About Decompiling
My name is Gary Smith. I'm a web developer by vocation, and a writer and a painter by aspiration. I live and work in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Decompiling is a newsletter about history, travel, art, music, and the fuzzy lines that connect these broad topics. In recent years, that underlying connection has often been technology; but this connection is not always a positive one. The tech industry in its current form has become hard to love. The idealism and sense of possibility that lead many of us to pursue careers in tech is now in very short supply.
I know I am not the only person wondering if the world would be a better place if we spent less time online, and less time on our smartphones. Like others, I worry that our increasing reliance on social media, algorithms, and generative AI is a risk to society, democracy, and the human creative spirit.
Wikipedia currently defines decompilation as "the process of transforming executable code into a high-level, human-readable format". This is a software engineering term, of course, but I wonder: could that concept be applied more abstractly? What happens if we stop prioritizing efficiency above all else? What happens if we forget about SEO optimization and virality and return to the days when we created ourselves, and for other humans who share our interests? In a sea of addictive shallow "content" is anyone really still interested in longer reads? Let's find out.
My goal is to publish something every month or so as I explore the ideas in my head and refine my craft. Subscribe to this free newsletter to receive my newest posts by email. It is easy to unsubscribe anytime using the link in any newsletter email. I'd love your support, shares, and thoughtful comments.
History of this Newsletter
Prior to September 2025, this newsletter was hosted on Substack. However, due to the ongoing failure of that platform to completely remove hateful far-right content, including content that openly promotes neo-Nazi ideologies, I decided to migrate my posts and subscriber list to a new platform. This newsletter now runs on the Ghost platform, deployed on a PikaPods app hosted on servers in the European Union. It may be a futile gesture, but I feel a bit better, and as a bonus I now have full control and ownership of my creativity.
Generative AI & Image Policies
No generative AI is used in the creation of this newsletter. All writing you see here is mine, including the inevitable typos, grammatical errors, and run-on sentences. The images I use to illustrate my newsletter are also human generated, usually my own photos or historic artworks in the public domain. I make every effort to transparently credit all sources.