Downsizing the Upgrades

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I run a values clarification exercise in my classes that asks the students to give serious consideration to their core beliefs; what those beliefs are, and where they came from. The idea for these technology classes is that when we encounter a new app for our phone, or a new piece of technology like virtual reality goggles, we need to decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing. We need to ask questions. Should the government be able to access your email? Should your phone always report where you are? Can people say anything they want about you on the Internet?  The idea I try to stress is that they need to run everything they encounter through the filter of their values; people, careers, technology, their own behavior.  Everything needs to be evaluated in terms of that core set of values.

I nudge them toward the idea of constructing a nice tight set of hierarchical core values that can serve as a “first pass” set of criteria as they move through their lives. Foster Harmony is the first tenet of my “hierarchical core” - Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, Oppose Harm. So Foster Harmony becomes my first filter for new elements I encounter in my life. With people it is pretty simple. People who are discordant, rude, racist bullies simply drop out of the “worth my time or consideration” category. It doesn’t matter if they are neighbors, colleagues, or presidential candidates. Which of course brings us to the topic of this essay which is, no, not politics, it is software development. And the tenet under consideration is the third one: Distill Complexity.

The problem with upgrades, you see, is like the Hogwarts Staircases.  In the Harry Potter movies, more than in the novels, the staircases at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry seem to be in constant movement. The older students navigate them with nary a second thought, while new students seem in danger of imminent death by nasty knocking newells. It is a delightful cinematic device. Everything is in a perpetual state of change, you never know quite where you are or where you will end up. Delicious. But when the notion of constant chaos becomes the default for your computer, laptop or phone, the novelty quickly wears thin. 

“Upgrade” is a word whose meaning and impact has shifted significantly over the past few decades.  Think of that old movie from the early 1990s, “Sleepless in Seattle”: “Bing. You’ve got mail!” There was time when getting email was kind of exciting - someone you knew was reaching out to you across that Internet thingy to communicate with you. Now, when I awake to fewer than 50 new emails it may be an easy day.  And that, of course, is the crux of the matter.  Computers, the Internet, smartphones, etc., everything that makes up our digital world was originally designed to make us more efficient, more creative, better, happier. “Bing. Not so much."

Distill Complexity points to that failed promise.  In my life my technology should do those promised tasks, let me write, paint, draw, and contact people more easily and efficiently.  What software developers obviously do not understand is that if you continually develop and release “upgraded" suites of software that may correct existing flaws in the software, that same “upgrade" actually introduces undesirable complexity into my world.  The developers may, like the older students at Hogwarts hopping up and down the shifting stairways, see these upgrades as really excellent and intuitive improvements. 

However while coders see features like automatically sorting my mail into predetermined categories, asking if I want to save a website’s URL to the cloud, popping a text message on my screen while I am composing a document - as improvements, to many of us they are just messing up our digital world. What I did one way in the older version, I now have to do a different way in the “upgrade.”  The coders seem to have lost track of the fact that for me - and I would assert for most of us - software is just a tool, like a hammer, or paint brush or screwdriver. The software is not the element of importance in a task, it is simply a route to that more important objective; the document, the images, the song, that allow us to Enable Beauty - realizing the second tenet.

I would like to suggest a new tenet for coders based on “Distill Complexity”: Invisible Improvements.  The basic idea is that the improvements are “under the hood.” What I do, my “click route” to a task remains the same - the coder’s “better, faster, more stable” parts of the process are invisible to me. I don’t have to relearn how to use the software. And please, please, don’t change what I see on the screen.  While a coder might think it is “better” to have a neon hammer with four interchangeable heads with variable density, I just use it to hammer a picture hanger on the wall. Leave it alone.

Another analogy: Think “Upstairs Downstairs”. Think "Downton Abbey”. The servants were invisible, but absolutely vital. They made things happen, but never, never, did they interrupt the smooth flow of life above stairs. The code, the applications, and the people who create them should live downstairs. The test of their quality is measured by how invisibly they make sure that life above stairs functions smoothly, beautifully.

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