The internet made code brittle because updates could happen anytime. Pre-internet, your software came in a box and that was it for this version. Companies had to test the hell out of it. Even after we got internet updates, but before broadband, people had to deliberately seek out updates, download them at painfully slow speeds, and maybe even write them to a disk to install them. I remember a MacOS update that spanned fourteen floppies.
But that simplifies things too much. Our software is also infinitely more complex. Getting into the business of trying to ship new and exciting features over maintaining a solid foundation also eats the industry.
I think it’s a bit different. The updates are a problem, yes, but only because people accept the promise of good working software as if it were good working software. “The next update will fix everything”, while the next update only places another block on top of the Jenga tower. If the next update isn’t just another introduction to an additional enshittification step that we accept because we also already accepted the idea of unsupervised updates.
The internet made code brittle because updates could happen anytime. Pre-internet, your software came in a box and that was it for this version. Companies had to test the hell out of it. Even after we got internet updates, but before broadband, people had to deliberately seek out updates, download them at painfully slow speeds, and maybe even write them to a disk to install them. I remember a MacOS update that spanned fourteen floppies.
But that simplifies things too much. Our software is also infinitely more complex. Getting into the business of trying to ship new and exciting features over maintaining a solid foundation also eats the industry.
I think it’s a bit different. The updates are a problem, yes, but only because people accept the promise of
goodworking software as if it weregoodworking software. “The next update will fix everything”, while the next update only places another block on top of the Jenga tower. If the next update isn’t just another introduction to an additional enshittification step that we accept because we also already accepted the idea of unsupervised updates.