I hate to pass for a boomer, but [insert a benign comment about whatever has been going on lately]

I heard this phrase about a million times, and it always irks me. If you've got something to say, just say it. Maybe I'll agree, maybe I won't. The one thing I can assure you is that I won't give a damn whether or not it makes you sound like an old fart.

I get why no one wants to be the proverbial old man yelling at the clouds. That meme comes from somewhere, and those people do exist. And yes, they can be annoying as hell and rarely have much of actual interest to contribute to the converstation.

But claiming that "new" always means "good" is just as deluded, and in my opinion, also dangerous. Embrace change all you want, but please don't turn off your brain in the process and let novelty shut down any attempt at criticism.

The software world seems to be particularly prone to this bias, which is ironic coming from people who love to call themselves engineers yet can't help themselves from chasing after the latest framework of the week, technical debt be damned.

This leaves us with an industry that runs on buzzwords. Web 2.0. The Cloud. Blockchain. Fucking NFTs. And now the current craze about AI.¹

The argument is the same every time. The world has changed, progress is unstopable, and whatever you're being sold is TheFuture™, whether you like it or not. Adapt or die.

Which sounds a lot to me like an injunction to blindly follow whatever happens to be trendy today. If this is what passes for innovation, then I'll gladly change my name to Nedd Ludd.

And you know what ?

It's all a lie

9 times out of ten, the crap we're being sold ain't even that new.

Remember Zuckerberg's metaverse revolution ? When I saw the adds² for it, all I could think of was that second life looked better back in 2003. And even second life wasn't a new idea. People were already dreaming of and experimenting with virtual worlds as soon as we figured out how to make computers talk to each other, all the way back to 1980. Why do you think the genre of cyberpunk emerged around that time ?

Also, who's still talking about the metaverse 3 years later ?

We're told that everything in computing is constantly changing, and that the whole world gets turned upside-down every other day.

And yet most of the world's infrastructure still runs on C, a language that was conceived 54 years ago. The banking and financial systems are desperatly hiring people who still know COBOL, which is even older. LLMs are mostly based on research that was conducted in the 80's.

Even the web, which I would argue was the last truly groundbreaking idea in IT, is older than today's young adults, but we still treat it as a "new technolgy". Mostly because we still have no idea how deep its impact on societies really is.

Code bases don't change at the pace of hype.³ If you think Claude and Copilot can speed that up, go ahead and try, but don't expect me to care when you end up with a unmaintainable and bloated mess in six months.

Tech is not magic

Real progress is slow and deliberate. Breakthroughs are rare and tend to go unapreciated for a while.⁴

And what that progress brings is new possibilities. Some of them pretty exciting. But bringing these potentialities into reality doesn't follow magically.

Take video games. Back in the nineties, small teams of half a dozen people could deliver a game in about one year, sometimes even less. Pixel artists had to come up with all kind of crazy tricks to make up for the technological limitations of the time, but at the end of the day, they only had to draw a copple dozen sprites for each character.

Today low-end GPUs are capable of rendering 3d photorealistic environements in real time, but it takes several hundred experts up to ten years to deliver products they didn't have time to finish.

Artists now have to model the individual hairs of each character and can't get away with a simple color swap to fake some variety. And another team needs to come up with a convincing animation for when said characters stand around, effectively doing nothing, because what was ok with abstract graphics would just look dumb with today's level of detail.

Synchronizing all the new systems resulted in an explosion of complexity, and no single person can possibly hope to truly understand every aspect of a modern engine. This is not because the devs have gotten worse at their job (quite the opposite). This is because actually exploiting the new tech has multiplied the labor costs by a thousand, if not more.⁵

All this so that gamers can bitch about how you failed to make their fancy hardware shine, failing to understand that just because something is possible or even common doesn't make it easy. We've come a long way, but the tradeoffs haven't disapeared. You can't keep obsessing over having the prettiest pixels and at the same time complain that games are getting smaller and buggier.

Progress Uber Alles

Brace yourself for a sudden change of pace. You know what was pretty hype back in the thirties ?

Fascism.

Mussolinni and his pals had plans for a grand new world, and while they sure had a peculiar relationhip with the past, they weren't selling the crowds on a return to the middle-ages. And up until recently, it wasn't controversial to think it didn't turn out so great.

Those guys were big on tech too, and would have loved to get their hands on our current stack. And yet we spent the last 15 years building the tools of mass surveillance that their successors are now gladly using, convinced that we wouldn't be dumb enough to let it happen again.

When the war ended, it was widely understood that the disastrous economic conditions caused by the crash of 1929 had been a huge factor in the rise of totalitarianism, and most countries started to build a few makeshift guardrails around capitalism to try and keep it from blowing up again.⁶

A mere forty years later, we started dismantling those guardrails, effectively going back to the ways of the 19th century. But we called it "modern", so how could it possibly wake up the monsters from a mere generation ago ?

Add another forty years, poverty and inequality has exploded, and we're shocked to discover that the same causes produce the same results they did last century. Turns out collectively chanting "Never again" wasn't sufficient to keep the bad guys from returning.

Well, they're back now. All it took was an update to their terms of service for them to reach a position from which they could unleash world war 3.0. I wonder if the feodal structure of the current web had anything to do with that situation.

History wasn't doomed to repeat itself. but the notion that it goes in a straight line and can't ever reverse directions is part of what put us in the mess we're in today. Hurray for progress, I guess.

Complexity sucks. Deal with it.

I'm not calling every tech-enthusiast a potential fascist. And I'm not even trying to claim that new stuff always suck.

The world's gonna change no matter what, I get it. And despite its current state, somehow I still don't think we're doomed. Yet.

But it's high time we had a conversation about where the hell we're headed and whether or not we're about to hit a concrete wall. This involves many different topics, each complex in their own right, and they all intersect and conflict with each other in a fractal web of convoluted side-effects.

I'm no expert on any of those fields, but I know they can't be reduced to simple pro or anti postures. We'll never solve anything if we're not willing to face that complexity. Call me stubborn, but I refuse to simply live with the times and stop asking questions.

It's okay if we don't agree on something, and you're welcome to try and prove me wrong. If you give me some time, who knows, I might even change my mind.

I'm getting old enough to recognize some recurring patterns, though. That doesn't mean my intuitions are always right, far from it. But you're gonna have to try a little harder to overcome them and convince me of anything. If my skepticism makes me sound like a nostalgic old geezer who's afraid of change, so be it.

But please drop the bullshit and make an actual point, instead of rehashing the slogans you heard from a commercial. It's hard enough to try and think with all the noise that's going on, so I won't even bother to listen if you start sounding like a fucking lemming.

See ya, interwebs. Please stop moving fast and breaking things before there's no ground left to stand on.

---

I saw this blog post pop into my feed last week. Shortly before that, Adam Neely's essay on AI generated music (possibly the best thing I've seen on the topic yet) had already prompted me to mull over that "You don't want to be left behind" phrase I'd been hearing so much lately. So I guess this article was inspired by both of those pieces.

This started as a quick rant and kept expanding as I typed. As a result, it's a bit all over the place. I hope I managed to stay somewhat coherent, but if I didn't, fine. Rambling is what this blog's supposed to be about, after all.