This is mostly a rant. Read it as such.
I haven’t written much as of late, creatively or otherwise. Fiction-wise, my works-in-progress proceed at a glacial pace, but at least they proceed. It’s not a creative block, because I know where I want my novel and my stories to go. It’s more like ‘execution fatigue’, if that makes any sense: when stories and plots are complex, there is a lot to check while you actually write. You may have a nice idea to keep the story going, but will the execution of that idea conflict with previous information about a character and/or their arc? Is the new idea so great that it’s worth the additional work of going back and alter previous elements of the narrative so that continuity is maintained? I don’t know if people truly understand the amount of work there can be behind a book. Especially when the author — as is the case with yours truly — has to take care of everything related to the publication of the book.
As for technology, it’s one of those periods when I’m feeling overwhelmed by everything revolving around it. Debates are exhausting. Trying to explain that Facebook and Google are bad for your privacy health is like explaining to smokers and gluttons the long-term respiratory and cardiovascular issues they’ll face due to their habits and addictions. It’s a long, exhausting explanation versus instant gratification and versus the fact that using Google and Facebook services — like smoking a cigarette or eating a chocolate cake — doesn’t seem to be so bad in the here & now. “But it’s so easy, so convenient! Who cares about the implications? I still haven’t seen anything nasty made by Google or Facebook against my privacy…” This is what I get after 15–20 minutes spent carefully and thoughtfully explaining how the adverse effects from trusting these companies with your data may not be immediately noticeable. Or they ask me for solutions. Since I’ve spoiled their fun, now I’m obligated to do their homework for them. “Then how am I supposed to keep in touch with my friends!?” “Then how am I supposed to migrate my email archives and sync my stuff!?” And don’t get me wrong, I often come up with alternatives, but it’s not enough. I try to teach people to fish better, they simply want the better fish served on a plate. When you point out that, at this point, things are leaving the ‘giving advice’ territory and entering into ‘consulting work’ area, which implies a fee, they either get angry or laugh at you.
You know what, then? Keep your Google and your Facebook. Buy their hardware. Let these companies into your own home, give all your data to them. I’ll see you at the next data breach, and it may be a data breach affecting another company you never heard from, but which has your data anyway because they got them from Google or Facebook.
But it’s not just this. It’s not that both regular people and tech nerds can be utterly exhausting to argue with, for different reasons. It’s a general feeling of dissatisfaction and disappointment towards… well maybe more towards the tech world than technology itself. Anyway.
Instant gratification is what seems to be killing perspective, too. If it’s not ‘new’ and ‘now’, it’s not cool. The problem, of course, is that ‘new’ and ‘now’ literally get old soon. The bigger problem is that these two fragile pillars are among the most prominent in the tech world’s foundations today. When talking about my fondness for vintage technology and for putting now-considered-obsolete devices to good use, my interlocutor chuckled and remarked that “nothing lasts forever in tech”.
Actually I think the tragedy is that today, in tech, nothing lasts enough. This principle leads, for instance, to the discontinuation of perfectly working solutions just because someone says “It’s time to move on” (the headphone jack) and, more broadly, to the let’s fix what is not broken mindset. This principle also creates a general landscape where everything is in a constant beta state. Today, when we encounter something that is under continued development, it’s usually considered a good thing. The flip side, however, is that this something is also never finished; it never really enters a finished state. In most cases, ironically, today ‘finished state’ means when something (software, but also hardware) gets discontinued, abandoned; when its development ceases.
Finished should mean completed, and I’m already hearing your objection: But Rick, today it’s practically impossible to have a product that is complete and definitive, especially software-wise. And I understand. It’s this obsession with maintaining an unjustified breakneck pace that afflicts everything in tech. I’m not averse to change. I’m averse to this trend that everything has to change as fast as possible because we supposedly need the ‘latest version’ of every damn thing. Progress used to be measured in stages. Today it seems to be measured by speed. If you stop, you die. My present state of mind can only come up with one reaction: fuck this.
We may have different opinions and sensibilities when it comes to enjoying things. As a user of tech products, I feel that lately such products have simply been lasting too little to be actually enjoyed. I’m not talking about manufacturing qualities or the fact that most products aren’t physically ‘built to last’ anymore (though that’s also true). I’m mostly talking about obsolescence and for how long something is considered up-to-date and supported. And I think it’s too short a time, and that it’s also a largely artificially imposed timeframe. Again, the industry has kept accelerating to the point that now the pedal is stuck on the bottom of the car, and I wonder when— no, I wonder if this vicious circle will be broken someday.
To make an example, just imagine if Apple (or any other company with their means, for that matter) stopped introducing new iPhones, a new iOS and a new Mac OS version every year, shifted gears and changed the cycle to just one year and a half. Everyone involved — from Apple designers and engineers, to third-party developers, to end users — would have more time to work on the hardware and software, and to enjoy said hardware and software. More time to hopefully fix bugs that otherwise keep accumulating because by the time you get to look into them, it’s already time to get to work to the next version/iteration of the operating system or application. More time to perform hardware and software quality control. More time to develop for a specific device. And end users would feel they’re really making a good investment by spending more than a thousand dollars or euros in a smartphone.
If this sounds kind of weird to you, you’re probably feeling the pressure of the tech world. But stop and think for a moment. There is no strictly technical reason against slowing down the general pace. The reasons are all commercial. Today, in the tech industry, you’re either the first to release a product, or you release a better product in that particular category. And releasing better products is hard and risky when the shortcut seems to be ‘Get there first, then you can iterate and make it better later’.
Yes, I know, you’re not exactly forced to keep up with technology. It’s not that you have to own the latest and greatest products. But in more than 30 years I’ve never seen such a strong pressure to keep people inside the update loop, so to speak. Update cycles used to be slower: excluding demanding professional needs, you could still use the same computer after 5–6 years without encountering particular issues that pushed you to upgrade. Sure, maybe you ended up expanding the RAM and getting a bigger hard drive or a better graphics card, but you didn’t feel you had wasted thousands of dollars on your Mac or PC after a relatively short while. Fortunately, Apple products have retained a certain degree of longevity, but at the same time they’ve become less internally upgradable and less reliable. The needless complexity of today’s Web technologies doesn’t help, so that a 2012 iPad or a 2013 iPhone, both with dual-core processors and 1 GB of RAM, struggle to load several websites due to the added weight of their cookies and trackers and advertising crap.
Software quality suffers because of today’s silly race to whatever’s next; as I was saying before, there’s less time to develop and release quality stuff, so you rarely find well-optimised software for the hardware that’s supposed to run it. You often find bloated or badly-optimised software that only the latest hardware can run smoothly. You launch it on your two-year old Mac or four-year old iPad, and you (you regular user) are left thinking that your machine is already inadequate.
The other vicious circle is that, if you want to at least keep up with the latest developments in technology, you have to follow the tech press, and the tech press is another source of the pressure I was talking about. The press gladly feeds on the current breakneck pace of the tech industry. More stuff gets produced, so there’s more to write and talk about. And the press is obsessed with the ‘new’ and the ‘now’. Of course, otherwise there would be nothing to talk about, right? Not that regular people would notice, since it’s basically impossible to reach ‘RSS Feeds Zero’ anyway. And even when there’s actually nothing to talk about, let’s publish some silly comparison, or a poorly-informed but decidedly polarising opinion piece. Let’s talk about how boring that smartphone design is, there’s so little difference with last year’s model, and why don’t companies innovate anymore? Let’s push and push and demand more capable more captivating more inventive and original products than the ones released just six months ago… You take a look at tech channels on YouTube and you soon bang your head on your desk in frustration when you see things like The iPhone 8 in 2018… Still worth it? Spoiler: Yes, yes of course it’s still worth it. It’s still a very capable device, still capable of doing more things than you could possibly throw at it. Yes, the iPhone XS has a better camera, but I see the photos you publish online and you’re going to be fine with the iPhone 8, believe me.
The artificial need for speed, for the new & now, all trickles down to end users. Like pills of tech ecstasy being passed around. So I end up getting emails from friends asking me whether they should buy the new mirrorless full-frame Nikon Z7 camera. I ask what’s their current camera. A Nikon D850 (i.e. last year’s top-of-the-line Nikon DSLR). Why do you want to upgrade, I ask. They write back: Well, it’s a smaller, lighter camera. And it has one megapixel more. And I read that mirrorless cameras are the new direction anyway, so…
What would your response be if you were in my shoes? Mine is as honest as it gets: What can I say? I’ve purchased a second-hand Nikon D200 two years ago (Note: the D200 is a semi-professional DSLR Nikon introduced in 2005) and I still haven’t fully taken advantage of all its features. But if you feel you have outgrown your D850 already [seriously doubting this, even if they were making a living as pro photographers, which they don’t] then sure, go for it.
“It has one megapixel more”… Let that sink in for a moment.