About 6 months ago, I teased a series on the idea of facadeware, largely starring our lemon of a Grand Cherokee, but speaking more broadly to a problem with how we’re developing technology. Specifically, I defined this concept as:
Facadeware: superficially advanced gadgetry with an actual net-negative value proposition.
I’d like to start unpacking that and write my series. Now, I’m not going to do what so many bloggers do and promise to write regularly again, since I have no idea if I’ll be able to back that up. But I am now through my two relocations in two months, settling into a permanent location, and hoping to have at least a thin sliver of free time to once again indulge my deepest passion: ranting discursively on the internet.
(I won’t belabor the point here, but for anyone interested, I’ll add a personal update as a footer to this post.)
Before I tell the tale of my Jeep in subsequent posts — and tell it, I will, rest assured — I want to expand on the concept of facadeware. I also want to reemphasize that I would no longer feel good about applying the label “technologist” to myself, descriptively or aspirationally. And that’s not because I now mostly do bureaucratic business ownership stuff for a living.
It’s because I no longer thing “technologism” is worth aspiring to, given the state of technological advancement.
Handing in My Technologist Card
Before going any further, I’d like to reiterate that I still like to program, build, tinker, and improve. Hell, just tonight I performed some quixotic field surgery on a Keurig, successfully bringing it back from the dead briefly, before it re-died in a blaze of cooking circuitry. It isn’t a question of my tastes or interests changing, but rather that I increasingly don’t think that the way we, humans, are advancing technologically is a net positive.
In fact, I’d go so far as to claim that I think we have collectively, technologically regressed over the last 10-15 years, notwithstanding a never-ending slew of phones that are slightly bigger, or thinner, or… something… each time. Technology in this time has advanced, in a sense, for some definitions of “advanced.” More computations are happening, and the cost of that computing is going down. Various things are getting faster, more parallel, and certainly they’re spewing shit at us in higher volumes than ever before. Endless scroll wasn’t around 15 years ago, and we now have that. So, that’s, uh, awesome, I guess.
Things are progressing down a path. There are undeniably more gerbils running in more, bigger, gerbil balls, flinging more gerbil poop into the universe than ever before. Nobody can look at our world and be anything but impressed at the advancements in gerbil poop per cubic meter per hour.
But does gerbil poop, impressive in its volume and efficiency, make anyone’s life better?
A Meaningful Definition of Advancement
At this point I’m going to back slowly away from the gerbil metaphor and trust that you’ve absorbed my implicit point that more-faster-cheaper isn’t a synonym for better. But if more cores and circles on the back of my phone aren’t necessarily better, what is necessarily better?
What indeed is the purpose of technological advancement?
Well, I’d argue that the purpose has historically been to improve the lives of users of the technology. For most of my life, and the 20th century preceding my life, I think one could argue that this was generally the primary goal of most technology (allowing for the exception that a lot of advancement comes from weapons research and is later repurposed for benevolent applications). Technologists built stuff to make their and others’ lives better. The user was the hero, and the technology was the enabler of the hero’s journey.
To drive this home consider the fictional Star Trek universe. I’ve recently learned a term “solarpunk,” that, if I’m understanding it correclty, could describe that universe. In that world, the crew of the Enterprise says things like “computer, make me an 8 course Thanksgiving meal” and it just happens without a lot of navel-gazing and mythologizing about how the computer does it and how it’s disrupting the farming industry.
The fabricator, the warp drive, the holodeck — these things all just serve the occupants of a galaxy with a substantially better standard of living than we enjoy. Centuries of technologists focused on improving the lives of others led to meaningful, life-changing outcomes. This is what I signed up to participate in when, 30 years ago, I started to consider myself an aspiring technologist.
And this is categorically not what we’re doing any longer. So I’m out.
Where We’re Heading Instead
When I first arrived at our new home in Phoenix, the plumbing wasn’t yet hooked up to our fridge, so I was temporarily forced to make ice cubes in trays, like some kind of savage of a bygone millennium. I went to Walmart and bought a couple of ice cube trays and found myself pleasantly surprised by an advancement in this technology, even though I paid like 40 cents for them or something. They had a lid that fit over the top with a coverable hole in it, so that you could easily fill them and walk to the fridge without sloshing water all over yourself.
I thought to myself, “this is a legitimate, genuine improvement that makes my life better in a meaningful, if tiny, way.”
I then realized that was more than I could say for most of my SaaS subscriptions and gadgets.
Google has recently pioneered new ways to punish me for using uBlock Origin. Our Jeep has recently showcased a major breakthrough in showing ads on our nav system. Netflix and other streaming services have explored sophisticated ways to annoyingly turn off my TV if they think their engagement stats are dropping, and they’ve happily shared that knowledge with traditional telecom companies. And everything, and I mean everything, has some kind of moronic AI chatbot that nobody wants, and serves only to explode the failure density of every applied technology in our lives.
Technology is no longer done for us. It’s done to us.
We are no longer the beneficiaries. We’re the marks. Improving people’s lives via technology has taken a backseat to extracting money, time, and attention from them via the same.
And, again, with that, I’m out.
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The Inline Self-Deprecation Example
