less_retarded_wiki

Update Culture

Update culture is a negative mindset of capitalist society which in technology manifests by developers of a (typically bloated) program or similar product creating frequent modifications called "updates" and forcing users to keep consuming these "updates", e.g. by deprecating or neglecting old versions, dropping backwards compatibility (e.g. Python) or by downright forcing updates in code. This is typically seen as a familiar pop-up message:

"Your software is too old, please update to the latest version."

In software this process is a lot of times automatized and known as autoupdates, but update culture encompasses more than this, it's the whole mentality of having to constantly update one's software, hardware and other products. It is similar to consumerism but more about constant modifications masked as "cool updates" rather than replacement of physical products.

A typical example are web browsers or proprietary operating systems that strive for bloat monopoly.

Update culture is however not limited to computers or technology, hell no. It is the mindset of the whole society and applies to things such as fashion, business, gossip, watching TV news every day, browsing social media or constantly updating laws, it is the acceptance and approval of living in a constant stress of having to extort extreme amounts of energy just to keep up with artificially made up bullshit, to race against oneself and others in a never ending artificially sustained race with no winners, just with extremely exhausted participants. Current system of law requires constant everyday maintenance that's extremely costly, law needs to be constantly remade and rewritten to reflect any emerging trend in society because it is so unbelievably complex and tries to encompass every single aspect of our society. Of course we eventually oppose any kind of formal law, however the kind of update culture law is yet orders of magnitude worse -- if we see law as a tool to serve society, this kind of law is an utterly shitty tool similar to a hammer that has to be repaired every second just to keep functioning.

Software updates are usually justified by "muh security" and "muh modern features". Users who want to avoid these updates or simply can't install them, e.g. due to using old incompatible hardware or missing dependency packages, are ridiculed as poorfags, idiots and their suffering is ignored. In fact, update culture is cancer because:

• It is a form of software consumerism, even if the updates themselves are gratis, they always come at a cost such as potential unstability, requiring new hardware, forcing installing more dependencies, required learning to use the new version, or even dropping of old features and malicious code in the updates.
• It is dangerous, updates regularly break things, and there are cases where a lot depends on software running smoothly.
• It is bullshit effort, wasting human work and creating an intentionally high maintenance cost. Humans, both users and programmers, become slaves to the software.
• The security justifications are lies: a true concern for security would lead to unbloating and creating a minimal, stable and well tested software. Update culture in fact constantly pushes newly created vulnerabilities with the updates which are only better in not having been discovered yet, i.e. relying on security by obscurity. This creates an intentionally endless cycle of creating something that will never be finished (even if it well could be).
• It kills freedom. E.g. with the example of web the constant meaningless updates of JavaScript and addition of "features" eliminates any small competition that can't afford to keep up with the constantly changing environment. This is why we have no good web browsers.
• It is a huge security risk (yes, we don't really buy intro security but this still holds). The developer, whoever it is, has the power to remotely push and execute any code at any time to the devices of many users. In fact this can be seen as the definition of backdoor. This is not just an issue of proprietary software, there have been many FOSS projects pushing malware this way (look up e.g. the projects that targeted malware at Russians during the Russia-Ukraine war).

All content available under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Send comments and corrections to drummyfish at disroot dot org.