Another Turn of the Screw

While I try to avoid too much meta commentary (vs Meta commentary) in this newsletter, here's a confession: occasionally I don't know what I'm going to write about until Wednesday morning rolls around, whereupon I sit down and wait for inspiration to strike. And by waiting for inspiration to strike I mean I get a little panicky and text a friend with "I have no idea what to write about" in the hopes they'll say something smart that kicks my brain into gear. This is partly why my newsletter is free, at least for now. I'm not doing big deep dives or a ton of research for these pieces since I need to focus on my book proposal (which is going well, more on that hopefully soon??), and it seems unfair to require anyone to pay for what is essentially a space for me to play with ideas. Although because this is still work on my part, I am very grateful for anyone who does pay, thank you.

Anyway, this week I had a few options in mind, topic-wise, when something annoying happened.

First, a bit of context. When 2025 rolled around, I made a conscious decision that, regardless of what else happened this year, I needed to prioritize bringing more joy into my life. We're only on this planet for so long, and what's the point if not to do good in the world and enjoy what we can? The past few (ok, five to ten) years have been challenging for me on many levels, even outside of whatever upheavals the world has gone through. I found myself spending less time out in the world, which on top of being a lonely bummer is incredibly stupid when you pay as much as a person has to in order to live in a city like New York. So I knew I had to make a big change and actually be intentional about it. Operation 2025: Do more good stuff!

As everyone knows, one of the benefits of New York City is that you have access to a ridiculous assortment of cultural events on any given day. This evening, for example, a classical pianist of some renown is performing at a concert hall very near to me. I'm no classical music expert but I love it just the same, and I've found that recitals are almost an ideal solo excursion. Plus, the venue could not be more conveniently located. There was no excuse: I had to get a ticket and, you know, do more stuff. So what was the problem?

When I went to buy the ticket – well, first I put off buying it for reasons I can only ascribe to...commitment issues? Being financially responsible for once in my life? General disorganization and ADD? I honestly don't know, but I put off getting tickets to two other performances this year, which resulted in me missing out on them entirely, and I'm still annoyed at myself. Oh and then I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out which of the remaining seats would be the best one, despite the fact that I would literally just be sitting there listening to a guy play piano and would not be watching him with any actual piano-related knowledge. Anyway, when I finally chose a seat and committed to buying the ticket, after all of this very Leah-specific bullshit, the site wouldn't let me. It just didn't work. I selected the seat, put it in my cart, and then when I went to checkout, it said "your cart is currently empty." But when I opened a browser on my phone to try and get the seat, the seat was marked as unavailable. And if you think I was just going to say, well okay, I'll try another seat, you clearly have not been reading very carefully.

One of the more surprising things about this particular moment in our modern existence is how dumb it is. Specifically for this particular newsletter, how inconvenient and inefficient it is. (Some of the other dumbness we can talk about another time). After all, the whole goal of so much of the technology that surrounds us was, ostensibly, to make our lives better. We were going to be freed of the hassles of stupid tasks! Work was going to take us less time! We'd be able to spend more time doing the things we loved with the people we loved! And yet here we all are, being forced to listen to the menu options that absolutely have not changed, interacting with AI chatbots we absolutely do not want, waiting for everyone at the self-checkout kiosks to get help from an agent because their item won't scan correctly.

Now, very obviously tech has made our lives better in many ways. Even beyond the biggies, like major advancements in medical technology, there are so many things we can do now that were never even possible, let alone conceivable. I no longer have to wait for a physical letter to go from New York to my best friend in Australia but can message her instantly, from almost anywhere on earth – or even above the earth, in a metal tube in the sky!!! – and I can also easily talk to her on video. We can sign forms and contracts without printing them out, which is frankly pretty great, as anyone who suffered through trying to find somewhere to print in the '90s can tell you.

But one of the problems with infrastructure, which tech has absolutely become in our lives, is that it requires a lot of maintenance and upkeep. Just like roads don't repair themselves, so too do all the systems that allow us to do pretty much every single thing we do online. It's hard to think of tech like this because the industry has trained us to think that tech is all about shiny newness or disruptions, the next big thing, the game-changing feature, the product that will finally free us from [insert here] – email, meetings, high prices, lack of creative opportunities, alternate career paths, whatever. Just like almost everything in the world, tech products don't emerge into the world and then work perfectly forever.

In fact, unlike most things, many tech products are released with less functionality and a lower thresholds of functionality. In tech there's something called the MVP, which is not the most valuable player but the minimum viable product: What is the least complicated thing we can build that can be released and still be successful. Sometimes this makes sense and works great! Sometimes it's like releasing an oven without a door, and the door will come out in a few years when oven 2.0 is ready. Hopefully.

This is one reason why the various apps and products you use have to be updated, why there are bug fixes and patches, why new versions will be released with features that no one wanted or that people have been asking about for years. This isn't the only reason all that happens though. Code breaks sometimes, and needs to be repaired. Or the product was built using engineering decisions that maybe made sense at the time but over time made less sense, and that's causing a lot of tech debt, which are often things that really need to be fixed and changed before shit gets bad.

But all that work requires people to do the work, which requires companies to prioritize it and staff it. Companies that are too busy chasing after every single next big thing because the market demands it. The stock market, I mean. The other market, meaning all of us, are just like, what the fuck man, can this thing just work? Why is everything so much less functional than before? Because you cannot do all the work of maintenance, erasing tech debt, improving our infrastructure if you do not fund and prioritize it to the same degree you prioritize, say, a generative AI feature that informs users – who are accustomed to only looking at maybe the top few results in a search – that John Kennedy graduated from college five times, including after his death.

The stupidest thing is that when the day comes that we've all been unfortunately accustomed to only looking at the GenAI results in a search, it will somehow have been deprioritized in favor of whatever other new big thing comes along.

The simplest tasks, the basic functionality of products that make you want to yell "you have ONE job!!" as you fling your laptop into the sea, are the ones that seem to be eroding more and more because they're kind of like our utilities. I've worked at companies that call some of this upkeep "keep the lights on" work, and I can promise you that no one appreciates or prioritizes those teams or that work anywhere close to what they deserve. They certainly don't over staff those teams or give them sufficient resources. Plus most everyone wants to work on the cool new stuff, which tends to be more fun but also tends to get the most attention and immediate reward. So a lot of the maintenance work and tech debt doesn't get prioritized.

No company is intentionally trying to erode the core functionality of its products, but no company is under the illusion that maintaining functionality is sole key to attracting new users or even stemming the tide of loss to competitors. Crazy but sometimes true. Obviously things breaking isn't good, so it'll probably get fixed. But will it get improved? Maybe not, which is another reason the experience feels like it degrades over time. It's staying stagnant, while everything else appears to speed up around it.

Once I waited long enough, the cart that had held the seat I wanted but had also told me it was empty when I went to check out finally released the seat. I bought it in another browser on a different device. I am sure if I emailed the venue and told them about this, they'd either already be aware of the bug or file a report, so to be a good citizen I'll probably do that. And I don't fault this venue, because they're not a big tech behemoth. I think I even know someone who worked there, maybe even on their website, for a long time. But that experience of not being able to complete a simple task, that one stupid thing I wanted to do, was probably the 20th thing in the past week that hasn't quite worked right. All of this against a backdrop of larger infrastructure problems, increasing prices, fewer jobs, a constant and growing sense of general unease and panic. In isolation, each petty inconvenience – oh no, I can't buy a ticket to go hear a guy play piano, what a first world problem – is silly, and I would feel like a total asshole writing about it. But there are so many, so constantly, especially with tech. Like we're being squeezed a little tighter each day, just enough that we can sort of tolerate it, but also just enough that feels like we can't escape.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx