why we resurrect past technologies.

I am about to write what I consider to be a series of scathing hot takes about the tech industry and the surroundings of what it’s rained around us. In advance, I mean no ill will to anyone who works on these projects, and this is just my personal opinion.

We talk a lot of shit about Marvel for reusing the same components over and over again in movies. It’s a trope, people are tired of superhero shit, reboots, so on, and so forth. But, tech companies are doing the same thing now too.

Most business boils down to this, and when you understand it, you see it everywhere. You must make a series of bets, most of them can fail, but a small number should succeed well past your imagination, and those few bets should pay off the rest of the failures.

This makes sense. People are highly variable, our world is unpredictable, things change at the speed of light, and ideas that are amazing on paper die in production.

It stands to reason that the bets you do make should be

1. strong
2. backed up by a lot of consumer sentiment,
3. driven by genericism and conformity to what we know as much as possible.

As I’ve touched on, I am the betrothed of the tech industry. I’ve spent the past decade programming, designing software, occasionally building robots, and becoming someone who understands on every level how these companies operate so I can recreate some of their success.

But, I’ll admit the quiet part out loud. I’m quite bored. Not that I’m not interested, and I’m not watching as new technologies fill our twitter feeds and our advertising space. I’ve also worked at some places, where tangibly I felt as though I was watching the future be fabricated before my eyes, learning about miracles done with technology that early 1700’s peasants would describe as witchcraft.

But, does that mean I feel as though what we’re producing is fresh, untouched by man, and the peak of the innovation spring from which Steve Jobs drank? No. Not particularly.

Naively maybe, I’ve been watching tech with growing disappointment. I think we’re seeing a culmination in the tech industry of a lot of forces:

a) the accumulation of mass amounts of capital in the hands of those who are the most risk averse: e.g: FAANGS, deeply industry embedded VCs and people, and others who basically have a lot to answer if shit doesn’t work

b) the maturation of our favorite products into every day items, reducing them from miracles to common artifacts

c) the lack of new capital being deployed in the space due to economy, leading to unprofitable companies dying but also the death of moonshots from people who have the power to genuinely change things.

Silicon Valley likes to imagine itself as a meritocracy built on logic and facts, but humans aren’t driven by logic and facts. They’re driven by emotions: fear of loss, embarrassment, and missing out.

They’re driven by passionate people, vision, a version of the future that’s attainable with minimal effort, and the belief that people who have wealth and power are smart enough to achieve them on their own merit.

But, there is still a definite layer of mass understanding that is required for a large group of people to fund, develop, and release products. Things cannot just make sense to you, but to your VC and to your accountant and designer and every intern inbetween. Thus, a lot of the nuance and creativity that makes an innovation gets flattened into product requirement documents, and into short pitches that get passed in corporate telephone.

Unfortunately, this mass communication that breeds conformity and predictability doesn’t lead to completely standout products that generate amazing results.

Case in point, most exemplary UI/UX design is a small set of principles relating to shape and color most designers are able to learn.

Correct corporate logic would be “if you want more people to use XYZ to get the most amount of customers, it should be as generic as possible“.

The conformity leads to products that are easy to use, and easy to forget. Sure, you can brand stuff with fonts and color, but you can’t deny there’s a sense of rhythm that’s disrupted in what we consider to be truly revolutionary products.

Then, corporate knowledge passing at scale, business facts and logic, this bias towards generic processes, and financier’s and executives inability to stomach strong amounts of risk lead to our current tech landscape, lead to this: things are just remade versions of previous things.

I’m not saying that people who build cool stuff don’t exist. Humane’s AI pin has been the subject of a lot of newsfire, but those people tried. Google glass tried. And failed.

I give more credit to people who’ve tried to built brand new things and failed than I do to those who’ve stolen things from sci-fi novels or make another smart wearable ring and throw a fucketh ton of money and PR gloss over it.

A company at CES made an accessibility device that leverages someone’s tongue to manage the person’s input, an insane addition to an under-innovated space.

I remember reading about that and being starstruck, not because of what it did but because of what it didn’t do. It created a new method of interaction that I’ve never considered or seen previously, something that the rest of the tech industry doesn’t often do anymore.

Back to the products we have dotting our future.

Voice assistants, which found some foothold but was not particularly revolutionary for the majority of people in how they interface with their devices.

AR/VR headsets, which is what happens when executives try to make a ‘bet’ on something, aka re-invent a somewhat novel technology from a sci-fi book people like as a way to bypass consumer testing because “if all these people show up to VR demos, surely they’ll buy the device”.

Apps and websites, which look to be the building blocks of our digital future but struggle with paths to revenue, leading many sites to become ad ridden content farms, or to people being so exposed to engagement bait 24/7 it causes health and societal problems.

Particularly, new social media companies which overuse Facebook’s playbook so much that any new app I know of is funded by ByteDance (Lemon8) or other industry connections (Clubhouse x a16z), or has a recreation of a thing that people previously liked (nospace) remixed with a secretive twitter hype campaign which ultimately fails to sustain the growth it started. BeReal is an exception, but not particularly divulged enough from Snapchat for me to praise its’ graces.

Throw in AI somewhere, which I don’t particularly want to touch on because that is a can of clusterfuck I do not have cooking utensils for.

Let me just say before anyone says I’m dismissive of generative AI: I’m a fan of ChatGPT (somewhat). I think it’s novel. I also think it means significantly less than most people seem to think, and I imagine the widespread adoption of it is

a) because it’s handy in some circumstances

b) because people don’t want to be the person who doesn’t adopt something big

c) it’s easy enough to pop in an OpenAI API key and call yourself a product leader.

It’s an easy, proven advantage. There is no risk and it’s backed by the most connected people in the industry, which is why I don’t think it’s particularly impressive that it turned into what it is today.

Although not in the scope of tech per say but relevant nonetheless, the stupid fucking 737 MAX family which should be a different plane but is just one Boeing fuselage wearing mustaches to sneak past the FAA even though it’s such a flawed and dated design that it should be reinvented entirely.

We’re even going to the moon! Again. We’re recreating previous technologies, or those already threaded into our society to increase the margin of error on our bets. Some of these things are useful, some of them are fun, many of them fall flat, but none of them make me excited about our future.

New, exciting products that capture the public’s attention in a tangibly paradigm shifting way will come not from these carefully researched, test group bets, but hopefully from minor intuitions that people have and make worlds out of.

The tech that I dream of and that makes people excited isn’t things that are clear, and neatly categorized as a win. It’s new, groundbreaking, and even a little scary. The products we use and the things we have should feel alien, not a generation of a generation of a generation.

Innovation is supposed to be confusing, not intuitive or like those before. If it is just a version of a version, it’s just iteration, innovation’s less cool cousin. Iteration is vital, and we stand on the shoulders of giants. But, sometimes standing on too many things without truly changing enough to be your own without them is just repackaging.

Tech doesn’t exist to change the world, it exists to grow to multiple million users as fast as possible, pay back its’ financiers, and then to die and possibly wait for resurrection in the form of mildly differentiated packaging for a new audience awaiting a shiny toy.

In a world where we have so much computational power and resources, it makes sense, but is nonetheless a shame that the capital we have won’t go into building these things. It doesn’t make sense. True innovation sometimes changes the world, other times it makes you look like a dumbass in front of your boss.

But nevertheless, I’m not looking for another phone with a better camera, a new chatbot, a voice assistant or AI doohickey, but something diverged from what we’ve seen.

Something that reminds us about the miracles we haven’t seen yet, not the ones we have.

I don’t think that future will come soon, but I can dream about it.

Build things people want, sure. But to build something that tangibly changes our world, build things that scare them, too.