple for how broken it is now.