The Rise of Bespoke Tech

One of technology’s powers is its ability to create new systems. A lot of the last decade’s backlash to technology and start-ups has in fact been in response to the systems those technologies and companies have created. But, of the myriad problems facing our society, this is potentially one of the easiest to fix ourselves. The world is editable- we can change it if we want to.

As AI gains traction, some of the smartest observers are foretelling a near-future where every user of technology will have their own little bespoke disposable apps and tools, in direct opposition to homogeneous monocultures of technology in the mid-2010s.

One of the original game-changing technologies of unix is the pipe. The idea that your operating system is made up of hundreds of little tools that can talk to each other, if you’d like, and the combinatorial power of these tools cannot be overstated. These aren’t just tools, but they are tools to build our own systems.

https://x.com/tylerangert/status/1821556537485099122

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At 14 years old, I was already a little nerd. It first started with my AIM away messages and buddy info. Then a friend at the Boys & Girls club introduced showed me how I could make my own website and host it for free. The year was 2006, and the idea of “web 2.0” was in full-swing; I uploaded my photos to Flickr with a creative commons license, put all my bookmarks in del.icio.us with tags, read and edited Wikipedia articles, and started my own WordPress website.

Everyone was pretty high on the idea of a free and open web, an evolution of Tim Berners-Lee’s original concept of an infinite, inter-linked web where everyone had the ability to contribute their own thoughts, how-tos, and art.

I asked my parents if I could go to computer camp- I told you, I was a nerd. My grandma helped pay for me to go to ID Tech, a summer camp held nearby at Vassar College. I would stay in the dorms at night, playing video games until the counselors told us to sleep. We’d wake up in the morning, go to the cafeteria hall, eat snacks, and then spend most of the day in a beautiful air-conditioned lab learning C#.

I had recently gotten into Twitter, a little “microblogging” site, that I used in combination with my AIM client to automatically update my away messages with my “current status” that could be updated via text message. Meaning, if I was at the mall, I could text a number to update my away message to say exactly where me and my friends were, so that other friends could come and meet us. To top it all off, I’d send these texts from my handy T-Mobile Sidekick that had a screen that flipped around 180° and was so cool my crushes would ask to try it out.

At tech camp we were told to pick a project for the duration of the session; and I decided I would write my own Twitter client using the freely-available Twitter APIs, so I could see my friends statuses and post my own. Little did I know I would spend the rest of my life doing basically this same thing on very different scales.

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In 2011, at 19 years old, I moved across the country to Oakland and began working at my first start-up, who had found me through a viral Flickr infographic I had done and was impressed with my ability to manipulate SVG with javascript, which is what they had in mind for the product they had raised $2M to build. I had been accepted to art school, but decided to defer for a year, thinking that moving to a state where weed was legal and getting paid instead of paying might be slightly more fun.

I found myself at meetups and hackathons in the offices of companies whose products I had used every day but had only ever seen as virtual logos on my computer. The vibe was almost exactly the same as those cafeterias and computer labs back at ID Tech, and it was easy for me to feel at home surrounded by smart people who primarily wanted to build things and were willing to teach me.

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Almost everyone innately saw the benefits of interoperability. We built tools that stood on top of each other, and websites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and Twitter positioned themselves as central shared databases that everyone could add to and pull from depending on their needs. I felt the power of this viscerally when I saw the Jonathan Harris/Sep Kamvar work We Feel Fine (2009) which scraped recent blog entries for the phrase “I feel…” and visualizing them together in a beautiful visualization. Part of the work is itself the API they created, with the authors saying “Borrowing is a great tradition in art; each individual piece of art is part of a larger conversation. With technology-based art, we have the ability to enable borrowing more directly by opening up APIs to our work. Accordingly, we have opened up an API for We Feel Fine, to allow other artists to more easily make pieces that explore these human emotions.”

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Somewhere, in the intervening years, the vibe has shifted dramatically. The coolest artists I know post most of their content to Instagram, an app run by a company worth over a trillion dollars. Instagram does not make it easy to get your data, photos, or followers out of Instagram, which makes sense, because they have every incentive to get you to stay and spend a few more precious seconds on their app.

Those seconds will be converted to money, as they covertly fill your feed with ads hyper-tailored to the interests they have gleaned from the photos you scroll more slowly over. These seconds can also be utilized as political capital by various product managers angling for a new house in Tahoe whose OKRs often directly correlate to how addicted their users are.

The value of picking up your phone, pointing it at something interesting, and all of your friends being able to see it and talk to you about it is clearly very high, but the price we are paying for it is not only extraordinary but unnecessary.

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https://interconnected.org/home/2024/08/09/no-apps-no-masters