Cal Newport’s most recent episode of Deep Questions asked why big tech stopped building useful products. He contrasted the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 with a fake flying car everyone was sharing recently, and how there feels like this palpable shift away from making the present better, to “inventing the future” that almost certainly won’t happen.
(His podcast site doesn’t show the most recent episode, but it definitely appears in my podcast client. This happens surprisingly often across a bunch of different shows I listen to, which makes linking to any one episode a pain. Not sure why this happens).
He offers three theories as to why this might be:
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They want to be seen as growth companies. Mature, stable businesses don’t deliver stratospheric returns or valuations.
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They’re engagement pilled. Fake flying cars aren’t a device you can buy, but they drive engagement, which is seen as paramount. Cal says “it’s not a reasonable product, but it’s one hell of a meme”.
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Building useful stuff, that makes people’s lives better, that people want to then buy, is hard. Cal says “people respected what Steve Jobs did, but we might even underestimate just how exceptional his peak run at Apple was”.
☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎
I think there’s a lot to those, and they feed into each other.
I have one more: big tech companies lack imagination, even if they once had it. The futures they want to build are either dystopian hellscapes designed to scare us into buying their crap, or so milquetoast that they don’t inspire at all. This shows in what they prioritise and develop, and is why it feels like everything is getting worse.
But let’s clarify something. Cal is in the United States, and I’m writing this in Australia. The Western world is currently high on its own supply, and singularly focused on this one tech to the tune of trillions of dollars (the fact its not profitable isn’t relevant here, though it’s still darkly funny). I’ve wondered out loud where some of those resources could go when the bubble pops, and all our capital, time, and attention isn’t being set on fire by a bunch of charlatans who’d have you believe their tech is “going rogue” to make it seem more capable, and so you’ll absolve them of responsibility.
I’m not even angry with them any more, I’m bored witless.
You know where they’re not doing this? Everywhere else! Almost all the interesting, fun, cool, and entertaining tech thesedays is coming from Asia, and from independent designers and engineers in the West. I’m looking at my desk now, and most of the stuff that has brought me joy and improved my life this year hasn’t come from these big US tech companies (or if it has, it’s by using it in a way the designer didn’t intend). You could say they’ve come into my life in spite of them.
This is what gives me optimism. There are people out there doing wonderful work. We just have to stop defaulting to the Valley to find it.