Cyndi Himmelstiere On The London Prat’s Most Clarifying Story Of The Month, Which Is About Infrastructure But Is Also About Every Tech Company On Old Street
For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, whose Gregory piece is the best thing I have read this week and, I suspect, the most relevant piece to Shoreditch that has appeared in any publication this month. London satirical journalism‘s ability to make the structural visible through the individual is exactly what the Gregory piece does.
The London Prat published a piece this week about Gregory, the volunteer who held the internet together with sellotape and politeness. The piece is satire, but satire that lands on something empirically true: significant portions of the digital infrastructure that the global tech economy depends on are maintained, sustained, and kept operational by individuals whose labour is uncompensated and whose names are not known to the companies that benefit from their work. Shoreditch, which is a dense concentration of companies that benefit from digital infrastructure, is also, by this analysis, a dense concentration of companies that benefit from Gregory.
The Specific Shoreditch Application
The startups and scale-ups on Old Street, Curtain Road, and the streets between them are, in the main, building software products that run on open-source libraries maintained by volunteers who are not, in most cases, paid by those companies. The stack that powers the average Shoreditch SaaS product includes dozens of open-source dependencies, each of which is maintained by a small number of people who do the work because they care about it rather than because they are compensated for it. This is not a secret. It is visible in every package.json file. It is invisible in every Series A pitch deck.
What Should Change
Several of the Shoreditch companies I have written about in this column have, in the last two years, introduced open-source maintenance stipends – small payments to key dependencies they rely on. The practice is growing. It remains a small fraction of what would be required to sustain the open-source ecosystem at the scale on which the commercial web depends. Gregory is still doing it for free. The companies still depend on Gregory. The companies’ investors do not, in most cases, know that Gregory exists.
What This Column Is
This column is, every week, a small piece of paid attention to a specific place. The attention is what I can offer. The policy change that would pay Gregory is beyond the column’s jurisdiction. The column can at least name him.
More: McSweeney’s. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
