Tech fog

(In dialogue form)

– You’ve been quiet lately.

– I have. It’s increasingly hard and wearing to find something to talk about when we talk about technology. And when I see something or read something that could push me to write an article here, it always feels rant‑y. In my head and sometimes in the article’s draft, if I even get to that stage.

– So you’re telling me that you’re going back to that feeling of ‘tech fatigue’ you often spoke about last year?

– Nah, it’s different now. It’s not fatigue, or lack of enthusiasm. It’s becoming flat-out disappointment. Wariness. Distrust. And even beyond that, as we’ll see later if we touch on the subject again. I still remember a time when I felt ‘empowered’ (to use a buzzword) by tech because it felt like we were on the same side, wanting the same things. Today, the tech world, tech companies and entities… it’s like dealing with banks and taxes — necessary, virtually unavoidable elements.

– I don’t know, maybe you should talk about that, about what’s wrong with tech today.

– You see, the funny thing is: on the one hand it’s a bit of a daunting task. Making a point, then doing research, then writing something that looks like a dissertation, chock-full of links and footnotes… And it’s not that I’m lazy and don’t want to do it. It’s that it increasingly feels pointless when the average interlocutor starts dismissing your arguments because he or she ‘feels/believes’ differently or ‘has heard differently’, and all you present them gets thrown out of the window as circumstantial evidence. And then there are like-minded people, who don’t need to examine Exhibits 1 to 45 to agree with you.

On the other hand, I often find myself shouting at the screen, Isn’t it clear enough already what’s wrong with tech today!? It’s getting more and more frustrating.

– Something I find increasingly annoying is listening to tech people (I mean tech company people). They sound utterly detached from the rest of us.

– Most of them are. Elon Musk said something like “empathy should be eliminated”, which speaks volumes about his own sociopathy. Empathy is one of the superior traits of any human being. A world without empathy is self-destroying. Don’t even get me started with Zuckerberg, another prime example of sociopath. But these two are obvious. There are dozens, hundreds of less prominent tech bros who see the world as a sandbox to play their profit-driven games. The crypto bros, the ‘AI’ bros… The other day I was reading this article on TechCrunch. Headline: Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads. Small excerpts:

CEO Aravind Srinivas said this week on the TBPN podcast that one reason Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app. This so it can sell premium ads. […]

Srinivas believes that Perplexity’s browser users will be fine with such tracking because the ads should be more relevant to them.

See, what this CEO and many like him do not seem to get is that people don’t want ads. They don’t. Personalised or not, they do not want them. And people don’t want to be tracked.

– Also… advertising rarely truly works anymore.

– Right!? When was the last time you actually bought something because you saw an ad for it when you clicked on a YouTube video? I block everything on my browsers. If I’m reading something in a magazine, or even online on a site that manages to show me ads despite the ad-blocker, my eyes are basically trained to focus on what I’m reading and skip all extraneous content. In 95% of cases, when I’m watching a YouTube video and the host starts saying “And now a word from our sponsor”, or “Today’s sponsor is…”, I skip forward.

Perhaps it’s a superficial analysis, perhaps people are more gullible than I’m crediting them for, but I think that the more advertising you want to throw at people’s faces, the less effective it becomes. But these tech bros think that the reason of advertising’s ineffectiveness is because it’s not targeted or not targeted enough. No, no, it’s because it’s too fucking much.

– Earlier you were saying something about you not feeling tech on your side anymore.

– Yes. I remember a time when tech companies designed products and sold you products as if they were like any other tool: a hammer, a screwdriver, a pen, an eraser, etc. They wanted you to have the best tools for your task. They put care in their products, especially software products. They designed (or tried to design) decent interfaces. They focused on the user. If you read about how much research and testing went into creating the operating system’s UI for the Apple Lisa and the first Macintosh, you can’t help but notice the sheer amount of care and attention. It’s true that people were essentially illiterate in the 1980s when it came to personal computing, which was a new thing then, but still, these designers and engineers went above and beyond in creating an interface and interaction paradigm that were as intuitive and friendly as possible. And when that wasn’t enough, if you pick any application software or system software manual written in that era, you’ll find the best tech writing imaginable. Especially as a Mac user, all this really made me feel as if Apple was on my side and that the company wanted what I wanted: tools that made me work better, and tools that could provide meaningful entertainment when I wasn’t working.

Tech companies today for the most part do not focus on what their users want or what’s best for their users. They want the user to focus on them. The products they offer are rarely finished, polished tools the user can acquire and use the way they see fit. Instead, the products are tokens, tokens that get the user hooked on whatever service the company provides. Tech companies today want to create a ‘relationship’ with the user, but within the confines of a lock-in… which means this ‘relationship’ becomes unbalanced and abusive pretty fucking quickly. Products become pretexts: where tools used to be ends, now products are means to an end. It’s the Gillette model: tech companies give you the razor, but the aim is to sell you interchangeable blades indefinitely.

– I also think this could be another way to explain the general decrease of software quality.

– In a way, sure. When everything is about providing users with good products, and good software tools, you put everything into them — again, especially true when talking about Apple. When the product or software tools are reduced to being a cog in a more complicated mechanism, then quality is less of a concern — the widget can simply be ‘good enough’ to keep the user within a certain software or brand ecosystem.

– The way app stores are designed has also killed the value of software as a product.

– People already struggled with giving digital goods a fair value, but the onslaught of $0.99 apps in the App Store was a fatal blow to the whole value system. I could practically hear some of my past clients yelling in their offices, “See!? This stuff is really worth one dollar!” How do you sell these people software applications and utilities at $50, $35, hell even $15? The reaction to this race to the bottom, in my opinion, has turned a lot of smaller developers into little tech companies that have to adopt the same tactics as the bigger tech companies to keep selling and to keep growing: there are always notable exceptions, but with subscriptions — now everywhere — it’s the same mechanism: less focus on the product for what it is, more focus on providing the product as a service, more focus on access rather than ownership. Keep paying to keep the lights on for me developer, and I in turn will guarantee you your ‘fix’.

– Hashtag: not all developers.

No, of course; the spectrum of this racket is more nuanced. There are genuinely good developers who keep writing useful and well-designed applications that are definitely worth the asking price, whether upfront or via subscription. I’d still prefer they all offered one-time payments, and with certain tools I wouldn’t mind paying, say, $50 or more. And I would certainly be a returning customer if I were satisfied with their products, gladly purchasing a paid upgrade for a major release.

On the opposite extreme there are downright frauds: honeypot apps designed to attract enough attention, and make you subscribe at exorbitant prices (charged weekly) through the use of dark patterns, like presenting you a welcome splash screen at launch, and when you press the bright Continue button, you automatically opt in for a trial period of e.g. one day, then you’re automatically subscribed. You should have tapped the minuscule ‘X’ icon in the upper right corner, in a colour just a shade darker than the splash screen’s background.

Between these two extremes there are all kinds of intermediate situations, with varying degrees of trustworthiness. Often you find stuff that is a bit more legit, from people who repeat the same platitudes, justifying the subscription by saying something like, “It guarantees that the app stays updated and maintained, blah blah blah”, then you peruse the app’s description and metadata in the App store and you see that it hasn’t been updated in 16 months, and you’re like, why should I give these guys money?

– Further diluting quality and poisoning the well today we also have AI…

– ‘AI’, always in quotes. Artificial intelligence doesn’t exist.

– Okay. ‘AI’.

– A.k.a. let’s turn the entire world in a giant Mechanical Turk that vacuums all kind of data to create the best stuff assembled by a predictive engine. It really looks like a recycling plant that tries to work things backwards: give me enough broken displays and motherboards, and I’ll produce a perfectly working display for your desktop computer.

– Well, out of that metaphor, that’s what’s supposed to happen with e‑waste recycling. The end result is producing working devices.

– Yes, well, I meant it quite literally, with the e‑waste entering this huge machine on one side, and coming out in perfect working order on the other.

– We could say it’s like a giant machine that you feed with all kinds of organic garbage in the hope it spits out edible food.

– Yes, edible food, perfectly cooked and plated by a Michelin chef.

Anyway, whenever I’m asked about ‘AI’, I always say, go subscribe to Ed Zitron’s newsletter. Ed is more knowledgeable and articulate than I on ‘AI’, he’s more up-to-date, too. I vehemently share his (negative) stance on ‘AI’ and the ‘AI’ industry, and he can certainly provide more specific examples and reasons as to why.

I’m just baffled at how a lot of regular people seem eager to accept ChatGPT and similar tools in their lives almost without question. “I’ll just ask ChatGPT about this and that”. Instead of doing Web searches, they just use the damn chatbot. They forfeit their critical thinking and critical method, and take the shortcut of least resistance (a shortcut which, I’ll reiterate, doesn’t guarantee you’ll get where you want).

It reminds me of some of my mates back in high school: why do any effort to collect information from different sources, when we can just copy and paste from the encyclopedia? And these people obsessed with ChatGPT make the same mistake my mates did — the point of the homework isn’t to copy and paste information the professor already knows. The point is that you learn to search for information, you learn to collate it, you learn to process different facts and sources to make your deductions. Presenting correct information is of course essential, but the enriching part is the journey you make from the beginning to the end of the assignment.

– Well, sometimes asking ChatGPT is done for fun. Like, they know they’ll probably get a shit answer. They just want to tease the machine.

– Sure, maybe some do this. But many really, already blindly rely on these tools for their queries and research. My wife not long ago told me, “You’d be horrified to know just how many students at the university [where she works] use ChatGPT”, and she’s right, I am. I wish they realised that asking these ‘AI’ bots information is really no different than asking stuff to the first stranger you meet in the street when it comes to trusting the answers.

– At least if you ask stuff to someone in the street, and they don’t know anything about it, they’ll tell you they don’t know.

– Exactly, while ‘AI’ literally fabricates, assembles coherent sentences that may or may not contain trustworthy information. I think some people think that these chatbots are like the supercomputer you see in so much science fiction, this all-knowing black box you interact with by asking stuff in natural language and then receive accurate information with zero failure rate. It’s science fiction, and will continue to be science fiction for a while longer.

The miracles of ‘AI’ are just like the miracles of cryptocurrency. It’s astounding that so many people understood just how much hypeware crypto is, but don’t seem to realise that ‘AI’ is essentially the same kind of hypeware. And a resource-intensive hypeware at that. In times like these, where we ought not to waste this much energy. Even if there are benefits in large language models, even if there are useful applications for these LLMs, I’m still convinced that — at least for now — the costs vastly outweigh the benefits.

– I’m starting to understand why you’re talking about ‘tech fog’.

– Well, yes, it’s all this (makes an all-encompassing gesture with his hand) but I’m also thinking of tech fog as a kind of present, generalised feeling connected to brain fog, and brain rot. But I’m also thinking that, banally, this fog is what’s making me uncertain about the very tools I’m using in my day-to-day tech life. I don’t trust Apple system software updates any more, because the company is getting terribly careless about software quality, and terribly controlling when it comes to hardware. I’m still using Macs and Mac OS because a complete switch to another platform isn’t feasible yet for me. But on the hardware front today’s Macs — and tomorrow’s Macs, unless something systemic changes — are black boxes that can’t be tinkered with, not even for banal interventions on the part of an intermediate-to-expert user. I used to be a power user, and troubleshooting Macs in case of issues was something I was entirely capable of — in the PowerPC and Intel era. With Apple Silicon, troubleshooting has become unnecessarily complicated and user-hostile. Because ‘security’.

On the software front, each major update seems to bring features I’m not interested in or that I downright do not want in my Macs or iOS devices and I can’t opt out of. And each minor update fixes a couple of bugs only to introduce four more. In how many languages do I have to say this, that most users need stability and reliability in the software tools they use all the time and make a living with!? That your OS isn’t something users stare at like staring at an artwork, contemplating the cleanness and translucency of its UI, the smoothness of its animations, and the shapes of icons and buttons!? People need to work. They need a functional, coherent, usable, accessible, friendly user interface that gets out of their way. The best UIs are the best because of these characteristics: the how it works of their design is so good that it shapes the how it looks. The other way round doesn’t work this well. Often it doesn’t work at all. But nobody seems to listen, and I mean the people who could make the necessary changes, not the many like-minded users that agree with me when I rant on social media.

So, this tech fog is sort of making me aimless, directionless. The newest Mac OS and iOS don’t work for me. I’m not going to update for the foreseeable future. Yes, I’m at this point. And it’s not just Apple. A lot of tech is like this today — either you’re okay with the changes companies arbitrarily introduce, or you have to take a ‘rebellious’ stance and do something drastic. Like staying on an older version of your operating system or even your software tools. I said it earlier, it’s like dealing with banks. You know every time they unilaterally change something in your contract and in the fine print they tell you something like, If you agree with the aforementioned changes, no action is required on your part. Otherwise you’re free to terminate the contract before the changes take effect. In other words, either you like our ways or you can change bank. All or nothing. And I wish there were more options and not just caving and adapting the best you can or tearing down everything and switching to another platform — where things aren’t ultimately that different.

– This sounds like you’re past tech fatigue.

– I’m indeed past tech fatigue, way past. This is pure, unadulterated frustration. Frustration, uncertainty, and doubt.