Everything Technology
Source transcript: Everything Technology - Raw Transcript
When I was growing up, technology was everywhere, but it was discrete.
There was a tape player. There was a phone. There was a television. There were paper magazines. If you wanted to talk to a friend, you called them on an analog phone or you went over to their house. If you wanted to watch something, you watched the TV. If you wanted to read something, you picked up something printed on paper.
The computer was different. The computer was an object. It was down in the basement. it was a destination.
But slowly, the computer started eating things.
I would go downstairs and play games on it. Then I started using BBSes, bulletin board systems. Friends and I would go online, do stuff, then still go over to each other’s houses and talk about what we had done online. The computer was becoming a place, but it had not yet become everything. Then the internet krept grew and with growth the importance of the computer grew.
Eventually, more and more of life became computer technology.
Not everything, but a remarkable amount of human work can now be transformed into ones and zeros, placed inside a computer, and manipulated there. Whole businesses exist almost entirely inside computers. Communication, scheduling, reading, writing, entertainment, money, identity, work, friendship, attention. All of it increasingly passes through software.
For me, this has mostly been good.
Give me a computer with a terminal and the internet, and I can probably keep myself busy for a lifetime. I like the slow process of using a computer to create things, break things, fix them, and create them again. I like the way computer work lets you iterate at low cost but end up with complex useful tools. You make a little thing. You change it. You see what happens. You keep going.
To what end? I am not sure. That is an interesting question.
Ben Thompson has said recently that consumers do not really want to pay for productivity. They want to consume. it’s businesses that will pay for productivity. that probably is broadly true. But I am part of the small group of people, who actually enjoy productivity productivity means creating a small application that makes your life easier in some way or , then productivity feels like play. i enjoy the process of building, tweaking, arranging, automating, and improving. but I know this is not everyone.
That is where a divide is.
As everything becomes technology, people who enjoy playing with technology get more and more of what they like. But people who do not enjoy technology experience something very different. Another part of life gets absorbed into a system they did not ask for and do not want to maintain.
A calendar invite stops working. An app has a setting buried somewhere. The phone is too distracting. The computer will not connect. The account needs a password reset. The file is in the wrong format.
For me, some of these are interesting little problems. I can poke around. I can ask ChatGPT. I can figure it out in three minutes and feel mildly pleased.
For many people, that is not fun. It is just another headache. but this is the world we live in now. it’sNot good exactly, not bad exactly. Just true.
And the real question becomes: how do we make it so that people can still enjoy life when so much of life has become technology?
The answer cannot be that everyone becomes a technologist. Most people do not want that. They want to live. They want to hang out with friends, listen to music, watch movies, read books, travel, work, raise children, go outside. But increasingly, every one of those things comes with accounts, apps, settings, updates, notifications, subscriptions, permissions, and workflows.
That must be incredibly frustrating if not only are you not a technologist but you don’t even like technology and feel most of the time it gets in your way and is a hassle.
Yet, software solutions continue to be created for all facets of life that it hasn’t touched yet and while this might be good for the technologist for the non-technologies this is another part of their life they have to use a computer / iPhone / internet for. The technologies might say that the if non-techies don’t want to use software then don’t. That view is somewhat insane, it it’s almost like saying - If you don’t wanna live in modern society, go into the woods and live in a cabin. It’s not even really a choice that most of us can make..
so applications get refined and distilled /limited useability in order to cater to a broader population. But in the end, it’s still technology. And distilling things too much disrupts the fun that a technology can have with a given product.
Too simplified a computer is not fun to the technologist. This is why I get so irritated by locked-down work computers. If you lock down a computer too much, it is no longer really a computer. It becomes an analog tool. It may still have a screen and a keyboard, but it has lost the thing that makes it fun for me: the ability to make things within it, its openness.
So I want computer freedom, the freedom to change it, script it, automate it, break it, fix it, and make it do something new.
But I also understand that most people do not want that at all.
They do not want infinite possibility. They want the thing to work.
Maybe that is the tension of this moment. The people building the technological world often like technology as an open-ended medium. But most people experience technology as infrastructure. They do not want to iterate on it. They want to depend on it.
For me, I keep my head down and keep iterating.