We Don't Need No Innovation

About a year ago, I gave in and bought an Apple Watch. If I'm honest, I'm not really sure what I "gave in" to, because I never really wanted an Apple Watch. What I wanted was to be happier.

Specifically, I was looking for happiness in two important, intertwined categories: Physical health and mental well-being. If you'd asked me at the time, I would have rattled off a bunch of somewhat intangible things. You know the list: Better sleep, more physical activity, improved fitness, look hotter, stop picking up my stupid phone every three minutes for absolutely no reason, quit scrolling social media, spend less time feeling shitty.

I had tried a lot of the usual things, and some of them worked, but I got it into my head that I needed a fitness tracker. A fitness tracker, I reasoned, wouldn't be a silver bullet and solve all my problems, but it would be helpful. It would motivate me and help me track my progress, and then – then! – I would start to be happier.

Earlier today I was texting with my friend Brian, rambling on about this newsletter in between random tennis-related talk. He mentioned the news about HP's acquisition of Humane, the company that made the terrible AI pin everyone hated, had somehow been worth $100 million, and what a world we live in that an absolutely failed "artificial intelligence" product can not only be made by a company called "Humane" but still be worth that much money. (An amount of money which, in terms of tech acquisitions, is frankly not very much. That's also nuts!) We chatted back and forth about it for a while, as I caught up on last year's savage reviews of a product I honestly hadn't even known existed until today. I know, what kind of person writes about tech but doesn't keep up with all the new gadgets and releases? Me. I genuinely don't give a shit about most of it.

If you do, please don't take offense. Just because tech isn't a major interest or hobby for me doesn't meant that I think it's stupid to enjoy it. I don't blame people for loving gadgets or being excited about new releases. A lot of them are fun! Some of them are useful.

It's just that I spent a lot of time watching products and features get made, and I found that many of them – most?? – are solutions in search of problems. Or worse, they're solutions for problems caused by other technology. There have been a lot of great innovations over the years, a lot of products and tools I've used, enjoyed, deeply benefitted from. But how many of them were really designed to meet a deep human need, to solve a problem in a fundamentally satisfying way, and to not somehow make a bunch of other things worse? That's a much smaller number.

This is partly because the tech industry has a real innovation fetish. Ok, the tech industry has a lot of fetishes, but innovation is a big one. Specifically, innovation as the ne plus ultra. Innovation for innovation's sake. The kind of "innovation" that's really a solution to a problem the team doesn't understand and will never take the time to understand. The kind of innovation that's a new shiny gadget intriguing enough to distract you from the fact that it might, you know, one day make you miserable or be responsible for significant environmental harm. You know the saying "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"? It's that but the hammer is innovation and the entire industry is stuck in that 1984 Macintosh commercial on an endless loop.

I saw a quote on Bluesky from a short 2023 interview with Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation. The question was "What technology do you think is overhyped?" Here's a shortened version of her response:

I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations.

It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology.

The idea of hype as valuable currency runs through all of tech. You can especially feel it when you work in tech, whether you work at a company that's got an incredible around of hype around it, none at all, or a lot of anti-hype. You can feel the need for hype at every level: To sell an idea to leadership, to sell an idea to investors, even to sell your own work for a stupid promotion. And innovation is a necessary hype ingredient. Maybe even the most necessary! It's much harder to get people hyped over something that's a different, if better, version of whatever already exists, or a refinement of a product so it works in a more satisfying, more human way. And god forbid you want to hype anything so unsexy as a product that doesn't pretend to somehow make people's lives easier.

There are a lot of myths around innovation in tech, and top among them is that innovation is the domain of singular genius – usually product or engineering, maaayyyybe design – an unconstrained space of such fresh, unfettered thinking that it must be powered by intuition alone. Workshops are literally built around the idea of "blue sky thinking," a sort of "yes, and" method that encourages everyone to come up with ideas without limitations or constraints. Of course research is involved, to provide a foundation of understanding, and of course the point of this is to get people to come up with ideas unencumbered by the realities of whether they can actually be built (like, at all, or in a specific case given a pre-existing engineering situation). A lot of great stuff comes out of these workshops! I can personally attest to that! But the underlying ethos is that innovation is pulled out of thin air – out of the clear blue sky – and because it's the result of so-called "product genius" that we shouldn't question it. We should just ship it.

Real, deep innovation is so much more than having a cool new idea no one's thought of, and then hyping that idea all the way to market. For every product release or feature update you have suffered through, I can promise there's at least one user researcher somewhere in the background begging people to listen to the fact that people don't want it, don't need it, aren't interested in it. That maybe what we should do is listen to the problem they're experiencing and understand it fully, so we can try to come up with a solution that actually fixes it, rather than one that kicks the problem down the worse or compounds it so we have to come up with another solution down the road.

When was the last time you used a product and thought to yourself, holy shit, this is really great. This not only works, it feels good! And not just physically good but like, it somehow meets a need that makes me feel better. I'm genuinely asking, I'd like to know, if you have any examples please comment or email or find me on Bluesky (what a name, eh?). Because obviously the Humane AI pin was not one of them. GenAI itself is clearly not one of them. And I gotta be honest with you, the Apple Watch has not been one of them. After a year of wearing one, I can confidently say I really dislike it.

Before you come at me with defenses of the Apple Watch, let me be very clear that I am not interested in hearing them. I don't care, you can love your Apple Watch all you want. Good for you! You enjoy it, it gives you something valuable, and that's great. It meets exactly two needs for me: tracks my fitness and allows me to easily set a timer when I'm in plank position. It has motivated me a little bit, and I guess I'm grateful for the times I've gone on a walk because of it, but that's also cancelled out by the annoyance I feel when I walk around my apartment for 15 minutes waving my arms frantically the entire time because of the stand ring. It has certainly not made me any less dependent on my phone or even tech more generally. If anything, I feel somehow more dependent? I really want to sell it or trade it in (it's a 41mm Apple Watch 9 if anyone's interested), but somehow I also feel weird about that? Like I'll regret it? What if it really is helping me move around more, and I'm just not willing to admit it, and I lose that, and then I feel even worse than I did before I got it?

As you can clearly see, it has certainly not made me happier.

Obviously it hasn't. Solving a problem requires understanding it, way down as deep as you can go, so you can try to develop a solution that addresses the real issue. If you look at a problem on the surface, you really only understand an interpretation of it built on someone else's mental model. Here's a quick example: Years ago, I was Slack's (first and, at the time, only) user researcher, in the days before you Slack had any reply/threading features. Threaded replies was the single most contentious feature, and the debate had raged internally for a quite a while before I worked on it. I will write about this in depth another time if people are interested, but the short story is this: I talked to actual Slack users and realized that the request for "threaded replies" was in fact shorthand for a bunch of different problems. People were asking for an existing solution they were familiar with and that was the best approximation for something they thought would fix the problem they were having. A problem, mind you, created by the nature of chat technology itself. But in some cases, threaded replies would actually make the problem worse, or create a different problem altogether. This didn't mean a reply feature was bad, or that we could never do a threaded reply feature. I argued (successfully) that releasing the feature as designed at that moment and calling it "threaded replies" would have been a bad idea. So why not release it as a non-threaded reply feature, while we kept working to better understand and to solve for the other problems.

When I look at my Apple Watch, and even more so when I look at the Humane AI pin, what I see are distractions. Cool stuff! But like, solving for what? Technological solutions for problems caused by technology. Surface solutions for problems we really don't want to deal with, because that means a lot of unpleasant honesty and hard work. And you know, it's inconvenient to pick up my phone in certain moments, so maybe this other smaller device will help. Or I don't move around enough because I'm working on my computer all day, so maybe this other smaller device will help. Yeah, I feel like I'm distracted by notifications on my phone all the time, but maybe this other smaller device will make that better. Should I buy a device that will brick my phone to keep me from looking at it 3000 times a day? It's crazy that so many of our innovative products have created enough problems that we have to make more products to solve them. As Brian said earlier, "It's as if the industry that monetized nausea now wants to sell you an airsickness bag."

Do you know what I want? Well, you know what I don't want. I don't want a pin that does a virtual reality overlay on my hand and requires me to learn more gestures, all while slowly distracting me from anything that might bring me joy. There is a big difference between distraction and dissociation, and believe me, if I'm going to dissociate from unpleasant reality, I want to dissociate. I do not want to find a new way to feel annoyed or sadly addicted to technology, all while being very aware of just how sad and bad I feel doing it.

I also don't want this kind of innovation in my non-tangible products. Brian mentioned that it's interesting how everyone can clearly see that GenAI is garbage is when it's in a physical product, that if you released ChatGPT like a normal, physical product, it would be seen as disaster. Tech has created this new sort of rubric by which products are judged with the baked-in knowledge that there will be versions 1.1 and 1.1.2 and 2.0 and, you know, updates and bug fixes! Imagine if you bought a refrigerator from me and I told you that the door wasn't in the MVP.

But as messed up as that is, the bigger issue to me is not even that ChatGPT would be a huge flop if you forced to roll out solely in the form of the Microsoft Zune (sorry, I know some of you loved yours) or the Apple Newton. The part that boggles my mind is that even with the Humane pin being dubbed "the worst product I've ever reviewed," people still said there was potential. Potential for what? Potential to solve some non-problems caused by other technologies that somehow make modern life more inconvenient and inefficient? Potential to make us feel even more dependent on technologies that make us sad, and more dissociated from healthy real world interactions? Is it that hard to ask a stranger for directions? Will it be that much more time consuming to put your phone down and text after you walk your dog while pushing your stroller with giant headphones on all the way down 2nd Avenue? Why do we continue to be willing beta testers for an industry that has shown only a willingness to lock us into products that somehow get worse over time?

What I want are products and experiences that feel human. I want innovation that is constrained by human need and human behavior, rather than innovation that requires human need and human behavior to adapt themselves to it. This kind of innovation is entirely possible – I've done it. The problem is that the industry doesn't think it's sexy, doesn't think it has hype potential. It takes too long, or it can't scale fast enough, or it won't be sticky enough to move the metrics before the earnings call that will impact the stock price. You can't have real social returns from technological innovation if all you do is build something that fixes a problem caused by a different product. You can't even have real innovation.

You can, however, have a gently used Apple Watch 9 for a bargain price.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx