Tech can be enjoyable again
About a year ago, I was sitting at a coffee shop late at night, meeting some new people. Inevitably the topic of passions came up, and I stated that I was pretty passionate about tech. “Ah, so you’re a tech bro” was one response, and I almost chuckled. In so many ways I would consider myself the opposite of a silicon valley dreamer hoping for a series A round, yet it was interesting that this was where their mind went first. We have been overwhelmed by one particular vision of technology for so long and to such an extant that we have lost sight of alternative ways to view circuit boards and monitors.
If we were to assemble a formula for what makes tech awful, it might look something like: lack of control + lack of stability + lack of purpose. A meme coin lacks stability and purpose, social networks lack control and stability. Our phones can be controlled to such an extent that on iPhones you cannot even install software outside of the App Store in regions in which the government has not mandated it. We are constantly at the whims of the next idea brewing in a product manager’s brain. That product manager is trying to design a single product for billions of people while also having to meet the financial interests of the company. No wonder things often change two years later!
Fortunately, the same advances that have enabled all of those products have also enabled other products to get a lot better. Those other products are truly wonderful, and represent the technology that I am passionate about. An application to send messages that just sends messages. A photo app that allows me to share memories with my friends regardless of whether they have an apple or a G on the back of their phone. A computer that never forces me to do anything. It’s a computer after all.
Over the past year, there have been many publications and videos about a creator or writer trying out Linux or self-hosting something. In the comments, there is a ton of glee about the feeling that comes with successfully pulling off that transition. That feeling can be so freeing that sometimes it’s hard to remember why we let things get so bad in the first place. We used to have personal websites and mp3 players, now we have automatic screenshots of the desktop every few seconds[1]. It was all in the name of progress, but that progress was never meant for the user, it was meant for the bottom line. Now when we jump back in to the “old ways”, we are amazed at what we can pull off.
For example, I have a little e-ink display that shows a dashboard of the weather. It is super helpful to look at right as I am getting dressed so I know what to wear. It doesn’t do anything more than that, but it meets its purpose perfectly. There is not a single additional thing that I wish it did. The same is true for my e-reader, I read books on it (wild!). I don’t want those books summarized, I don’t want a built in social network, I want to read books. There have been massive improvements in how easy it is to borrow from the library, and those are the developments that matter. I could continue with many more examples, many of which I have written about here. A watch that tells the time, self-hosting music, or an operating system that made the desktop the calm environment it should be.
So many of these tools don’t have any marketing budget at all, the only way they can be discovered is through word of mouth. Additionally, it often takes someone to gently prove that it isn’t as scary as it seems. The kids these days are throwing phone free events, a recognition that technology never needed to be involved in every space to begin with. Others are trying out flip phones, and are being featured in the New York Times in the process. Texting gave us convenience, and along with that convenience also the ability to opt out last minute.
“It’s a little frowned on if someone doesn’t show up,” Odille said. “We’re here every Sunday, rain or shine, even snow. We don’t keep in touch with each other, so you have to show up.”
Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it changes how we think and move throughout society. As Chris Hayes explains in The Siren’s Call, this encompasses everything from how we experience isolation, to how we perceive our self worth. As another teen mentions from the New York Times article:
“When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed,” Lola continued. “I started using my brain. It made me observe myself as a person. I’ve been trying to write a book, too. It’s like 12 pages now.”
In the workplace, we now have so much complexity that we get jobs that we can’t even explain to each other. Part of this is just because workflows can have funny names (imagine having to explain that you manage swarms of docker containers for a living, and the average person having any idea what you are talking about), but some of it is that we have either lost sight of our goals or are trying to obscure it. Instead of saying “I work in continuous deployment and integration”, it could be “I help automate updates to an e-commerce website”. It’s less mysterious, less mystical. It also makes it clear what the work is contributing to. The improvements to the e-commerce website, are they in the interest of the customer or a fairer marketplace? If not, could they be?
We have all gotten better at working with technology over the last decade. We still have a ways to go in making technology work better for us. There are terrifying stories every day about tech being used for evil, so let’s celebrate the wins and slowly accumulate ideas and knowledge until the positive uses for technology outshine the darkness. The Revenge of Analog may have been ahead of its time in 2016, but I think we are now in a space where we can implement and integrate technology thoughtfully. Dishwashers that are smart enough to run overnight are wonderful, dishwashers that need to connect to a “data lake” half a world away are not. I’ll end with the hilarious and accurate words of Molly Bradley at Consumer Reports:
The smart dishwashers available today don’t offer functions that are particularly essential, nor do they address the pain points most people have with dishwashers (such as the inability to fully dry dishes)
I am of course referring to Microsoft Recall, a truly mindboggling launch that has only gotten slightly better. ↩︎