A Culture of Bullshit

Today I paused Spotify on my computer. Maybe 15 minutes later I turned off my Bluetooth headphones. Then the song I’d been listening to started playing loudly on my phone speaker in another room. Problems with this:

1. I had paused the Spotify song manually, so it should never auto-resume.
2. I hadn’t had Spotify open on my phone for weeks, so it should not be auto-resuming on my phone.
3. I had never listened to Spotify on my phone’s speaker, so it should not be auto-resuming through my phone’s speaker.
4. The entire idea of automatically resuming on a second device because the first device disconnected saves me maximum one button press, and worst-case starts blasting porn on the car speaker to my whole family, and should therefore should never happen.

Dealing with poorly designed technology like this is synonymous with using technology at all. This same week, I was trying to do some basic finances, paying off credit card and so on, and I had to deal with four separate software bugs that delayed me, whether I had to refresh a page or wait for a server outage to pass or whatever.

Steve Jobs was a fan of the idea that technology should “just work”. The idea was that the software should function flawlessly and elegantly without any hassle. Modern tech companies still use this phrase, but reinterpret it slightly to mean that their technology should just work, that is, you shouldn’t expect anything more of them than the bare minimum needed to get the thing working at all.

Maybe it’s not a big deal that YouTube forgets your position in a video, or that Reddit mobile loses your scroll position when returning from a post, or that Windows has menus that render off-screen so you can’t use them. Maybe it’s not a big deal that modern software is not just insecure but insecurable. To plug the many holes in software security, we can use the law.

But mediocrity begets mediocrity, just as crime begets crime. This is the broken windows theory of criminology: the idea that broken windows and graffiti lead to further civil disorder and crime. Maybe we could have a similar theory in the software world. A broken Windows theory: Every time a software developer opens their Windows laptop and sees an ad in the Start menu, or opens the Windows control panel and sees a mishmash of four different UI styles, they care a little bit less about making good software.

After decades of this, most developers don’t take pride in their work, and those who do are usually prevented from doing good work by their company, since excellence has to be company-wide, and we don’t live in a culture of excellence. Instead, we have a culture of bullshit. Children bullshit school assignments. Little do they know the teachers are also phoning it in. The kids grow up to work jobs where they bullshit their bosses. Little do they know the bosses don’t care about the product either, and just want to put their name on something. Everyone knows everyone else isn’t trying, and so everyone has contempt for everyone else.

There are a few, of course, who fight against the deterioration. Who really put the effort in. It’s always a joy to use a product or a piece of software created by such a person. I say person rather than company, because, obviously. Take Stardew Valley. It’s a labor of love. Nintendo, with all their resources, had their Harvest Moon series eclipsed by one man: Eric Barone. All he did was actually care about making it good, and put in the effort. These days, that’s all it takes. Nobody at the Harvest Moon studios was able to do that. It’s no small task to care, given that everyone around you will be doing the opposite. But it’s the only way you can be proud of what you’ve created, and the only way to fight against the enshittification of our society.