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Parasites, Symbionts, and the Scabs

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

What happens when a product doesn’t co-exist with others in its ecosystem? When products are static but exist within a mutable world? When the products encourage replacement over renewal or repair? What opportunities does that present to other ecosystem actors?

Following on from last week’s writing on building within an open source ecosystem and working on the rehype-jsoncanvas project, it feels like maybe an opportune time to finish. That project is one where the ecosystem invites incremental, open, and unexpected additions. Most product ecosystems aren’t like that.

Late last summer and in the fall, I was investing some time in relearning and updating my electronics skills. Like many, I’m pretty capable when it comes to arduino and pi projects, but had never gone beyond the perfboard stage. So I decided to learn how to design a PCB. This introduced the opportunity for a parasitic product. I’ve written a bit about that unfinished project here, which was originally part of this post but got edited out.

Anyway, theres a helpful definition of inter-species relationships captured by 19th century mycologist Heinrich Anton de Bary, which frames interactions from a few different angles:

Open: 2024-parasite-post.png

This idea that there are six types of relationships along a spectrum of positive, neutral, negative is a helpful way to frame things. But then, if we take this from the perspective of a two by two, we end up with something like this. Open: 2024-parasite-2x2.png So symbiosis (Positive x Positive) becomes the likely ideal, but ultimately parasitism isn’t that bad — is it? The spectrum down to competition seems like a valuable threshold.

Parasite, Symbionts, Scavenger, Scab

So where does my little project rest its hat.

Parasites (Positive/Neutral-Negative)

Parasites play a selfish survival role in an ecosystem, where they subvert an existing system for their own ends. This selfish motivation can result in a positive, for example, round worms (a parasite) can apparently boot immune response in a host — albeit with the motivation of making the host a more respective environment for reproduction.

In my little project’s case, parasite is probably still an appropriate term. It replaces the brain of the system and leverages the resources around it — maybe closer to the zombie-fungus that the Last of Us game/show reminded us all of. It extends the utility of the object as well, and in my version of the board, I was designing it explicitly to fit into the zigbee-powered smart home ecosystem.

Symbiont (Positive/Positive)

Symbiotic creatures have some positive or net-neutral interaction with the species they’re bonded with. The classic examples are clown fish being cleaned by sea anemone (and feeding those creatures in the process), or fish hitching a ride on larger fauna like sea turtles or sharks.

Apart from the excising of that little green board, my project feels a fair bit like this as well. It saps a bit of power and presents a risk to the product (swapping out the attached PCB can kill the existing board, after all), but in exchange opens it up to a wider ecosystem and extends its potential shelf-life. It turns a superfluous toy into a tool.

Scavenger (Negative/Neutral)

What about the product lifecycle itself? Scavengers are creatures that consume the dead — basically left overs within the ecosystem. This isn’t just the classic hyenas and vulture carrion eaters either. Termites are scavengers of dead plan materials, and creatures like worms and mites are a form of scavenger called detritivores. Electronics projects have a lovely history with this activity, with a classic example being folk modernizing old A/V enclosures, from midcentury modern consoles to this unbelievably cool raspberry-pi powered VFD display.

This is a classic “decay of digital things” kind of tech, which I actually argue projects like Littleprinter.club belong to, in a “software scavenger” mode. The Little Printer is dead tech because its server strings were cut. Connected objects like that can’t live without their cloud, so they died. Any attempts to reuse the corpse left behind becomes a scavenger activity, but a positive one. It’s not subverting something that lives, but rather leveraging something that has died.

Scab (Negative/Negative)

Then there’s something outside of the animal kingdom which came to mind. The Scab, or a strike breaker. Scabs are labourers who come in to work in a circumstance when organized labour (usually a union) is participating in a work stoppage. Scabs are usually people who are hired in after a labour dispute starts, and go into work at pretty significant risk to themselves. They are a very distinct NEGATIVE/NEGATIVE class — they risk themselves within the ecosystem because scabs are normally retaliated against, and they usually are negative to the ecosystem in they are deleterious to improving labour relations. The only beneficiary is usually the management class, though even that is often temporary.

You could frame up the scab in invasive species terms in the most negative way: one that comes in, clears out an existing ecosystem, and then dies itself in the process. But more realistically, that relationship results in the species adapting to that environment and the constituent members of the ecosystem adapting in turn. The Cane Toad’s introduction to Australia is an example of this.

Scabs in the product world are a pervasive venture capital practice. Take Uber and Lyft. Their core strategies were to undercut existing services in any local they entered into, kill those businesses and acclimate users to their service model, and then hike up their own prices. This has been joking referred to as the Millennial lifestyle subsidy , but its directly responsible for a lot of the big-tech capture of industries that we’re experiencing now. Everything is a subscription, we own less that is useful, we spend more.

Revisiting the 2x2

Given the framing above, I think this picture ends up being one of gradations. Open: 2024-parasite-2x2-2.png

Let’s take the open source ecosystem as a whole: that’s one of net-positive mutual good for consumers and the ecosystem. It fosters new product creation, it’s good for consumers from a transparency and accessibility standpoint, it encourages new products, etc.

A new product category is almost always positive for consumers given it introduces choice, but it can go two ways from there: waste generation if the product category isn’t received, or potentially market generation as new players enter the field (and capture occurs).

SaaS businesses are generally not good for consumers, acting as long-term leeches on personal capital that are incentivized to reduce churn. A healthy SaaS business is self-sustaining in revenue and its ability to generate revenue is based on the value that it creates to the user. An anti-competitive SaaS business locks users in and that value is dissipated — so its ability to exist in an ecosystem isn’t contingent on its value creation but its capture of potential resources that competitors might be able to access

Consumer Subsidies (eg. the millennial lifestyle subsidy) from VC-backed corporations seeking market capture are similarly terrible. They start off as positive for consumers (greater services and access, less cost), but this subsidy is directly created to capture a market — clear cutting an ecosystem to prepare it for replacement.

The thing that I found interesting sketching this out is the clear bias in movement towards capture — which ends up being dangerous for the ecosystem and poisonous to consumers. Returning to the Australian Cane Toad example, the Cane Toad was introduced with one purposes and ended up being an utter blight on the native wildlife as it tried to consume this new animal and ended up dead as a result.

Scott Fitzgerald’s Seeing Like a State is a favourite book of mine for its description of how our “ecosystem eyes” are fundamentally lacking when it comes to making structural decisions within a system relative to that system’s capacity for emergence. Trying to force legibility on top of an ecosystem often doesn’t work because so many of the interactions within a system are contingent.

Making this little parasitic 2x2 was a helpful activity to frame up SOME of those interactions, and while I mapped the “species A” and “species B” onto Ecosystem +/- vs. Consumer +/-, this frame on modeling interactions between symbionts and scabs seems a useful tool for approaching ones own work.

Ultimately, what do we want to make, and how do we want it to affect the ecosystem we inhabit? We might not have ultimate control over the outcomes of our designs, but we can map out the potential interactions between our creations and the environment, and make decisions accordingly.

Systems Decay When Shared

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 12:00:00 GMT

We’re terrible at adopting the systems of others. A “defined” system should always be approached with skepticism and curiosity — and systems of the self most of all. Some of these might be in your life: Productivity has everything from GTD to Pomodoro; Knowledge has Zettlekasten to Cornell; Decision making has everything from negotiating frames (eg. ZOPA and BATNA) to niche domain-specific algorithms (like the Konmari method).

To frame up my belief here: systems are always interventions and contingent — nested within some broader experience. This means that barring what we can observe of the physical world, we’re always shipping a derivative product when we talk about systems design.

Let’s give a specific example. The control system a pilot uses to control a helicopter is a legible human interface for a human being to influence and control a complex mechanical system. The helicopter uses pressure and rotational control (and a bunch of other things) to generate lift and move around with the fluid properties of air. A pilot primarily uses a system of pedals, stick, and collective to control how the power exerted by the helicopter acts within that environment. The helicopter exists within a Newtonian system which defines its constraints, and the helicopter as a system is defined by the individual mechanical systems (thrust, weight, aerodynamic potential). The control system exists relative to those constraints, and is shaped by the physical characteristics and ergonomics of the human body.

The nice bit is that this nested set of dependencies also makes for some great characteristics we can exploit. The fluid properties of air allow for lift to be generated; the ability to independently control rotation (anti-rotation) from lift (rotor); and the design of the control system translates our physical qualities — and our capacity for kinetic learning — into something that can control a spinning top swimming through the sky. (I’m terrified of helicopters fwiw)

Derivative Bias

Intervening systems are a great thing because it makes things tangible. The problem is always understanding the system we’re intervening in, and whether we’re intervening in the way we intended. Going back to the previous helicopter example, a test pilot is someone who’s highly skilled at interfacing with the systems in question — and understanding IMMEDIATELY if the system they find themselves strapped into is misaligned with its dependencies. Those that don’t tend to find themselves as ex-pilots pretty quickly.

The problem with taking on an external system of self is that it’s rarely… right. Take the modern Zettelkasten system. High level, it’s a knowledge pipeline that filters reading notes and observations through a three step process of summary and synthesis into a kind of informational “node.” The idea is that these nodes of knowledge accumulate and connect over time, so that when it comes to write or use that knowledge, you have a pre-made and searchable body of work to draw from. It’s a great idea. Except, I invite you on a journey of folks’ failed attempts at adopting a zettelkasten system by just googling “about my digital garden”.

Unlike the test pilot, few of us are particularly adept at recognizing when we’re engaged in a system that doesn’t fit our needs. Zettelkasten works brilliantly for academics and writers who have a project in mind — and slows down the process of consumption and synthesis for the rest of us. Instead of facilitating recall, it distracts and undermines discovery. The Konmari system is a lovely approach to decluttering that’s literally just a systematic cluster-and-sort of your domestic life, with an emotionally arduous step of engaging with each item in turn. It works fantastically for some, but catalyzes conflict and depression in other settings — where family is involved, where anxiety exists, etc.

Each of these systems emerges from the web of dependencies surrounding their originating systems and structures. Today’s Zettelkasten has its roots in Enlightenment era interest in epistemology, just as the GTD framework emerged from the early internet and found its greatest adoption in the highly-tracked software dev world. These “systems” usually EMERGE first within a team or for an individual, and then become observed, described, packaged, and published to the rest of us. 37Signals is a good company to pay attention to when it comes to their domain-specific self-awareness around packaged productivity and process — whether its writing or products like basecamp.

The issue is that we often don’t have the same dependency when we unwrap this newly packaged system. What needs to be acknowledged with this process of “adopting a system” is that we’re not actually adopting that system. Something else is going on.

Compression Artifacts

Mostly, I think what’s happening on the “failure to adopt” side isn’t on the adoptee — it’s shitty compression. I have a distinct memory as a kid seeing bootlegged Evangelion a friend had downloaded from IRC. 24mb and in a realMedia format, these little .rm files did a lot to bootstrap my high school nerd-ery and introduced me to a whole world of ideas. They also were barely legible, chunky, and had many scenes that disappeared into a cloud of 56k-facilitated data corruption.

Corrupt, illegible media can still be formative — but perhaps not in the way that it was intended. When a system like GTD, Zettelkasten, 37Signals 6-week sprints, etc. gets packaged for dissemination, that packaging necessarily compresses lived experience into something that can be meaningfully communicated.

Sometimes you get a system whose medium compresses brilliantly. Pomodoro is one of those: 25 minute work cycles with 5 min breaks, using a kitchen timer (the tomato clock). The idea and structure is simple to understand, simple branding, recursive, and has low dependencies.

Sometimes you get a systems communicator who is unusually effective at compression. John Boyd was one of those people, I think. Ideas like the OODA Loop are efficient abstractions of a very complex theory of decision making that can be built into broader theories of action.

But mostly, the compression algorithms fail. The system as outputted is not the system that served as the input. Take Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint. Targeted at a broad market of product and leadership types, it is a fantastic design-driven, critically scoped, inclusive-to-stakeholders take on feature discovery and iteration that NO ONE actually implements. Why? Well, partially because its compression mechanism was a business productivity book. And partially because the system didn’t need to be adopted effectively for the idea of it to spread. For the Design Sprint, these compression artifacts manifest as skipped steps, compressed timelines, and half-committed senior participants. For Konmari, its failing to unpack everything, failure of will, and misalignment of intent.

I think that all systems communication suffers from this fundamental risk, and its part of why all systems communication should be approached with skepticism and curiosity. So let me try to compress one of mine.

Case: Hydrologic Cycles

Energy, effort, and attention are cyclical, I think. But not all at once. And reflecting on my last few years of work — in startups as a contributor, in big enterprises as a consultant, as a solo SaaS founder, and as a writer of sorts — I’ve realized that I don’t have a lot of control over the cycles themselves (my old essay on Sponge Cycles hits at this a bit). What I do have agency over is how I cultivate, exploit, and recover within my personal ecosystem. In a way, it feels like the grade-school drawing of the water precipitation cycle.

Let me to try to “compress” this and we’ll see what happens.

Evaporation: As a quintessential generalist, my experiences and projects are represented by water that is continuously evaporating.
Convection: This evaporation is entropic (projects decay and get outdated) and productive (past experience opens up new experience) — eventually condensing into visible work through portfolio creation, social sharing, talks, media, etc. These are the convective forces that form our clouds.
Precipitation: Generally, this kind of work generates more work, with some sense of value having being communicated and interpreted. The weight of that work makes opportunity, and that opportunity is represented hear by rain or snow.
Collection: Work done and experiences had HAVE to be interpreted — hopefully in a generative way. Case studies, new methods, as well as new products emerge from THIS stage of the process.

Very tangibly, a past precipitation cycle for me was (descriptive):

Portfolio and networking to find consulting clients
Writing my newsletter, essays, and giving talks as a primary tool of sense making
Lots of consulting clients who were “design adjacent” and where my work was legible.
Reflection of these experiences resulted in the prototype of Knowsi, a tool for design researchers. Future cycles would become overly Knowsi focused, and would end up painting me a bit too-heavily as a researcher, and an increasing volume of research work.

Using this to “describe” through the cycle, I’m wondering if I can use this system to be a bit more intentional about what happens downstream.

Evaporation = Marketing/Community: I need some way to be exposed to new communities and people, both from the professional “finding clients” side of things, but fundamentally to keep MY attention focused. I am motivated by the expectations of others, and my construction of that expectation
Convection = Sensemaking: Sensemaking and synthesis is the key here. I need a way to go fairly deep on a topic or idea, and cultivate a specific opinion about it beyond guy feeling. The way to do this for me is prototyping, and one of the ways (though not exclusively) I can “prototype” a theory is through writing.
Precipitation = Income-generating Work: Income. I need some way of making money — doing work that is trans-disciplinary, involves some complexity, has some urgency tied to it, and probably NDA’ed into oblivion. This makes it sustainable and realistic, since doing really interesting work in the open often doesn’t happen in real-time.
Collection = Projects: The previous stages have taken me on a journey, and the water returned to the reservoir is perhaps not the same water that left. The opportunity here is to cultivate something meaningful — but maybe not permanent — that serves as a foundation for a healthy ecosystem. What evaporates tomorrow needs to be of substance and value, basically.

This system then becomes the way that I weigh and assess what kind of work I do, when. It’s basically a decision-making/effort-categorization heuristic that helps me think of my efforts in functional isolation, but structural co-dependence. Aspects can overlap, and occur at different tempos. It’s also veryyyy specifically directional. Convection doesn’t go straight to Collection — Rule 4: never get high on your own supply. Precipitation doesn’t go straight to Evaporation — respect the NDA.

So how am I acting on this system? You’re engaged with the evaporation (the newsletter) and convection (this essay) part of things right now. The main way I’m using it is as a mechanism for work estimation (how much client work can I take on) and project scoping (what projects can I realistically do and what has the maximum value for seeding other parts of the ecosystem?).

The biggest immediate effector has been rebooting this newsletter, or rather recognizing (as discussed two weeks ago) that I was missing something important to me. The biggest near-term effector is with regards to project selection: basically I’m on the cusp of committing a bunch of time to one of three projects, and this framing is helping me break down how each project might add value or extract focus from each other stage.

System, Interrupted

I don’t think I did a particularly good job “compressing” that system, but assuming that it’s about standard. A few things I noticed:

I relied heavily on metaphor. It reduced the dimensionality, and introduced some core ideas like directionality, visual language, and relative states.
I used concrete framing (examples and cases) to flush out the metaphor, since the metaphors stages aren’t 1:1 to the experience
I considered it with two different functions (introspective and prospective), which helped to answer a bit of the so-what.
I relied on diagraming (both a known descriptive reference core to the metaphor, and an actual one) to frame up the communication of the system I’m using.

So, common systems communication is metaphor-based, provides concrete examples, is functional, and is visual. There’s a lot more to look at here in terms of understanding what makes for effective systems communication. Considering figures like John Boyd (as mentioned), Dona Meadows, Heinz von Foerster, Richard Feynman, Abraham Maslow, to name a few. Also more contemporary systems communicators like Randall Munroe, Venkat Rao, Simon Wardley, etc.

Skill Spalling

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 12:00:00 GMT

The skills we develop aren’t permanent. They’re things that develop within a particular context — education, a workspace, a team, etc. — that accrete and slough off over time unless continuously reinforced. The now aged youth who studied piano might retain their ear for beat and pitch, but can’t find the chords or read the music without placing themselves in a place to reacquire that skill. The lapsed skateboarder might struggle with their new body upon return to the practice to teach their child a former passion — centre of gravity, mobility, and forgotten detail hampering their efforts.

I tend to think of this process as a kind of spalling to our identities and our interests. We’re moving time collecting experiences and skills that contribute to our understanding and realization of selves (especially as makers), and the realization and manifestation of those skills contribute to our construction of self. But the reality of life creates friction — through labour (whatever that labour might be) under a capitalist society, through the responsibilities to family and community, through the remaining responsibility to one’s self. Under this friction and heat, little bits of these skills start to spall off — fragmenting and spinning away as we continue on.

This probably isn’t too bad of a thing. For one thing, skill maintenance always includes skill acquisition. It can’t be helped. Practising a favourite song will inevitably introduce something new; reviewing old vocabulary will expose new idioms or trigger a forgotten conversation. Basically, mindless practice often begets synthesis. And that synthesis might unlock something special. Running is one of the most accessible examples of this — to the point that many artists, designers, and engineers understand that the practice of these endurance sports is not just a hobby, but absolutely critical to their creative work.

Other skills require similar perseverance. Painting is a great example of this, where understanding of technique and form must go hand-in-hand with muscle memory, conscious practice (usually in the form of a study), and a certain amount of risk when engaging in the creation of a new piece. A lapsed painter trying to get back into the practice is a pretty unpleasant person to be around while they reacquire their confidence — surrounded by the evidence of their past skills, they simply can’t get the paint to move like it used to.

What’s worse, sometimes the skill is a moving target as well. Software engineering is a quixotic example that an increasingly large cohort is familiar with. Here, the knowledge of a language, common engineering patterns, and mental flexibility to apply them, makes someone a good programmer — BUT the communal baseline is constantly shifting under their feet. I’ve experienced this plenty myself as someone who is more of a hobby programmer. I’m frequently making something, but every time I start on a new “big project,” I find myself in a new country with a whole new culture to learn.

So. Is it worth trying to stop this spalling process? I don’t really think so, though I think a lot can be done to retard its process. In material spalling with concrete, rebar (the crosshatched metal bars that form the frame of a safe concrete structure) is one of the core mechanisms used to increase the strength of something made with concrete and accounts for one of the foundational weaknesses of the material. If we accept that our skills will naturally spall, then by extension, what can we use to increase its strength and reduce its susceptibility to life?

The habit developed through regular practice and continued applicability of the skill is ultimately the best route forward. Lifelong musicians often have two familiar traits: a regular and joyful practice of practising and playing with the instrument, and the presence of that instrument in countless other aspects of their life — in school, bands, religious community, etc. For me, I’ve been programming since I was in high school, and the constant through-line has been making the things I dream up real. It started with a book writing platform for Nanowrimo, went to synthesizers and music, then installation art, then apps, and now simulation. It’s a hobby skill that’s been maintained now for almost twenty years, and never stops being a struggle and a joy.

The rebar analogue is pretty clear: the example musician has the core of habit and community; my example is projects and explorations through making. These two qualities make for skillsets that spall (please don’t ask me to write a MySQL statement), but retain a core of resilience that allows for the skillset itself to be maintained over time (I could figure out how to write those MySQL statements pretty quickly and effectively). The problem is, resilience is not permanence, as anyone who has seen rusted rebar and crumpled walls can attest. A habit is easy to maintain when your quotidian infrastructure supports it — less so when it becomes disrupted. I’ve personally had a pretty hard time pursuing larger hobby projects since my son was born — the demands of being a parent kinda supersede everything else, and frankly, the many little projects as a parent are their own discrete and wonderful thing. A new job, living situation, or romantic interest (i.e. the infrastructure of others) can just as easily disrupt if you don’t know what to look for.

The other side to permanence is accepting and embracing the process of mending. Japanese boro mending (as artistically rendered above with a Kapital boro jacket) is a great example of this — layering patches of old material overtop of tears, abrasions, and holes to construct and retain a well-loved piece of clothing over decades (though in the above photo’s case, Kapital is heavily leveraging a belt sander). True skill maintained applies exactly this process: the layering and mending of experience over time, as our past selves spall off; fixed before the core of our skillsets get a chance to decay. Over years and decades, the form is retained and recognizable, but with a diversity of texture and colour that represents something original.

As a hobby coder, my foundation is having regular projects (a few each year) that keep me stimulated, aware, and in practice. But my process of continuous mending is the diversity of projects that I approach: creating a synthesizer, developing a web app, contributing to an open-source project, or writing a game in Unity (the greatest trick the Devil ever played on humanity was using C# in Unity). A painter might develop their foundational skillset in a formal art school, then move across different mediums at different points in their life: digital illustration, miniature or sculptural painting, a return to canvas, then onto murals. Each of these experiences layers and accentuates the core skillset and experience. While returning to one frame on the skill (let’s say a return to oil on canvas) might be arduous, the form remains — richer and more textured than before.

The Decay of Digital Things

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 12:00:00 GMT

We have spent a decade building the consumer Internet of Things with an ethos of “fail fast”. Unfortunately, many of the things we built failed to embrace the withering effect that time has on business, technology, intention, and capital. Consumers have been left holding connected objects that no longer connect, and the question of why investments in the “future” of physical things have resulted in such ephemeral value.

The Decay of Digital Things started as a series of personal essays and prototyping projects exploring this idea that turned into a class taught at the Stanford d.school in 2014. Inspired by my essays and the frustration about connected products with dead services, we asked the students to explore the different aspects of decay that are connected to networked objects. Physical metaphors like rust, patinas, overgrowth, and repair were all central to the students’ construction of a body of work and scenarios that pointed to digital decay. Their work explored everything from the calcified information around our social networking identities, to the fragility inherent in creating a connected object; becoming a vanguard to uncritical enthusiasm for more, which has become a hallmark of Silicon Valley-inspired creation.

In the beginning, this exploration emerged from my suddenly dead Little Printer. A brilliant little object from consultancy-turned-product company Berg, the Little Printer was a small Internet-connected thermal printer that could create all sorts of little artifacts, provided that they were two-dimensional and monochromatic. This could be your to-do list for the day, a list of upcoming meetings to stuff into your wallet, an inspirational image, or your two-factor code. The printer got these messages by connecting wirelessly to a hub (tied to Berg’s plans for future connected things), which in turn connected to a server called Berg Cloud, which managed accounts, apps, and all the bits of software that brought the otherwise charming but simplistic object alive. On March 31st, 2015 though, this server and Berg as a business shut down, and a thoughtfully-designed piece of technology became just dumb plastic and silicon.

Berg’s story is one that has been repeated all over the connected world: ambitious companies create networked objects that bring more functionally than their un-networked kin. But with this functionality comes a compounding liability: infrastructure and the need for enduring business models that can maintain that infrastructure. Sometimes this is fine, but other times the cost becomes too much to bear. Of course, there are many different kinds of businesses in the world, and some of them are better able to support their connected products than others. A publicly-traded company like Garmin has multiple revenue streams and a complex web of telemetry-leveraging products. Many of these are Internet-enabled, and rely on a service called Garmin Connect and, more recently, a development platform called Connect IQ. This connectivity is a valued feature of the product, but not the product itself. The Garmin running watch to track your run, or the cycling computer to track your route and fitness, and the marine GPS that tracks your boat. The fact that its features can be arbitrarily extended through an app store and connectivity is a value add, but ultimately not the product’s core purpose.

Conversely, a company like Pebble, which shuttered its services in December 2016, had a much more challenging time. Pebble often kick-started its product development on a product-by-product basis, as it built a variety of wearable smartwatches. They worked hard on their product, sold almost two million smartwatches, but ultimately weren’t able to make it work. The watches were generally well-made, had a strong application ecosystem, and are still loved by many of their owners. My friend Luke, an Australian postdoc in Copenhagen, still wears his Pebble every day. The watch is something he’s become accustomed to, bugs and all. He can flip through its menus quickly and responds just as quickly to its little quirks: bugs that will ultimately never be fixed now that the platform has shut down.

Software and Hardware

Objects that require connectivity to deliver their promised value are ultimately just clients connecting to the endpoints of a broader service. It’s easy to argue that one is not buying the object itself, but rather access to the service that the object affords. On one level, this places the physical object on the same plane as any web application or mobile client that pulls data and context from a broader service. And certainly, for every dead Internet of Things startup on the battlefields of platform capitalism, there are dozens of dead software-only businesses. The demise of Rdio Inc. hit hard, as did the obsolescence of the Sparrow mail client as its team was acqui-hired to work on Google Inbox and saw Sparrow wither into uselessness.

The death of a software product leaves a hole in one’s pocketbook and a need to find a functional cognate, but it doesn’t leave behind a corpse. Instead, if you think about our products as things that we hire or fire for their different capabilities, the analogy is closer to a hired feature (let’s say, our email client Sparrow) prematurely quitting, or simply disappearing one day. Certainly a shock, but with relatively little damage, because we can find a substitute (such as the email client, Airmail). Conversely, when an Internet of Things service shutters its doors, the consumer and the environment are left to foot the bill of starting over. If your Internet of Things home security system shuts down because they botched their growth strategy, you have to invest in a new and expensive chunk of hardware for your home. Or, perhaps even worse, this product could be subject to an acquisition that locks the customer into a platform with values and a service model they don’t want, but can’t afford to change.

Nature, Nurture

I have described a bleak view of connected objects, but fortunately, this is not the only story worth telling. Even in the failed model, there are interesting early stabs at addressing the “long tail” of connected objects. One shockingly consistent example of sustainable product design is the Monome, a hardware platform for open-source music creation that connects into an ecosystem of community-created tools. It’s a simple grid of lights and buttons that send and receive commands from a device. Mine is from 2008. I also recently set it up again to use with a new crop of tools from the Monome community, and its founder helped a community of us debug a problem with old monomes and a new OSX systems.

The Monome presents a vision of sustainable product maintenance because it is both a company and a community. Brian Crabtree created its first iteration, but countless others have written code for it, built performances around it, and made their own versions of it. It’s an open-source product that creates greater value for its supporting business through the value generated within the community itself. Monome.org also has a vast repository of knowledge related to the monome in its different and evolving products that empowers its customers to continuously adapt it to their evolving needs.

The Monome ethos of product development echoes the “slow company” movement exemplified by 37Signals and LDLN. Their theory is that what you are creating through your business is precious, and it’s very easy to ruin something by moving too fast. So don’t. Don’t take that investment if you’re not absolutely clear on how you’ll use it. Don’t commit yourself to that big Kickstarter campaign, if you’ve only figured out the product, and not the production. The weight of capital can be a massive liability to an enterprise that is still figuring out how to walk unencumbered, let alone thrive under the weight of growth-forcing liabilities.

Defibrillation

Sometimes though, things do simply fail. As frustrated as I am with Berg Cloud shutting down, it’s difficult to fault the Berg team in pursuing a dream and giving it their all. Sometimes businesses simply fail despite one’s best efforts. There might not be a market, or it might be a pricing strategy that doesn’t work, or you simply run out of runway. A business failure is not (necessarily) a moral failure on the part of the entrepreneurs, but the result is the same. Consumers are left with their dead plastics and silicon pining for a server that will answer back.

The Little Printer is an example of what can be done when a connected technology business does not foresee its own demise, but tries to react responsibly to it. Some simple searching reveals an enthusiastic community (along with the individual help of some former Berg team members), who have brought their now dead printers back to life. The process isn’t simple.

It involves setting up your own server and then flashing the Berg Hub to redirect server requests to the new address. These methods emerged from long GitHub discussions and thoughtful blog posts, but they emerged nonetheless. So why does the Berg device have a pathway to resuscitation while many other devices don’t?

I think the answer lies in the community and in the approach of the product’s creators. The Monome platform and its subsequent creations started from a point of openness and community involvement. This gave the community a greater-than-normal stake in the outcomes of this product. Berg Cloud was a platform that spoke to creators and engaged consumers so that when it closed, it had a larger pool of potential revivers to consider resuscitation. And because the Berg team released their server code and contributed to the discussion, the chance of reviving the Little Printer (at least on a small scale), is starting to become a reality.

In the physical product world, aftermarket and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) accessories emerge around any platform that sees some market success. This can have the effect of dramatically extending the life of these products as their creators disappear, but the demand remains. A few years ago, for example, I created a 3D printable model for a table clamp that fit an old 1960s Luxo lamp. It’s since been downloaded close to a thousand times, hopefully extending the use of a wonderful piece of design with otherwise difficult to find parts. We need to encourage a similar economy of repair, modification, and adaptation for our connected things, and I’d like to believe that the story of the Little Printer, initially tragic, might point to a more optimistic future for our decaying digital things.

Better to Fade Away

Four years after the Decay of Digital Things class, I’ve become a bit inured to this crisis of sustainability for these products. All around us, we’re seeing an accretion of hollowed-out objects calling for servers long since shuttered. The brilliant Internet of Shit Twitter account provides a near-daily laugh track of poorly considered connected things. My friend Luke wears one on his wrist as a simple watch, shrugging off its lost functionality with the insistence that it had a “good run.” I have another on my shelf as a multifaceted totem to my values as a designer: its brand –a smiling face left after each new print– now barely visible on the sun-weathered thermal paper.

We are creating software-powered things in an environment that often requires businesses to pursue capital-intensive growth models if they want to be considered successful. But this is far from the only path, and we need more diverse definitions of success if we’re going to deflect the distracting, wasteful, anxious, closed, bricked, unfixable, expensive, disenfranchised future that the first decade of the Internet of Things seems to promise.

_This was originally a chapter of the 2018 Kairus book, The Internet Of Other People’s Things. _

References

http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/03/patina/

https://www.wired.com/2016/12/the-inside-story-behind-pebbles-demise/

https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/24/11753878/pebble-2-watch-fitness-tracker-heart-rate-sensor-vide

Diverge Weekly Issue 9 The Dependencies Issue

Tue, 05 May 2020 12:00:00 GMT

First, thank you and welcome to all the new subscribers, and to Hillary Predko for sharing Diverge in The Prepared. This is a weird newsletter that aspires to be about design and global affairs — but I take some latitudes.

The pattern of my day-to-day life is mostly contingent. It rests on the physical infrastructure that makes urban living possible. It is attuned to the temporal and interpersonal nature of knowledge work. It is capillary to the logistics of on-demand consumerism and platform capitalism. And it sets tempo to the increasingly stressed network of labour that empowers my own specialization.

Over the past months, those dependencies have started to show their cracks. I recently had my Gore-Tex jacket fail, and so the weird properties of Gore-Tex have been on my mind.

As designed, the multiple layers of Gore-Tex work together to keep you dry and climate-controlled in some pretty grim conditions. It has the remarkable property of being both waterproof and breathable — allowing moisture to pass away from your body while also preventing water from entering. Also durable, light, etc etc. It’s magic. Having been trapped for hours in a mid-May downpour while bike camping in Sweden, I love Gore-Tex.

But it’s also a fragile fabric. After only a few wears, the body’s oils and dirt will start to permeate the fabric, causing the laminate of different materials that provide for these unique properties to shear off — bubbling up and giving the garment an almost organic appearance as it delaminates. Repeated use and friction can cause the tape that prevents seams from leaking to peel away, while improper care will undermine the jacket’s first line of defence — a hydrophobic coating called Durable Water Repellant — and cause the entire garment to soak through.

Taken together, Gore-Tex is a pretty complex material that relies on and leverages multiple systems to perform its function of keeping its wearer dry, INCLUDING the labour and consciousness of its wearer. Failing to wash the jacket, or to properly care for its DWR coating leads to a systemic failure and a wet inhabitant.

The past few months have taught me about the fragility and interdependence of so many of our systems — especially those systems that underpin our own identities. Part of my identity is being a bit frenetic — constantly reading, writing, making, exploring. Not necessarily anything good, or particularly long-lasting (my short-lived foray into woodworking being an example of this), but it’s part of who I am.

However, the liberty to be that frenetic comes with an absurd web of dependencies. It’s facilitated by leisure time that comes from position, job expectations, and a certain earning power — itself constructed of a lucky mix of skills and interests within a market, and the cultural narratives around their value. It’s purchased with the labour of others: those who deliver groceries and meals when my wife and I are too exhausted to cook; the incredible childcare workers who care for and teach our son during our workday; the front-line retail and service workers whose work supports the enterprises who end up being my clients — this list can go for a while.

When the coronavirus hit and things shut down, it was like that taped seam ripped or the DWR failed: the bubble built around me wetted through and suddenly the contingent identity was compromised. For me, the dependence on childcare and absolutely catastrophic impact of working full time while caring for a one-year-old was my untaped seam. The fatigue and stress undermined everything else. With daycares now open, I think about this weakness every single day.

In many ways though, I like having these dependencies. I love what I do (whatever it is that I do), and am massively grateful for the repeated opportunities to do it (whatever that might be). Having someone to thank, to be connected with, and to follow the trail of their experiences as well — these are wonderful things. As is having someone else think about where I get my water 99.9% of the time. Human and physical infrastructure facilitates that opportunity. But the current global crisis — in its utterly tragic and freakishly muted way — is surfacing the stories of where those dependencies suddenly end. When we played our catastrophe forecasting game last month, it also gave my wife and I the chance to game out how that disappearance of resources and infrastructure might transform our own lives.

So. I’m not quite sure what to do with this anxiety. But the thing that came to mind was perhaps how to be comfortable in dependency but resilient to insecurity. Kind of like a prepper with good healthcare — building resilience where it makes sense to build resilience, and reinforcing dependencies where it makes to reinforce those dependencies.

Stockpiles that lend resilience might be an appropriate amount of food, a medical kit (and the knowledge to use it) for your family and your neighbour, some liquid assets wherever possible, and contractual relationships (rent, subscriptions, debts) within whatever means might be possible. Dependencies to cultivate might be a good relationship with a family doctor, friendships built on shared labour and goals, the maintenance of a shared building or public space, and healthy engagement in local political institutions.

Of course, all of the above is itself contingent. A meaningful relationship with your doctor is unlikely to develop if a single medical professional is covering an impossibly large community. Contractual relationships like employment are difficult to navigate when power asymmetries undermine one’s options. Liquid assets can scarcely be accumulated without a market that values your labour, or fails to compensate you fairly for it.

A Gore-Tex jacket properly cared for will last you a long time. But getting that jacket in the first place —with the protection it affords and the opportunity to care for it— is a lucky and privileged thing. I do think about the weakness that the coronavirus exposed daily, but I also think about the strengths and imbalance that it surfaced. After all, a failing motor that sputters to a halt still takes you a bit further down the road through simple momentum. And so I think we’ll see that the catastrophic failure of a business will still facilitate opportunities and networks that can cushion its beneficiaries from absolute destitution. Hopefully too, a tragically undermined social safety net in the US will still provide citizens with a small economic buffer — even if it comes with the mad king’s signature. If nothing else, this crisis has taught us that having access to and wearing the right protective gear saves lives.

So I’ll continue to build dependencies even with their fragility: My life has been richer and stronger for it. But within that web, I’ll strive to at least see those dependencies for what they are, to adjust those relationships as they evolve, and to build in the redundancies that support my community, my family, and my ability to be who I am.

Security Blanket

Making Sure Peace Isn’t a Casualty of COVID-19 in Fragile States

This article is a great overview of where dependencies are suddenly failing, leaving weakened communities and threatening the central institutions of peace. From day-labourers cut out of vital work in Afghanistan to East Timor seeing its financial safety-net pulled out from under it — fragile and developing states around the world are seeing their citizens’ most fundamental expectations about government and their lives tested in ways that are unfair and could have been at least buffered. Not working for a day without any savings leave you hungry and weak, not working for a few days leave you desperate. A weakened community and a weakened state are unable to fill the gap, and we might see desperate people do desperate things.

This article has a number of recommendations and principles about how the international community can help avoid the worst outcomes — with all sectors having a part to play from commercial services to religious communities to public sector entities. Dependencies often go both ways: debt holders don’t want to see countries bearing the debt default; nor do they want to see the humans who constitute those nations thrown into even greater chaos (one hopes, anyway). And so discussions of debt relief on the national scale could be a vital pressure valve for otherwise terribly leveraged developing economies.