People are becoming more and more aware of this. Environmental and
economic problems have strengthened the criticism towards consumer
culture, monetary power and political systems, and all kinds of
countercultural movements are thriving. At the same time, however,
ever more people are increasingly dependent on digital technology,
which gets produced, bought, used and abandoned in greater masses than
ever, causing an ever bigger impact on the world in the form of waste
and pollution.
Because of this, I have decided to finally summarize my thoughts on
how digital technology reflects the malfunctions of our
civilization. I became a hobbyist programmer as a schoolkid in the
mid-eighties, and fifteen years later I became a professional software
developer. Despite all this baggage, I'm going to attempt to keep my
words simple enough for common people to understand. Those who want to
get convinced by citations and technical argumentation will get those
at some later time.
## Counter-explosion
For over fifty years, the progress of digital technology has been
following the so-called Moore's law, which predicts that the number of
transistors that fit on a microchip doubles every two-or-so
years. This means that it is possible to produce digital devices that
are of the same physical size but have ever more memory, ever more
processing speed and ever greater overall capabilities.
Moore's law itself is not evil, as it also means that it is possibile
to perform the same functions with ever less use of energy and raw
material. However, people are people and behave like people: whenever
it becomes possible to do something more easily and less consumingly,
they start doing more of this something. This phenomenon is called
"rebound effect" based on a medical term of the same name. It can be
seen in many kinds of things: less fuel-consuming cars make people
drive more, and less calories in food make weight-losers eat more. The
worst case is when the actual savings becomes negative: a thing that
is supposed to reduce consumption actually increases it instead.
In information technology, the most prominent form of rebound effect
is the bloating of software, which takes place in the same rate of
explosiveness as the improvement of hardware. This phenomenon is
called Wirth's law. If we took a time machine ride back to 1990 and
told the contemporaries that desktop computers would be becoming
thousand times faster in twenty years, they would surely assume that
almost anything would happen instantaneously with them. If we then
corrected them by saying that software programs still take time to
start up in the 2010s and that it is sometimes painful to tolerate
their slowness and unresponsiveness, they wouldn't believe it. How is
it even possible to write programs so poorly that they don't run
smoothly with a futuristic, thousand times more powerful computer?
This fact would become even harder to believe if we told them that it
also applies to things like word processors which are used for more or
less exactly the same things as before.
One reason for the unnecessary largeness, slowness and complexity of
software is the dominant economic ideal of indefinite growth, which
makes us believe that bigger things are always better and it is better
to sell customers more than they need. Another reason is that rapid
cycles of hardware upgrade make software developers indifferent: even
if an application program were mindlessly slow and resource-consuming
even on latest hardware, no one will notice it a couple of years later
when the hardware is a couple of times faster. Nearly any excuse is
valid for bloat. If it is possible to shorten software development
cycles even slightly by stacking all kinds of abstraction frameworks
and poorly implemented scripting languages on top of one another, it
will be done.
The bloat phenomenon annoys people more and more in their normal daily
life, as all kinds of electric appliances starting from the simplest
flashlight contain increasingly complex digital technology, which
drowns the user in uncontrollable masses of functionality and strange
software bugs. The digitalization of television, for example, brought
a whole bunch of computer-style immaturity to the TV-watching
experience. I've even seen an electric kitchen stove that didn't heat
up before the user first set up the integrated digital clock. Diverse
functionality itself is not evil, but if the mere existence of extra
features disrupts the use of the basic ones, something is totally
wrong.
Even though many things in our world tend to swell and complexify, it
is difficult to find a physical-world counterpart to software bloat,
as the amount of matter and living space on our planet does not
increase exponentially. It is not possible to double the size of one's
apartment every two years in order to fit in more useless stuff. It is
not possible to increase the complexity of official paperwork
indefinitely, as it would require more and more food and accommodation
space for the expanding army of bureaucrats. In the physical world, it
is sometimes necessary to evaluate what is necessary and how to
compress the whole in order to fit more. Such necessity does not exist
in the digital world, however; there, it is possible to constantly
inhale and never exhale.
## Disposability
The prevailing belief system of today's world equates well-being with
material abundance. The more production and consumption there is, the
more well-being there is, and that's it. Even though the politicians
in rich countries don't want to confess this belief so clearly
anymore, they still use concepts such as "gross national product",
"economic growth" and "standard of living" which are based on the
idealization of boundless abundance.
As it is the holy responsibility of all areas of production to grow
indefinitely, it is important to increase consumption regardless of
whether it is sensible or not. If it is not possible to increase the
consumption in natural ways, planned obsolensce comes to rescue. Some
decades ago, people bought washing machines and television sets for
the twenty years to follow, but today's consumers have the "privilege"
of buying at least four of both during the same timespan, as the
lifespans of these products have been deliberately shortened.
The scheduled breaking of electric appliances is now easier than ever,
as most of them have an integrated microprocessor running a program of
some kind. It is technically possible, for example, to hide a timer in
this program, causing the device to either "break" or start
misbehaving shortly after the warranty is over. This kind of sabotage
may be beneficial for the sales of smaller and cheaper devices, but it
is not necessary in the more complex ones; in their case, the bloated
poor-quality software serves the same purpose.
Computers get upgraded especially when the software somehow becomes
intolerably slow or even impossible to run. This change can take place
even if the computer is used for exactly the same things as
before. Bloat makes new versions of familiar software more
resource-consuming, and when reforms are introduced on familiar
websites, they tend to bloat up as well. In addition, some operating
systems tend to slow down "automatically", but this is fortunately
something that can be fixed by the user.
The experience of slowness, in its most annoying form, is caused by
too long response times. The response time is the time between user's
action and the indication that the action has been
registered. Whenever the user moves the mouse, the cursor on the
screen must immediately match the movement. Whenever the user presses
a letter key on the keyboard, the same letter must appear on the
screen immediately. Whenever the user clicks a button on the screen,
the graphic of the button must change immediately. According to
usability research, the response time must be less than 1/10 seconds
or the system feels laggy. When it has taken more than a second, the
user's blood pressure is already increasing. After ten seconds, the
user is convinced that "the whole piece of junk has locked up".
Slow response times are usually regarded as an indicator that the
device is slow and that it is necessary to buy a new one. This is a
misconception, however. Slow response times are indicators of nothing
else than indifferent attitudes to software design. Every computing
device that has become available during the last thirty years is
completely capable of delivering the response within 1/10 seconds in
every possible situation. Despite this fact, the software of the 2010s
is still usually designed in such a way that the response is provided
once the program has first finished all the more urgent tasks. What is
supposed to be more important than serving the user? In the mainframe
era, there were quite many such things, but in today's personal
computing, this should never be the case. Fixing the response time
problems would be a way to permanently make technology more
comfortable to use as well as to help the users tolerate the actual
slowness. The industry, however, is strangely indifferent to these
problems. Response times are, from its point of view, something that
"get fixed" automatically, at least for a short while and in some
areas, at hardware upgrades.
Response time problems are just a single example of how the industry
considers it more important to invent new features than to fix
problems that irritate the basic user. A product that has too few
problems may make consumers too satisfied. So satisfied that they
don't feel like buying the next slightly "better" model which replaces
old problems with new ones. Companies that want to ensure their growth
prefer to do everything multiple times in slightly substandard ways
instead of seeking any kind of perfection. Satisfaction is the worst
enemy of unnecessary growth.
## Is new hardware any better?
I'm sure that most readers have at least heard about the problems
caused by the rat race of upgrade and overproduction. The landfills in
rich countries are full of perfectly functioning items that interest
no one. Having anything repaired is stupid, as it is nearly always
easier and cheaper to just buy new stuff. Selling used items is
difficult, as most people won't accept them even for free. Production
eats up more and more natural resources despite all the efforts of
"greening up" the production lines and recycling more and more raw
material.
The role of software in the overproduction cycle of digital
technology, however, is not so widely understood. Software is the soul
of every microprocessor-based device, and it defines most of what it
is like to use the device or how much of its potential can be
used. Bad software can make even good hardware useless, whereas
ingenious software can make even a humble device do things that the
original designer could never have imagined. It is possible to both
lengthen and shortern product lifetimes via software.
New hardware is often advocated with new features that are not
actually features of the hardware but of the software it runs. Most of
the features of the so-called "smartphones", for example, are
completely software-based. It would be perfectly possible to rewrite
the software of an old and humble cellphone in order to give it a
bunch of features that would effectively turn it into a
"smartphone". Of course, it is not possible to do complete
impossibilities with software; there is no software trick that makes a
camera-less phone take photos. Nevertheless, the general rule is that
hardware is much more capable than its default software. The more the
hardware advances, the more contrast there is between the capabilities
of the software and the potential of the hardware.
If we consider the various tasks for which personal computers are used
nowadays, we will notice that only a small minority of them actually
requires a lot from the hardware. Of course, bad software may make
some tasks feel more demanding than what they actually are, but that's
another issue. For instance, most of the new online services, from
Facebook to Youtube and Spotify, could very well be implemented so
that they run with the PCs of the late 1990s. Actually, it would be
possible to make them run more smoothly than how the existng versions
run on today's PC. Likewise, with better operating systems and other
software, we could make the same old hardware feel faster and more
comfortable to use than today's hardware. From this we can conclude
that the computing power of the 2000s is neither useful, necessary nor
pleasing for most users. Unless we count the pseudo-benefit that it
makes bad and slow software easier to tolerate, of course.
Let us now imagine that the last ten years in personal computing went
a little bit differently -- that most of the computers sold to the
great masses would have been "People's Computers" with a fixed
hardware setup. This would have meant that the hardware performance
would have remained constant for the last ten years. The 2011 of this
alternate universe would probably be somewhat similar to our 2011, and
some things could even be better. All the familiar software programs
and on-line services would be there, they would just have been
implemented more wisely. The use of the computers would have become
faster and more comfortable during the years, but this would have been
due to the improvement of software, not hardware. Ordinary people
would never need to think about "hardware requirements", as the
fixedness of the hardware would ensure that all software, services and
peripherials work. New computers would probably be lighter and more
energy-efficient, as the lack of competition in performance would have
moved the competition to these areas. These are not just fringe
utopian ideas; anyone can make similar conclusions by studying the
history of home computing where several computer and console models
have remained constant for ten years or more.
Of course it is easy to come up with ideas of tasks that demand more
processing power than what was available to common people ten years
ago or even today. A typical late-1990s desktop PC, for example, plays
ordinary DVD-quality movies perfectly but may have major problems with
the HD resolutions that are fashionable in the early 2010s. Similarly,
by increasing the numbers, it is possible to come up with imaginary
resolutions that are out of the reach of even the most expensive
special-purpose equipment available today. For many people, this is
exactly what technological progress means -- increase in numerical
measures, the possibility to do the same old things in ever greater
scales. When a consumer replaces an old TV with a new one, he or she
gets a period of novelty vibes from the more magnificent picture
quality. After a couple of years, the consumer can buy another TV and
get the novelty vibes once again. If we had an access to unlimited
natural resources, it would be possible to go on with this vanity
cycle indefinitely, but still without improving anyone's quality of
life in any considerable extent.
Most of the technological progress facilitated by the personal
computing resources of the 2000s has been quantitative -- doing the
same old stuff that became possible in the 1990s but with bigger
numbers. Editing movies and pictures that have ever more pixels,
running around in 3D video game worlds that have ever more
triangles. It is difficult to even imagine a computational task
relevant to an ordinary person that would require the number-crunching
power of a 2000s home computer due to its nature alone, without any
quantitative exaggeration. This could very well be regarded as an
indicator that we already have enough processing power for a
while. The software and user culture are lagging so far behind the
hardware improvements, that it would be better to concentrate on them
instead and leave the hardware on the background.
## Helplessness
In addition to the senseless abundance of material items, today's
people are also disturbed by a senseless abundance of
information. Information includes not only the ever expanding flood of
video, audio and text coming from the various media, but also the
structural information incorporated in material and immaterial
things. The expansion of this structural information manifests as
increasing complexity of everything: consumer items, society systems,
cultural phenomena. Those who want to understand the tools they use
and the things that affect their life, must absorb ever greater
amounts of structural information about them. Many people have already
given up with understanding and just try to get along.
Many frown upon people who can't boil an egg or attach a nail to a
wall without a special-purpose egg-boiler or nailgun, or who are not
even interested in how the groceries come to the store or the
electricity to the wall socket. However, the expanding flood of
information and the complexification of everything may eventually
result in a world where neo-helplessness and poor common knowledge are
the normal condition. In computing, complexification has already gone
so far that even many experts don't dare to understand how the
technology works but prefer to guess and randomize.
Someone who wants to master a tool must build a mental model of its
operation. If the tool is a very simple one, such as a hammer, the
mental model builds up nearly automatically after a very short
study. If someone who uses a hammer accidentally hits their finger
with it, they will probably accuse themself instead of the hammer, as
the functionality of a hammer can be understood perfectly even by
someone who is not so capable in using it. However, when a computer
program behaves against the user's will, the user will probably accuse
the technology instead of themself. In situations like this, the
user's mental model of how the program works does not match with its
actual functionality.
The more bloated a software program is, the more effort the user needs
to take in order to build an adequate mental model. Some programs are
even marketing-minded enough to impose its new and glorious features
to the user. This doesn't help at all in forming the mental
model. Besides, most users don't have a slightest interest in
extensive exploration but rather use a simple map and learn to
tolerate the uncertainty caused by its rudimentariness. When we also
consider that programs may change their functionality quite a lot
between versions, even enthusiasts will turn cynical and frustrated
when their precious mental maps become obsolete.
Many software programs try to fix the complexity problem by increasing
the complexity instead of decreasing it. This mostly manifests as
"intelligence". An "intelligent" programs monitors the user, guesses
their intents and possibly suggests various courses of actions based
on the intents. For example, a word processor may offer help in
writing a letter, or a file manager may suggest things to do with a
newly inserted memory stick. The users are offered all kinds of
controlled ready-made functionality and "wizards" even for tasks they
would surely prefer to do by themselves, at least if they had a chance
to learn the normal basic functionality. If the user is forced to use
specialized features before learning the basic ones, he or she will be
totally helpless in situations where a special-purpose feature for the
particular function does not exist. Just like someone who can use
egg-boilers and nailguns but not kettles or hammers.
The reasons why technology exists are making things easier to do and
facilitating otherwise impossible tasks. However, if a technological
appliance becomes so complex that its use is more like random guessing
than goal-oriented controlling, we can say that the appliance no
longer serves its purpose and that the user has been taken over by
technology. For this reason, it is increasingly important to keep
things simple and controllable. Simplicity, of course, does not mean
mere superficial pseudo-simplicity that hides the internal complxity,
but the avoidance of complexity on all levels. The user cannot be in
full control without having some kind of an idea about what the tool
is doing at any given time.
In software, it may be useful to reorder the complexity so that there
is a simple core program from which any additional complexity is
functionally separated until the user deliberately activates it. This
would make the programs feel reliable and controllable even with
simple mental maps. An image processing software, for example, could
resemble a simple paint program at its core level, and its
functionality could be learned perfectly after a very short testing
period. All kinds of auxilary functions, automations and other
specialities could be easily found if needed, and the user could
extend the core with them depending on the particular needs. Still,
their existence would never disturb those users who don't need
them. Regardless of the level of the user, the mental map would always
match how the program actually works, and the program would therefore
never surprise the user by acting against his or her expectations.
Software is rarely built like this, however. There is not much
interest in the market for movements that make technology genuinely
more approachable and comprehensible. Consumer masses who feel
themselves helpless in regards to the technology are, after all,
easier to control than masses of people who know what they are doing
(or at least think so). It is much more beneficial for the industry to
feed the helplessness by drowning the people in trivialities,
distancing them for the basics and perhaps even submitting them under
the power of an all-guessing artificially-intelligent assistant
algorithm.
## Changing the world
I have now discussed all kinds of issues, of which I have mostly
accused bad software, and of whose badness I have mostly accused the
economic system that idealizes growth and material abundance. But is
it possible to do something about these issues? If most of the
problems are indeed software-related, then couldn't they be resolved
by producing better software, perhaps even outside of the commercial
framework if necessary?
When calling for a counter-force for commercial software development,
the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement is most commonly
mentioned. FOSS software has mostly been produced as volunteer work
without monetary income, but as the result of the work can be freely
duplicated and used as basis of new work, they have managed to cause a
much greater impact than what voluntary work usually does. The
greatest impact has been among technology professionals and hobbyists,
but even laypeople may recognize names such as Linux, Firefox and
OpenOffice (of which the two latter are originally proprietary
software, however).
FOSS is not bound to the requirements of the market. Even in cases
where it is developed by corporations, people operating outside the
commercial framework can contribute to it and base new projects on
it. FOSS has therefore, in theory, the full potential of being
independent of all the misanthropic design choices caused by the
market. However, FOSS suffers from most of these problems just as much
as proprietary software, and it even has a whole bunch of its own
extra problems. Reasons for this can be found in the history of the
movement. Since the beginning, the FOSS movement has mostly
concentrated on cloning existing software without spending too much
energy on questioning the dominant design principles. The philosophers
of the movement tend to be more concerned about legal and political
issues instead of technical ones: "How can we maximize our legal
rights?" instead of "How should we design our software so that it
would benefit the whole humanity instead of just the expert class?"
I am convinced that FOSS would be able to give the world much more
than what it has already given if it could form a stronger contrast
between itself and the growth-centric industry. In order to strengthen
the contrast, we need a powerful manifest. This manifest would need to
profoundly denounce all the disturbances to technological progress
caused by the growth ideology, and it would need to state the
principles on which software design should be based on in order to
benefit human beings and nature in the best possible way. Of course,
this manifest wouldn't exist exclusively for reinventing the wheel,
but also for re-evaluating existing technology and redirecting its
progress towards the better.
But what can ordinary people do? Even a superficial awareness of the
causes of problems is better than nothing. One can easily learn to
recognize many types of problems, such as those related to response
times. One can also learn to accuse the right thing instead of
superficially crying how "the computer is slow" or "the computer is
misbehaving". Changes in language are also a nice way of spreading
awareness. If people in general learned to accuse software instead of
hardware, then they would probably also learn to demand software-based
solutions for their problems instead of needlessly purchasing new
hardware.
When hardware purchases are justifiable, those concerned of the
environment will prefer second-hand hardware instead of new, as long
as there is enough power for the given purposes. It is a common
misconception to assume that new hardware would always consume less
power than old -- actually, the trend has more often been exactly the
opposite. During a period of ten years from the mid-1990s to the
mid-2000s, for example, the power consumption of a typical desktop PC
(excluding the monitor) increased tenfold, as the industry was more
zealous to increase processing power than to improve energy
efficiency. Power consumption curves for video game consoles have been
even steeper. Of course, there are many examples of positive
development as well. For example, CRT screens are worth replacing with
similarly-sized LCD screens, and laptops also typically consume less
than similar desktop PCs.
There is a strong market push towards discontinuing all kinds of
service and repair activity. Especially in case of cellphones and
other small gadgets, "service" more and more often means that the
gadget is sent out to the manufacturer which dismantles it for raw
material and sends a new gadget to the customer. For this reason, it
may be reasonable to consider the difficulty of do-it-yourself
activity when choosing a piece of hardware. As all forms of DIY
culture seem to be waning due to a lack of interest, it is worthwhile
to support them in all possible ways in order to ensure that there
will still be someone in the future who can repair something.
Of course, we all hope that the world would change in a way such that
the human- and nature-friendly ways to do things would always be the
most beneficial ones even in "the reality of numbers and charts". Such
a change will probably take longer than a few decades, however,
regardless of the volume of the political quarrel. It may therefore
not be wise to indefinitely wait for the change of the system, as it
is already possible to participate in practical countercultural
activity today. Even in things related to digital technology.
