waffle

I am sick and tired of the conversation on software everyone keeps having that only has two extremes in it. Either you are tethered to UNIX semantics and castigate everything approaching reinvention as ducking standards and crushing your community. Or you run some grand opera argument about a focused implementation of the simplest solution that will still feel pure, paint “convenience” as an ill and bask in your own arrogance.

Apple has the nerve to proclaim a photo service that doesn’t let you browse your entire photo library from anywhere in the world or even from the phone in your hand 10 cm from your computer as “All your content on all your devices”. Microsoft tries to slough off its desktop environment instead of putting its energies behind a new horse for the same race, knowing what they know from 25 years of hardship. Google forces you into a social network no one wanted and doesn’t even hide their own fascination for having a complete file on you above serving your interest anymore. Everyone decides that “security” doesn’t mean having the keys to your own house and your own things and letting in what you want to let in, but instead means letting American fear and prudeness decide what you can do with your phone, tablet and soon computer and walling everything off from everything else.

This is not an attack on touch, workmanship or keeping around what works well. It’s not an invitation to adopt some companies’ brute-force road to “innovation”, meaning unleashing every idea as indispensible additions to smartphone camera canon which will for some reason not stick around even for every other of their own phones, or to adopt curved screens for the unbridled pleasure and utility of having a screen that is curved, how cool is that you know, the other guys don’t have that.

There are industries of people throwing money at other people saying they’ve found a breakthrough way of doing X for Y, where X is Instagram and Y is something that couldn’t possibly be a dishwasher because that wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. There are companies like Everpix who try to fulfill what some other companies are promising and what we all want, but they run out of money. To the extent that they can’t survive because no one wants to pay and all the funding’s gone to Twitter-optimized coupon sites that don’t know five years in how to turn a profit, yeah, we’re screwed.

But we’re not screwed because no one wants to pay for anything and would rather file status updates during Christmas dinner. We’re screwed because no one dares to actually break the mold. No one wants to unhinge everything and fucking fix it. No one wants to stop making photo library apps for 2001 where it’s just cool that you can have those family photos on the computer or the photo sender app for 2006 where you can send pictures to people outside of the room(!) and make the photo library app that will be needed as everything will be going digital, everything will be kept forever and accessible from everywhere and no one will even remember there being a discussion about no one remembering paper copies or rolls of film.

I promised some ideas and there’ll be ideas, but I can’t do this alone. Stop wondering about what version numbers the next versions of Windows and OS X will have. Start wondering about how the hell we’re even getting along with what we have.