Willy’s Outsourcing Problem

So by now you’ve probably heard about the infamous Glasgow Willy Wonka ripoff event that was a dismal disaster. If somehow you remained ignorant, basically one guy generated a bunch of AI content (including a script), outsourced everything to various actors and suppliers, and it was a mess. Fyre Festival for kids, as someone put it.

As the internet united around watching and dissecting the disaster, what I found fascinating is how this happened. Not because I learned anything new, but because it seemed depressingly familiar. It was a tale of outsourcing, taken to an extreme.

Most of the news has focused on the creation of AI content by the mastermind (disastermind?) Billy Coulls. It was obviously AI generated, from creepy imagery to hilarious misspellings and nonsense words. How AI generation is just a form of automation, of basically outsourcing. It was merely the most extremely hilarious example of Coulls having anyone but him do work.

There were people hired to bring in props. People hired to act. It seems like every damn thing was outsourced and then everyone was just supposed to make it happen. Needless to say that didn’t go well, nothing happened, everything got ad libbed and there was no chocolate. Not sure how you ripoff Willy Wonka without chocolate, but there you go.

All outsourced. There was no there there, just a bunch of AI art and some guy saying “good luck” before families paid tickets for this fiasco.

This may seem extreme, but outsourcing happens all the time. If you analyze and business or product you’ll likely find some outsourcing, because sometimes you save time and money with specialists. You’ll also find outsourcing backfiring as well, with poor service, lousy computer code, or questionable media design.

If you’ve ever tried to figure out who is responsible for something and had to drill through various organizations to get an answer or a refund? You get the idea. Outsourcing isn’t an evil thing at all, but too often its used to dodge responsibility, screw employees, and not actually do anything.

At the extreme, you end up with an event that isn’t about anything, is all fake, and ultimately is a disaster. Plus it’s hard to hold someone responsible – a little more coverage and forethought and we might haven’t discovered who did the Faux-Wonka fast enough for it to hit the news cycle.

There is nothing unusual about what we saw in Glasgow, it was just incredibly obvious. Many of us have been there before. Maybe we need to ask how much of our world is outsourced, and how much of that plays into the problems we face each day.

Outsourcing isn’t bad at all – I’ve been on both sides of it. But it can be misused.

Steven Savage

Optimized Failure

I saw an online conversation about the book How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra. In this book that I apparently have to buy, the author mentions that resilient systems are not optimized systems. To have a network, an organization, a team be resilient you need redundancy, slack time, backup, vacation time, whatever. Doing something perfectly doesn’t mean you’ll be able to keep doing it because being able to keep doing it isn’t part of actually doing it.

This is a very obvious statement that very obviously gets missed everywhere. If you’ve ever had to explain to someone that their network needs backup or that the fastest transport route isn’t necessarily reliable you get the idea. I know I’ve been there.

I also think it explains a lot about the brittleness in today’s world. We see collapsing ecosystems, housing prices going out of reach, and stagnant wages. We’re supposedly in this high-tech age with fast deliveries and electronic banking, an optimized age, but it’s fraying isn’t it?

A big part of this is that we figured businesses, hell even government, should all be optimized to one goal – profit. Make money really well, and that’s it! Of course, at that point all you get good at is making money – probably very fast of course. You have quarterly reports to make after all.

I think this means a lot of companies and other organizations are brittle as they’re optimized to just make money. They’re not resilient as they rely entirely on getting as much cash as possible. Sure they can spend that cash when things are painfully non-resilient, to get through bad markets and so on, but it’s not the same as actually enduring. Ask anyone who’s been through a third round of layoffs.

It also means that there’s damage to the resilience of society. Regulatory capture means there’s less resilience brought by laws and policies. Layoffs to protect the bottom line destroy lives. The environment takes a hit from our pollution and dumping and the like. Bought-off politicians avoid doing anything to help people, anything resilient.

Profit-focus is just another form of optimization. Like optimization, it backfires.

Today I hear talk about the kind of larger crisis our world is in. But I think a lot of it comes down to optimizations in profit-seeking. We got so good at turning things into money, we ignored resilience. Now we’re going to have to switch back or face some pretty severe consequences.

I know what order I expect, sadly.

Steven Savage

The Money In Cleanup

I have an acquaintance that helps migrate businesses off of ancient and inappropriate databases onto more recent ones. If you wonder how ancient and inappropriate let me simply state “not meant for industry” and “first created when One Piece the anime started airing” and you can guess. Now and then he literally goes and cleans up questionable and persisting bad choices.

In the recent unending and omnipresent discussions of AI, I saw a similar proposal. A person rather cynical about AI mused someone might make a living in the next few years backing a company’s tech and processes OUT of AI. Such things might seem ridiculous, until you consider my aforementioned acquaintance and the fact he gets paid to help people back out past decisions. Think of it as “migration from a place you shouldn’t have migrated to.”

It’s weird to think in technology, which always seems (regrettably) to be about forward motion and moving forward that there’s money in reversing decisions. Maybe it was the latest thing and now it’s not, or maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time (it wasn’t), but now you need someone to help you get out of your choice. Fortunately there are people who have turned “I told you so” into a service.

I find these “back out businesses” to be a good and needed reminder that technology is really not about forward. Yeah, the marketing guys and investors may want it, but as anyone who’s spent time in the industry knows, it’s not the case. Technology is a tool, and if the tool doesn’t work or is a bad choice, you want out of it. The latest, newest, fasted is not always the best – and may not be the best years later. Technology is not always about forward, even if someone tells you it is (before they sell you yet another new gizmo).

Considering the many, many changes in the world of tech, from social media to search to privacy, I wonder how much more “back out businesses” might evolve. Will there be coaches to get you to move to federated social media? How can you help a company get out of a bad relationship with a service vendor with leaky security and questionable choices? For that matter can we maybe take a look at better hosting arrangements and websites that aren’t ten frameworks in a trenchcoat?

I don’t know, and the world is in a terribly unpredictable state. But I’m amused to think that somewhere in my lifetime the big tech boom might be “oops, sorry.” Maybe we can say “moving away is really moving forward,” get some TED talks, and make not making bad immediate choices cool.

Steven Savage