Clothes have never been cheaper. These days a t-shirt is often cheaper than a decent cup of tea in a cafe. The wonders of capitalism. At least that is how it is often described. And when you point at the underpaid, gruesome labor that people in poorer regions of the planet have to do to make this possible the answer tends to be: “Well, they are having jobs and can provide for their families now, so it’s reducing poverty.”
Now of course the situation is a bit more complex, has more angles. Because fast fashion causes about 10% of the world’s carbon emissions (about one EU), that is more than all international flights and all maritime shipping combined. And because the clothing is cheap and what experts call shit it ends up in a landfill or burned. Because those shirts and pants don’t survive contact with the real world for long.
Fast fashion is not about durability and sustainability, it’s about novelty. Not just can fashion companies sell you more stuff, get you into their stores more often, you can also express yourself more. Buy a fun t-shirt just for this one party. Or – maybe even worse – just for a haul video on Instagram or TikTok.
But if you do not think about the context, the externalities (fancy way of saying the way it fucks up the world and the people in it) too much, fast fashion is great: You have a fun idea about how to attend a party or how to make a statement of any kind somewhere and you can probably order something for cheap.
This is exactly where we are with software now. We are turning software into fast fashion. Because “AI”.
One of the current trends in software is “vibe coding”: You no longer have a person who more or less knows what they are doing write software but you have an LLM do it. There’s a few optimized ones out there that even get the code to actually compile or run most of the time. Sometimes the results are even correct.
This is often framed as liberation: Every human being can now have the software tool they want. Without having to learn to code or without having to ask someone else. You think it, you get it.
Now most people will admit that the code is utter garbage. It’s inconsistent, inefficient and mostly unmaintainable. But it does what the user wants it to do … maybe. So who cares? We don’t need to maintain this stuff. If we need something similar later we don’t build on this, we just have it generated anew.
Software is no longer seen as an asset, as something to care for, to maybe even take pride in. It’s a throw-away product. Like a napkin. Just get one quick, wipe your mouth and throw it away. Like a novelty t-shirt.
There is software you need only once. A quick script to automate a few things. Like renaming a bunch of files or so. And if LLMs would just be used to write those I would care a lot less about it.
But that’s not the narrative: The promise is that you can built full online services or meaningful products (think a web browser) that way. It might even work almost. Some of the time.
Software has become an important part of our lives. It structures a significant part of our experiences given how much time we spend in front of some sort of screen. The vision that “AI” companies are selling under the label “democratization” of software development is a world where the only clothes you can buy are fast fashion throw away items. Shirts that are basically not worth putting into the washing machine cause they won’t survive anyway.
But just as with fast fashion there are consequences. Let’s not even talk about the environmental cost of LLM use, the water, the electricity, the e-waste.
When was the last time you were really frustrated by a piece of software you had to use? Your bank’s app not allowing you to change your address but forcing you to talk to a chat bot that kept trying to do the wrong thing. Your music player making your laptop’s fan spin eating up your battery while not playing any music, just generating a “busy” cursor. Your email client crashing while you are writing. The options are endless. How long ago was that? An hour? 5 minutes?
Software has gotten bad in weird ways. It’s not just that everything is basically just a half-assed website pretending to be an app with even simple text editors bringing almost a whole browser along just to show a bunch of characters on the screen (as long as the file doesn’t get long). I have to use Microsoft 365 at work and literally none of the paid tools work properly. Features are missing or just do not work as documented. Everything is dog slow and doesn’t integrate well. Now apply that everywhere.
I am not a fashionable or stylish person. I basically buy a thing that works 5-10 times and then I am done for a long time. But I am in the position that I don’t have to buy fast fashion (and I know some people have so few resources that that is the only thing they have access to, it’s tragic) and I would never buy a shitty t-shirt for 5 bucks or whatnot that will annoy me after 3 rounds of laundry. I want to have the things in my life work. Ideally be even a bit nice. And I think we all deserve that. Deserve having access to objects that have a level of quality and care put into them.
It’s not just about giving people access to something. My guiding ethic is to give people access to good things. Because that’s what is right.
I keep coming back to the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness from Terry Pratchett’s novel Men at Arms:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
We are working towards a digital world where we’ll all be having wet feet all the time. And that makes me very sad.
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