Our relationship to technology is broken
The other day I texted an old friend. His name had come up in conversation, and I wanted him to know I was thinking of him.
His reply came swiftly:
“When are you gonna get an iPhone? 🤣”
My friend is a gifted communicator. Rather than engage in a stilted back and forth about “what’s new in your life lately,” he knew a little gentle teasing would inject the kind of intimacy we felt back when we had cause to see each other often.
After the texting wrapped up, I was inspired to chuck my Google Pixel and buy a new phone. But I didn’t buy an iPhone. I bought a rootable device from a small startup.
For some time now I’ve wanted to choose a phone, or a laptop, or even an email client without feeling like I’m swearing allegiance to a feudal lord. I’m old enough now to remember when we chose – or built! – the best software tools to suit our needs, and made them work together ourselves.
Some of these software tools became big businesses, and some of those supplanted the big businesses that came before them. I know some people think this was bad, but for my part, I have no problem with it. Capitalists brought us the Apple Macintosh personal computer. Free software advocates brought us the gcc C compiler. Both are wonderful.
But the current generation of big tech companies have gotten wise to the threat little toolmakers pose to them. They’ve developed antibodies protecting them from competition from little toolmakers, and one of their chief antibodies is ecosystem lock-in.
Choose a phone, or an email address, or a web browser, and it immediately becomes hard if not impossible to deviate from every other tool that vendor offers. Show me an iPhone user, and I’ll show you a user of Safari and iMessage and Apple Maps.
The problem, of course, is in this ecosystem, there’s no need for Safari and iMessage and Apple Maps to be any good. They’re not chosen on the basis of quality. They’re not chosen at all.
Google, my ecosystem of choice until last Monday night, understands this very well. They are now in the process of leveraging ecosystem lock-in, i.e. marching their AI chat tool, Gemini, across the face of every other tool they make. Search results are pushed even farther down the screen of the search tool that’s un-removable from my Google phone. Spreadsheets full of numbers offer AI summaries, blithely ignoring the fact that LLMs are notoriously bad at math.
Gemini demands to summarize my email threads, taunting me that the only reason I’d want that is that Google has allowed Gmail to decay to the point of unusability. Google could use an LLM to, I don’t know, let me specify mail filter rules in plain English. They don’t do this because improving the quality of the email tool is not the point. The point is to use ecosystem lock-in to get me to use their new AI tool regardless of its utility.
Our relationship to technology is broken. It was broken by Google and Apple and Microsoft when they decided they don’t make tools, they make ecosystems. When they eschewed craftsmanship for network effects. Somewhere along the way, I gave in. I stopped selecting tools, and simply chose an ecosystem and submitted. The friction of using Apple’s operating system but Google’s browser became too high.
The basis for my friend’s teasing, of course, was the infamous text bubble color in iMessage. He’s letting me know that his text bubble, in his messaging tool, on his phone, is the wrong color. Well, I submit to you: If you don’t like the color scheme in one of your tools, you should change it. And if you can’t change the colors in your tool, you should ask yourself why that is.
Are you using your tool, or is your tool using you to recruit more members for the ecosystem?
Steve Jobs, patron saint of small technology toolmakers, marketed to us by holding up the Whole Earth Catalog. He told us that fire made us stronger and the wheel made us faster and the personal computer would be the best tool yet, a bicycle for the mind. He appealed to how much his tool would empower us.
When his company, run by his chosen successor, markets to us not by appealing to empowerment but by weaponizing peer pressure, it brings to mind a quotation from that great American work of poetry, The Wire:
“Makes me sick, motherfucker, how far we done fell.”
I am done with ecosystems. I am returning to the days when we selected a device, and then an operating system, and then several applications, hacking them together to suit our needs. I remember well how much time we had to spend building and maintaining these stacks. I also remember the pride we felt in the stacks that were uniquely ours, handcrafted for our preferences.
It will be messy. What will happen when my open source email client receives a calendar invite? How will I securely sync passwords across my motley collection of tools? These are some of the problems I am creating for myself. Fortunately, a toolmaker once reminded us that the world is very malleable. I will solve these problems, using my tools.