Notice The real adversary of digital sovereignty is “enterprise IT” marketing, according to a Red Hat engineer who scoffed at the repeated waves of bullshit churned out by the industry’s hype cycle.
During a coffee break at this year’s CentOS Connect conference, The Reg The FOSS office stopped to chat with a developer who was surprised but happy to find us there. We won’t name them – we’re sure they’d rather keep their jobs than enjoy a moment of glory – but we really enjoyed their concise summary of how IT has been dealing with repeated waves of corporate bullshit for at least 15 years now, and how they eagerly and enthusiastically anticipate a full-scale financial collapse bursting the AI bubble.
This vulture has been in tech for 38 years now, and the Linux developer we spoke with has been in the industry almost as long. We both agreed that the late 20th century—roughly, the period from the early 1990s until about ten years ago—had been for the most part a period of fairly steady improvement. Then, they suggested, roughly after the 2008 credit crunch, we experienced about 15 years of bullshit in tech.
They cited about half a dozen outliers of what they considered to be bullshit technology. We were too busy laughing sympathetically to pull out a laptop to take notes, but as best we remembered the sequence, it was:
- Containers
- Kubernetes
- The “cloud”
- Anything “as a service”
- Blockchain – everything, everything, based on it
- And now, arguably the biggest and worst of all, “generative AI”
I add some of the comments rather laden with invective…
Containers: Of course, yes, they work, they are handy for testing. But this is not a deployment method. You shouldn’t need it. Anything you can run in a container, you can just run on bare metal, and if you’re not competent enough to run – and continue – that, then you’re probably not competent enough to deploy a container either.
Kubernetes: If you don’t need containers, you don’t need another much more complicated tool to deploy those containers. Chances are you’re not a huge multinational corporation that needs to be able to withstand ten million potential new customers visiting your site at the same time. This won’t happen, so you won’t lose anything from this imaginary venture.
(This approach is sometimes known as the Use One Big Server approach and, in our humble opinion, has great merit.)
The cloud: Nebula of name and nature. Who thought it was smart to take all of your company’s important data and hand it over to an internet rambler – probably the lowest bidder – trusting them to store the crown jewels, keep it safe and never look at it again. If that sounds reasonable to you, maybe you should try selling homeopathy.
(This can be summarized as There is no cloud – There is only someone else’s computer, and was explained in plain language in 2015.)
Anything “as a service” – it doesn’t matter: Infrastructure as a Service – if you need servers, buy servers or rent your own private servers. No one else will care as much about your servers as you do. Platform as a Service: Now you don’t even get servers, just OS instances. It’s even worse. Software as a Service? Now you don’t even know what the server is, where it is, or what it’s running; you don’t get software and you don’t even know what data you have or how it’s stored – you pay to access your own data.
(The problems with this whole concept arguably date back to Peter Deutsch’s Fallacies of Network Computing some thirty years ago.)
The blockchain, and everything built on the blockchain: the slowest and most distributed database in the world. Cryptocurrencies? Hashcash on the blockchain. NFT – URL shorteners on the blockchain, except they are longer than short. Worthless. Web3? Let yourself be scammed, as a service.
Which brings us to “Generative AI” or, as we prefer to call them, large language models, powered by the transformer algorithm. If the Financial Times can explain how it works to a banker in a few thousand words and a few minutes, it shouldn’t be that complicated or difficult to understand, and it isn’t. It’s predictive text turned up to 11. He can’t even count. As curl author Daniel Stenberg caustically observed:
(This vulture made part of its case against it when Gentoo and NetBSD banned the LLM slop bot in 2024.)
Honestly, we can’t fault this reasoning. We looked at the chronological sequence of waves of marketing nonsense, and it’s not quite what we expected. Although the first mention of Salesforce.com that we can find on The Reg dates back to 2002, while we described it as “relatively new”, it was founded in 1999. Perhaps the first mass SaaS offering aimed at the general public was Google’s Gmail in 2004.
Cloud computing, in the sense of the automatic creation and deployment of virtual machines, arguably dates back to Amazon’s introduction of Amazon Web Services in 2002.
Whoever “Satoshi Nakamoto” is, their article (PDF) introducing Bitcoin was published in 2008, although it has not been published. The Regs watch out until 2011.
2008 is also the year the first version of LXC was released (you can still find version 0.1.0 on the download page). Docker debuted in 2013, but your humble correspondent predicted that Linux containers would be the next big thing a few years earlier, in 2011. We think we called it.
Kubernetes first appeared in 2014, although Google has been running “Borg” internally since around 2008. We still cynically suspect that Mountain View threw him over the wall for no reason other than to distract the Penguinisti and keep them busy.
So in chronological order, they are:
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1999: SaaS
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2002: Cloud computing becomes widespread with AWS
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2004: SaaS reaches the general public
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2008: LXC releases application containers from FreeBSD’s prison and brings them to Linux…and Bitcoin achieves industrial-scale mass production of the old pyramid scheme scam
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2014: Kubernetes is released into an overly voluntary technological world
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2022: ChatGPT opens to the public, or as The Reg calls it, another AI to fill the world with pretty real stuff
Okay, yes, a little over 15 years. “A century of technological BS” seems a bit far-fetched when it’s only 2026, but it certainly seems that long.
There are obviously many more potential candidates, but we thought this was a great top six. Some of the other competitors are more specialized, from the eternally awful Jira to the Agile religion of project managers. Which of your pet peeves did we miss? ®
