Tired of Software
Well, the real answer is...you don&#x27;t need much software in your life, but software itself has developed into your life in an interdependent fashion, where you need it because the norms demand it, so any kind of software failure becomes more noticable. Let me give a specific example.<p>I often post on a subreddit for art questions(visual arts) and one of the FAQs is &quot;What are the best graphics tablets that the pro digital artists use?&quot;<p>The question is basically naive in what it&#x27;s asking, because drawing digitally is mostly the same across devices. As long as you&#x27;re getting something using a current generation of EMR(or Apple Pencil) the only major differences are physical form factor and screen. The actual drawing experience is the same: slightly laggy, slightly aliased, artificially smoothed by the software, and disembodied-feeling since the brush stroke doesn&#x27;t reflect the physical contact of the stylus. It&#x27;s a fancy mouse, and it works, and you can learn to cope with it as a unique medium, but it won&#x27;t feel like traditional.<p>What you really gain from having the software is...programming. You get to defer more decisions and make more design changes. You can layer up stuff and automate various processes. That lets you pursue a more technically accomplished work, to belabor certain elements and automate others. But the actual drawing, moment-to-moment, is still worse in a lot of ways, because it isn&#x27;t as directly connected as traditional tools.<p>Similarly, many of the editing capabilities that come to mind with using digital can be done traditionally by using tracing paper, lightboxes, and projectors. The ones that only digital can do well - the precision cut and paste, transforms, etc - are such common features that you don&#x27;t need a lot of software to get the capability. And many people working traditionally will use digital as an enhancement, to help design the work and then print, lightbox or project it, or to add some color or compositing at the end.<p>However, there&#x27;s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of tech for tech&#x27;s sake: a program adds some way of getting some cool new effects, and that drives people into going further with it, because they want to play with that. And then it becomes, in some circles, the norm to use the tools in that certain way, to extract a little more out of them. But as you go further, you&#x27;re increasingly tech dependent, and the specific software starts to define your work, rather than just being a neutral medium. You post on &quot;digital art&quot; sites, get paid from it. So you start paying your subscription fee and putting up with the bugs because now that&#x27;s your career - not &quot;artist&quot; using the new medium to creative effect, but &quot;digital artist,&quot; one more pawn in a technological rat race, using the tablet not because it makes your work better but because it lets you produce content faster. And then younger people see this and think it&#x27;s normal to be a digital artist, so they ask questions in terms of the norm: &quot;what do the pros use?&quot;<p>The element of obsolescence does happen traditionally, of course: paper is made differently now from in the 70&#x27;s - more recycled, different chemical treatments. But it&#x27;s different from a software feature that the whole work hinged on, like using 3D models to set up your scene. The former changes the character of the work, the latter changes what kind of thing you work on.<p>And where we&#x27;ve ended up in the broader view is that more of our software is in this interdependent state, where it doesn&#x27;t export to a printer as the final step - it stays on the screen and in the database forever, so you have to have the computer there, always, and it isn&#x27;t &quot;batch processing&quot; where you use the computer for that one job, it&#x27;s online, it&#x27;s connected, and all of those other things, and the entire thing you&#x27;re doing is making work to feed an algorithm.<p>And the reason why this is bad, ultimately, is because society hasn&#x27;t caught up with how to organize itself around the consequences of that. It isn&#x27;t a dynamic amenable to trade relationships. Every software business has to invent some outrageous roundabout method of making the result product-shaped and profitable, which also makes the software a worse experience. We could ignore it in the 90&#x27;s because the software mostly still came in a box, it still exported to paper, so it resembled the traditional processes enough. When it crashed - and it did, Windows and Mac software in the 90&#x27;s was often guaranteed to crash on a daily basis - you lost some amount of project work, but if you saved frequently and followed backup procedures to avoid corruption, your data could be maintained. So all the downsides and failures of &quot;high tech&quot; could be overlooked because it did speed up certain things and enable certain possibilities. Once we started emailing our projects to each other and publishing to the web, that dynamic changed from enhancement to normalization: &quot;why aren&#x27;t you doing it this way?&quot; And that will change your notion of what software should look like.