Remember the days when you bought video games that came on CDs (or even cartridges!) and you would play them on a console that was not connected to the Internet? Or maybe you remember the pre-subscription era of Adobe where buying the Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign) was a few thousand dollars, but once it was installed, it just worked—you could get by for quite a few years without another purchase.
Apparently, we're in a software crisis, again. I've heard the complaint in many venues lately that software is just expected to be buggy and barely accomplish what you need it to do. This expectation may not be limited to just software. We can see it in things like the content on social media: empty videos that grab attention, but don't deliver anything meaningful, thoughtful, or actionable. I think there is something going on culturally that lends a hand to this issue of quality: intolerable satisfaction.
There are two ways we can think of this:
- Satisfaction with the intolerable
- An overabundance of satisfaction to the point that we cannot tolerate it
Broken Standards
As a developer, I am confounded and amazed at industrial designers, mechanical engineers, and others whose work deals in real, physical products. I have so long been trained on the flexible and forgiving medium that is website development that the thought of making something in real life seems arduous.
"You mean that when you designed that [notebook, microphone, waterbottle, insert product here], you had everything worked out before you sold it to someone?!"
It is impressive to be able to create something to be used that will work out-of-the-box, because that means you have thoroughly tested how the thing works, you have painstakingly worked out any issues, and your product can live up to its marketed promises.
Granted, nothing is perfect—and I am assuming a lot about the product development (they are actually testing the final product, right?). It's just that software products can hide a multitude of sins by having such short iteration cycles. If you mess up something that is physical, you'll have to remake the whole thing. You can't just take it back to your shop really quick before the customer notices something was broken, but you absolutely can in most parts of the digital world.
The famous Silicon Valley slogan of "move fast and break things," continues to pervade the attitudes of tech companies and product development. So yeah, there will be bugs and you'll be better off just expecting your app to not be perfect, right? I certainly think this expectation has been trained into us over the years: we're desensitized to quality, not because it doesn't exist, but because there is so much distraction, we forget that quality was supposed to matter.
We have become satisfied with what was previously intolerable.
More, more, more
It is disturbing to me that the game played out by the biggest technology companies is essentially a convergence on harvesting human attention.
Social media platforms have all started looking pretty similar. Sure, there may be slight "cultural" differences (e.g. LinkedIn is more business, Facebook is more political), but especially in recent years, I've had a harder time distinguishing one venue over the other. On the phone, the experience is virtually the same: short-form vertical video or "carousel" fed to you one after another.
Creators are now effectively re-posting the exact same stuff on all of their different platforms, meaning that there is no incentive for someone to go to a specific place for a specific reason. Now, you just go to Instagram because the reel for XYZ creator will be the same as it was on TikTok or Twitter (using that name to spite its owner).
Maybe it's giving me nightmares because I hate the idea of duplicate content—especially at scale—because it feels like such a waste and such an exponential increase in data to sort through. Maybe it's also the implications of what the game really is: Excess.
In business, there is a theory that you should choose which game you want to play: the short-game (finite) or the long-game (infinite). The short-game is for fast profit, and it's often characterized by practices that aren't sustainable or scalable—like focusing on aggressive cost-cutting or hitting arbitrary numbers for a quarter. Not much is put into the big-picture strategy, and there are winners (those whose businesses are found superior to competitors) and losers (those whose businesses close).
The long-game is lauded as the ideal, because it means that the business leader is always looking to the future, to the next big thing. It's not about winning, because the game isn't supposed to end. It's about accumulating. It's about constant "up and to the right" graphs and profits.
The problem is that there is no end. The incentive to accumulate and hoard are not healthy. We've seen exceptionally wealthy individuals turn to destructive or chaotic practices because they have already far surpassed any possibility of being matched.
How do you have the will to stop when every game in our society, from owning a business, down to scrolling through social media is demanding more, more, more?
Cyborg
This is my personal call to action amidst the backdrop of increasing anxiety and overwhelm. I want to take Cal Newport's advice from his recent book, "Slow Productivity," to focus on quality. Exceptional quality.
Maybe AI can eventually get to a place where it can produce high-quality things. Other people are currently producing high-quality things. The issue isn't: can someone/something create a high-quality thing? Rather, it is: Do I want to dedicate time and energy to acquire the skill to create a high-quality thing?
Maybe other businesses are doggedly chasing the never-closer horizon. I don't have to run my business or my career in that way.
Maybe other developers or designers are fine with cutting corners, moving fast, and breaking things. I want to practice delivering exceptional quality.
There's nothing inherently wrong with big-picture, long-game thinking, but it's easy to lose sight of the actual point of that strategy. It's not about more, it's about better.
I want to contribute to a healthier humanity, not an intolerable satisfaction.