This Time It’s Not Fatigue, but Disconnection⁠↗

It’s like I’ve been playing this game called Tech for the past 30+ years of my life and I just don’t feel engaged anymore, but not because I got bored of the game — like it happens with many regular games. It’s not boredom or fatigue. It’s more because the game has gone through a series of updates that have ultimately made it so much worse.

As the media was talking about the iPhone success and impact, I couldn’t help but go back to that conversation with my schoolfriend’s dad about the World Wide Web back in late 1991. I couldn’t help thinking of what he had said: It is probably going to be so effective and so ubiquitous it will ruin people’s lives.

But the problem today is the way money is involved. It’s all about this quest for infinite growth that has become an obsession in Silicon Valley and environs. It’s a model where a product isn’t created with the goal of being an excellent product people will buy because of its apparent merits and because it clearly has been designed to improve their lives. It’s a model where a product becomes a pretext, becomes bait to lock people in an ecosystem made of other products and of habits that are engineered to keep people hooked. And bait only has to be good enough to do its job.

And as someone who genuinely cares about technological progress, actual progress, it’s disheartening to see the effects of this growth-driven change in tech companies. For not only do a lot of products today feel like customer bait and little else, tech companies are also prioritising their profits over actual tech progress. ‘The future’ has become a trite narrative where technological advancements are little more than hyped concepts or half-baked ideas tech companies want you to believe are the Next Big Thing. Like ‘artificial intelligence’. Steve Jobs famously said that Apple was at its worst when business and marketing guys were at the helm. Well, now marketing people are leading the whole tech industry.

The curve that has been climbing for the past thirty years is flattening a bit, and we’re definitely experiencing a lull, a stabilisation phase after what’s probably been a saturation point. In an ideal world, in a sane market, tech companies would use this somewhat stagnant interval to improve their products, the quality of their software, the quality of their designs, focusing less on quantity and slowing down this mad technological pace they feel they have to maintain. Better quality and more reliability in products would certainly reinforce user loyalty and would unquestionably benefit the relationship with customers as it would help slow down this progressive erosion of trust we’re currently witnessing in various degrees.

More like a user of technology, I increasingly feel used and lied to by it; I feel like a mere instrument that exists to guarantee its survival — a battery, like humans are to machines in The Matrix universe.

And the advertising industry, of course. Which probably deserves a 3,000-word piece all by itself. An industry that was full of creativity and proper visual art when I first got into it so many years ago, and which has gradually turned into an ever-spreading, intrusive, data-sucking cancer.

All this money-making tactics focused on growth at all costs are making these industries more and more self-absorbed, and are also draining the creative and innovative forces I used to witness in past decades.

But what I find most exciting is that they all seem very focused. As in, designed with a specific purpose in mind, and in service of that purpose. Which, frankly, today is an increasingly rare sight in tech. Product design before profit design. No-nonsense offerings instead of hyped solutions.