Technology

The Future Was Never What It Was

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

“The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be” has been a saying for a while. In a time of resource-sucking hallucinating AIs, climate change, and ad-saturated social media, the saying seems more relevant. We’re not getting the future we expected, want, or needed.

As I muse over this, I think the problem is that we had expectations as opposed to asking what we really needed. We wanted a future that was past and present.

Let’s take the Cybertruck, which is one man’s vision of a futuristic vehicle. The Cybertruck – for whatever valid critiques may be made of it – a deliberate creation, from its tech to the low-poly appearance. It’s something out of past science fiction, shoehorned poorly into current technology The thing is it turns out what we want isn’t, well, that vision or its janky implementation.

Or Microsoft’s Recall feature, which records what you’re doing for some kind of recovery purpose, all while basically being a security nightmare. A cybersecurity writer noted that maybe this is just what you get when an aging group of leaders keeps forgetting things. Is it evil opportunism, or just people thinking of a future that solves only something they might think of?

I could of course go on, from wasteful AI today to cuecat in the past and so on. A whole lot of people are inventing, selling, and sometimes just lying about how they’re making the future we want or expect. Which really means what too many people wan tis a future based on old videogames and movies and current ill-thought-out-needs.

We’re not humanity wants or needs because it really seems we’re not trained to think about that.

We look at what we want, and assume it’s for everyone. We look at our childhood media fixation and figure it’s how it should be. Even when people are lying their butts off trying to make “number go up” they’re justifying it with such explanations. I’m pretty sure enough supposed “leaders” of the tech world have been justifying things so long they actually believe it.

I’d feel kind of better knowing I’ve been lied to more, but am really starting to feel a little too much kool-aid has been drunk. A lot of that kool-aid came from 80’s direct-to-video.

And right now people’s egos and money are on the line in these various bad tech decisions, so they’re not going to reverse without some pretty hard bumps. Delusion, short-sightedness, and personal income and reputation are pretty compelling. Besides The Market doesn’t reward you for insight and the news doesn’t fawn over you for saying what a dumbass you were.

I’m starting to think being able to make the future (and make it better) is sort of its own skillset. Clearly a business degree doesn’t help you. But neither does a writing degree as you might just create a new mental straightjacket. Designing a future that works doesn’t necessarily come from pushing around numbers and making pretty words.

But it’s a skill we desperately need right now, and maybe recognizing it is a start.

Steven Savage

The Cybertruck Tells Us What We Want

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Yes, I’m going to blog on Elon Musk’s Cybertruck and how it teaches us what people want. Buckle up, but avoid a crash because the doors will probably stick.

Now if you expect me to praise Elon Musk or the Cybertruck, then you’re new here. The Cybertruck is an ugly mess, a renegade PS1 asset turned into an overdesigned and overhyped dysfunctional chunk of metal. Even if Elon Musk hadn’t worked hard the last few years to ruin his reputation, the Cybertruck would be a joke (and indeed it didn’t help his image). There’s a reason it’s so hated – and ironically the reason the Cybertruck is so hated is a lesson in what people actually want.

See, the Cybertruck, for all its flaws, is the realization of a vision.

It is a bad vision. It’s got an ugly retro-futuristic design with no appeal. Its control system sounds horribly inconvenient. The design makes visibility questionable, to the point I’m nervous to drive near one.. Even the unintentional flaws like the rusting or the dangerous hood, are things that seemed to be ignored in pursuit of the vision. That vision, apparently, is being a prop from a 1980s direct-to-video film.

But it is clearly a vision made by a person, there is an idea here.

Even if people had not, soured on Musk, the Cybertruck would still be the fulfillment of a vision. This truck is designed by someone with a plan, it is an expression of a human voice and human intent. Therefore because we know there is a person behind it, the dislike becomes personal, passionate. We get why it is the way it is and we don’t like it.

To hate something truly, is to have a personal connection to that hate. There’s someone and some decision to understand and dislike.

The hatred for the Cybertruck also tells us why we like things. A vision that speaks to us, that tells us about the intent and the creator and what it means, is one we can love. Through a book, a movie, or a vehicle, we can feel the intent, the human agency behind it. The love of something is also personal, because we know there is a person there and we get it.

Why we hate the Cybertruck is why we can love things – the human factor.

This is also why we really hate everything soulless, personality-less, from AI to corporate bureaucracy. There’s no one there, no one home, no moral actor. Even in hating something, knowing there’s someone there to hate is enlivening, dare I say, human. The Cybertruck may be awful, but it’s awful in a human way.

So before you entirely write off the Cybertruck, take it as a lesson. Not in hubris or questionable design decisions (since we’ve already had that lesson), but in why we hate and love things. It is a personal statement, and humans gravitate to those.

Even if just to complain.

Steven Savage

No Sympathy For Tech

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So as you may have just seen, some insiders at big companies (Zuckerberg, etc.) sold off stock. That tells me the sign that things are slowing down in tech. Well, one of many signs:

  • Everyone’s all in on AI, which means that there is going to be some shakeout when it doesn’t all work out.
  • Plenty of sites that are a little unstable, like ol’ Kotaku’s pivot (ha!) to guides.
  • Whatever embarassments crypto still holds for us.
  • Venture Capital looking for quick profits (See Ed Zitron’s latest).

This tells me that at some point we’ve got a shakeout in tech. As in something bad – and something earlier than I expected. This isn’t a surprise – for the last six months I’ve seen people make predictions that boil down to some combination of:

  • A big name takes a hit.
  • A lot of not-as-big-names fail because of a mix of bad ideas, low ad rates, and so on.
  • AI doesn’t pan out like people hope.
  • General enshittification.
  • VC money moves away fast.

I’ve been trying to puzzle out what’s going to happen myself. But there’s something else I want to address – how people react. See, I think there’s going to be little sympathy, and plenty of schadenfreude when the inevitable “big fall” happens.

People regard tech different than they did ten years ago or twenty years ago. Sure there’s some interesting stuff, but it’s often pricey, questionable, or not much more beyond interesting. Beloved sites are enshittified. Nothing seems new, often because it’s not.

Gone are the days of breathless waiting that felt like there was something worth waiting for. Ads are everywhere, websites are overclogged, products might be fourth-rate knockoffs with AI generated images. New gizmos ape SF concepts while planned obsolescence takes the fun out of the new. Annoying bad features are a joke among social media users.

A friend of mine of well over two decades has noted they feel things were better back when we first met.

So when the “big fall” happens, in whatever forms (I expect a kind of cascade collapse), I think people won’t care and many will enjoy watching things burn. When they do care it’ll be more how they’re personally impacted for obvious reasons – but there’s so much less “loving tech together” these days.

That’s also going to make everything from economic recovery to new products to potential government regulations harder to predict. Watching people fall out of love with tech (and tech has done plenty to shoot itself in the foot) isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen in my life except one thing.

Watching how the reputation of smoking collapsed in my lifetime. No, it’s not exact – tech has benefits smoking’s benefits were mostly social, but still the “feel” is there.

Perhaps that’s something for me to explore later. Just writing the above was exhausting, because so much has changed over the nearly three decades I’ve been in tech. Looking back over half my lifetime feels like several.

Steven Savage