Sandcastles at low tide
Thoughts on the temporary nature of tech.
I like to tell people I was born into design and the internet. I spent many hours as a preteen tinkering with websites, hacking video games, and torrenting music files. I reckoned recently that I’ve now spent over two-thirds of my life working and playing digitally. Where are those early experiments of mine now? I have few mementos from that time in my life. GeoCities is a distant memory now, much less ExPages. (Though charmingly Neopets and Weebls Stuff still endure).
The web by its nature is ephemeral. If we shut it all down tomorrow, there would be nothing left but secondary artifacts to attest to its existence — advertising for imaginary places, the physical media we use to access it, and the infrastructure used to generate it.
I remind clients of this fact frequently as a designer. “I work in the past and the future”, I tell them. “I can only communicate what’s happened. Or show a vision for what could be.” It’s most often within the context of someone trying to perfect a piece of content in-situ, or when hard deadlines are set arbitrarily.
So many businesses forget about this when it comes time to ship software. I’ve seen teams working on incredibly large enterprise platforms release code no more than two to three times a year. I’ve (painfully) been on teams that had to plan their design and development out three to six months in advance.
What’s lost in that moment is that software is not monumental architecture. It’s not carved in stone. It’s messy, malleable, amorphous, and ever-changing. Working in tech is building sandcastles at low tide. Nothing is solid, not even the medium we use to build. It’s a form of installation art instead. We descend on a virtual space. We build an experience. We leave. Its impermanence is part of its charm, its joy.
Will there ever be monumental architecture in tech? It’s a good question. Healthcare and civic services spring to mind as potential vectors. Who knows. Maybe when we find out the answer, we’ll be too busy tinkering to notice.
