technology

The Money In Cleanup

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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

Let’s Talk About the Hype Cycle

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I saw someone post about the “AI Hype Cycle” on Mastodon. Against all odds, I’m not going to talk about AI – I’m going to talk about the “Hype Cycle” and the fact we are really too used to it.

You probably have seen this for years – the Hype Cycle for this, the Hype Cycle for that. It’s burned into our brains, probably in part because Gartner actually tried to build a model for it. But we’re now used to the idea that the next Hype Cycle is here, coming, or sneaking up on us.

The thing is a big part of the Hype Cycle is utter bullshit and terrible disappointment. The fact that the Hype Cycle is part of our vocabulary means that we have normalized the idea that we’re being lied to and everyone is going to be bitterly unhappy later, and some lawsuits are going to fly around. We just sort of accept this, it’s been worked into our worldview and our vocabulary.

Everyone even has their roles in this play. There’s the evangelists (who probably made money last Hype Cycle), the skeptics who jump ahead to disillusionment (either understandably or because that’s their role), and so on. Sure some people believe honestly and some disbelieve, but too much of this starts seeming a lot alike.

I’m sure a big part of the Hype Cycle’s existence – and prominence – is because people WILL make money in the latest round of Hype over the Latest Thing. Venture capital streams in, people rush in with the hope of making it this time, and of course the evangelists from last time are on top of it. I also noted the last Hype Cycle for Crypto and NFTs that political actors got on top of it as well, which just amplified things further.

Of course with Crypto it’s still going, but it also seems that every week some techbro half my age goes to jail forever or gets sued for the GDP of a medium-sized country.

But some people make money in the Cycle, a lot of people loose money, and here we go again. Recently in Hype Cycle discussions, I saw a person honestly and sincerely discuss how to prosper in a Hype Cycle bust as a “cleanup consultant” which is brilliantly depressing. I myself have been in IT 30 years and have navigated many a Hype Cycle and I’m kind of done with them.*

But sadly, I think we have to discuss the Hype Cycles to ask why we have to discuss the Hype Cycles. Maybe we need to ask if we can move beyond them into something focused on real results early, on actual caution at the right time, and getting things done.

Steven Savage

* Oh and my secret to Navigating Hype Cycles? Stay aware of trends, don’t get caught up, stick with useful skills that will carry over, and put yourself in a place with real deliverables.

Into The Nothing That’s Everywhere

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I observed a discussion of AI art online, and someone made a chillingly accurate comment. They said people were using AI art to get clicks on message boards. Using a tool to make “art” that you didn’t make, to post to a board of people you don’t know, so they click on the post so you feel good. Nothing actually happens or means anything. It’s just automation wearing the clothes of human interaction.

I began asking just how much of modern interaction, infused by market-driven technology, is just meaningless clicks. How much is nothing.

Not much later, I was listening to a podcast on game and game development, and how some people courted controversy. You could make an utterly crappy game, but get the right people to scream about how great it is, cite culture war B.S. and you’d sell your game. You’d get “reviews” yes, but the reviews wouldn’t be about the game you made, just who you annoyed. The tools to make a game, the social media to discuss it, the ways to distribute it, but the game itself means nothing.

Doing something to get something else to happen over something else, while everyone pretends something meaningful is going on. Human interaction as a Mousetrap-style game to get clicks, sell adds, or just annoy someone you’ll never meet. Meaningless. Nothing.

These experiences helped me get a feel for the profound alienation that seems to have settled on many in our high-tech supposedly connected world. The system of clicks, views, reviews, etc. means something else than it says it is, if it’s about anything else anymore. Yes, some – a great deal – is about ad revenue, but that’s you doing something so someone else pays you to shill an unrelated product. Even then it’s still so abstract from what you say is going on.

The Enshittification of human interaction. People can’t even hate each other properly without worrying about follower count and ad revenue.

The thing is we expected the Internet to connect us – it can and it has. Yes, it lets you build a bubble, but humans always do that. As I look over this phenomena of human abstraction and clicks and numbers, I think a way to look at it is that we’ve added middlemen.

Ad revenue companies, many big tech companies, etc. Even crypto is really a kind of middleman, an unregulated stock market of the imagination that you eventually have to cash in for real money. All of it is inserting yourself into the human experience to charge a toll and getting people to click, maybe paying them in a cut or just giving them a number to watch go up.

And now, nothing means anything except clicks and who’s getting paid. Sometimes no one is getting anything but is hoping to or doing it out of habit. Worse, so much started pretty good.

Now I wonder how sustainable it all is – and I honestly don’t know. We’re in unexplored territory at scale while the climate changes and the world careens forward. But wherever we are now, I don’t think it’s going to solve our problems. You can’t solve anything with nothing, and there’s a whole lot of nothing right now – a complicated nothing.

We need less of this nothing.

Steven Savage