
Technological Conservatism - czr80
http://hypercritical.co/2013/04/07/technological-conservatism
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jd
What Siracusa describes as Technological Conservatism is probably more of a
status-quo preference. I think this is because there are two opposing forces
are work.

1\. Innovation is often little more than a sequence of small incremental
improvements. Improvements that -- when viewed individually -- don't really
seem to matter much but when they accumulate you get a completely superior
product.

2\. Keeping up to date on the newest developments can be a chore. Things
change, but for no apparent reason. APIs get refactored and break. Your
favorite buttons in your favorite OS get removed. What was idomatic code last
year is considered crummy today. This can be frustrating, because you just
want to get your work done and not worry about all this stuff on the margins.
Every hour you spend reading release notes and upgrading to the newest version
of jQuery, Node or Go is time that would otherwise go into your product. And
yet, by standing still you go backwards.

So this is where the comparison to politics breaks down a bit. In the short
term being "conservative" and just sticking to whatever tools you know is
optimal. It will get your product out the door the quickest and it can still
be high quality and mostly bug free. From a short term business perspective
it's often the right choice. In the medium term you run into bugs of
frameworks that have already been fixed 6 months ago and the quality of your
code base is slowly going to degrade as hacks pile on top of one another. The
more out of date your technology stack is the more you lose out on great
libraries and best practices. So for t → ∞ sticking to whatever you know today
is clearly a poor strategy.

~~~
pixl97
So what you're saying is modular technology and modular politics would be the
most optimal situation.

If one part of a system is outdated it makes more sense to replace that the
broken part rather than an entire system.

Unfortunately both political and computer systems want us to be 'all in' on
whatever current version is out.

~~~
jiggy2011
The problem is that interfaces will typically change over time. So really you
are talking about maintaining backwards compatibility which means maintaining
a bunch of old stuff riddled with technical debt.

If you are designing a new product to a tight deadline, it seems very
attractive to leveridge all the features of "the new hotness".

~~~
milfot
This illustrates the core argument for conservatism (in the burkean sense.. as
commented below). You have to move slow to make sure you don't break things
that were working (as in.. if it ain't broke). There is no such thing as tight
deadlines in conservatism. As with all things, I disagree with applying a rule
to unforeseen situations. Sometimes you need to adjust your rule and sometimes
you just have to break stuff.

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rasengan0
We are so far gone, it is depressing: <http://youtu.be/KbAPtGYiRvg>

Never mind opening the discourse on broader implications and consequences of
technology to the 'real' world.

Article gives first world problem examples of interfaces, hardware
performance, iphone 5 heft, WebKit growth (Blink Blink), and Netflix discs.

To be sure, many will be squealing like giddy schoolgirls when iOS7 UI gets
deskeuomorphed, but how does any of this contribute to, uh, say... uh energy
discovery, cancer cures, controlling world population, feeding the masses,
stabilizing peace, et al

Trapped in a bubble, a narrow prison of perspective, so far gone, this article
is what amounts for technological criticism.

Siracusa, lemme know when the world moves away from qwerty or get out of the
way.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
Didn't knew about Neil Postman, thanks for posting the video.

The problem with media and economic pressures - specially in today's "Like" or
"Upvote" web - is that we have asymmetric exposure of different viewpoints.

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jeffdavis
The author seems to basically be describing a lack of vision as "technological
conservatism". What's ideological about that? Why inject political language
into that phenomenon?

There are ideological battles in technology, of course. But it doesn't have
much to do with a lack of vision. If someone lacks vision, and then you make
something amazing, they will generally acknowledge it (though perhaps slowly)
and everyone moves on. Sure, there are a few people still using DOS, but not
very many.

~~~
lbarrow
I think the shoe fits here.

Political conservatism often draws inspiration from the works of Edmund Burke.
"Burkean conservatism" is a philosophy that accepts that society will
inevitably grow and evolve, but is skeptical of the ability of human beings to
understand and intelligently guide society as it changes.

A Burkean is therefore reluctant to embrace new social policies, new norms,
and new ways of living. Burkean conservatives argue that things should stay as
they are now, or at least that they should change slowly.

~~~
jeffdavis
Conservatism means a lot of things. It's a loaded word, and I don't think
applying it here adds any value.

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Adlai
He doesn't touch on the arguments that technological progress is a bad thing,
in and of itself. Two extreme examples of that would be that agriculture has
led to a massive rise in population density (compared to hunter-gatherer
societies), and that advances in military technology have created a world
where we live on the brink of Mutually-Assured Destruction.

While that's not my personal view, it is an argument that gets raised at
times...

~~~
jcsiracusa
Quoting from the article: "Not all new ideas represent progress. (Do I really
need to spell this out? It seems so.) But ideas should not be rejected based
merely on a lifetime of having lived without them."

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tstactplsignore
Personally, I have always found myself shockingly distant from the rest of the
tech community on technology issues like transhumanism. I would never support
consumer mind computer interfaces for casual applications like video games or
communication or intelligence augmentation. I even think our current smart
phones go too far and have a net negative impact on society in their current
form; don't even get me started on Google glasses.

Honestly, I am fairly sure that the society of the future will look back on
current technological use and trends much in the same way we look back on the
industrial revolution; a time of great progress which eventually led to a
better society, but while first being implemented it had zero regard for
investigating social, human, and environmental impact.

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lostlogin
Siracusa taking a broad view is new to me! I'm sure he has before but what I
like about him is his laser-like focus on some detail that has previously
never been noticed by me. And he knows the 17 iterations of the feature that
went before and likely place its going.

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archagon
An interesting contrast to this:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5219866>

~~~
lostlogin
What a thread! And its closed. The discussion of old phone is fascinating - I
can't get my wife to bin her Nokia 3310 - it's rock solid reliable. It's been
to hell and back over 10ish years and still holds a charge for a week or so.
Some things have got a lot worse in the cell phone world.

