Jason Fried is the Co-Founder and CEO at 37signals, the maker of Basecamp and HEY. His blog usually engages in discussing business, technology, design and product development, and his post earlier this month became especially interesting to me after last week, when it seemed like technology was out to get me personally. I experienced infuriating breakdowns or glitches from Verizon, American Express, Amazon Prime, my bank (Wells Fargo), Merrick Bank, Microsoft, and, of course, WordPress. Each breakdown involved frustrating interactions with chatbots and automated “customer service” lines, the oxymorons of the century. In total, I lost about four hours of otherwise billable time, and several of the problems have yet to be fully addressed.

Apparently, however, things will soon get worse, unless I hurl myself into that woodchipper, which seems to work just fine.

Fried writes in part regarding the recent experience of his parents when they rented a house near him to spend a few months. He had just come back from a vacation in Montana and had rented a house there. “[E]verything…was old school and clear. Physical up/down light switches in the right places. Appliances without the internet. Buttons with depth and physically-conformed to state change rather than surfaces that don’t obviously register your choice…traditional round rotating Honeywell thermostats that are just clear and obvious. No tours, no instructions, no questions, no fearing you’re going to do something wrong, no wondering how something works. Useful and universally clear. That’s human,” he concluded.

But not in the new, technologically advanced, “improved” house his parents ended up in. He writes in part (and in horror):

The lights are powered by Control4. And require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understand which ones control what, and to be sure not to hit THAT ONE because it’ll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn’t mean to. Worse.The TV is the latest Samsung which has a baffling UI just to watch CNN. My parents aren’t idiots, but definitely feel like they’re missing something obvious. They aren’t — TVs have simply gotten worse. You don’t turn them on anymore, you boot them up. The Miele dishwasher is hidden flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here’s what isn’t: It wouldn’t even operate the first time without connecting it with an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn’t know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate? For serious? Worse.

Thermostats… Round touchscreens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options just to be sure it’s set at 68. Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at, but it’s at 72? Wait… What? Which number is this? Worse.

The alarm system is essentially a 10” iPad bolted to the wall that has the fucking weather forecast on it. And it’s bright! I’m sure there’s a way to turn that off, but then the screen would be so barren that it would be filled with the news instead. Why can’t the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse.

And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem…

Tech can make things better, but I simply can’t see in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it. It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to make things easy yet. That some breakthrough will eventually come when you can simply knock a switch up or down and it’ll all makes sense. But we haven’t evolved to that point yet…

 

Herman Kahn, of whom you’ve heard me “speak” many times, once explained how our culture’s obsession with gadgets and complexity was absurdly impractical, expensive, and juvenile. One example he gave were all the devices installed in jet fighters to prevent stalling. Bells go off, buzzers buzz, lights flash, and recorded warnings sound, he said, and this was decades ago: I assume its worse now. “Those systems add millions of dollars to the costs of the planes,” he said. “The Russians think we’re nuts.” In the Russian jets, Herman told us, there’s a little gauge with a needle that goes into a red zone when the plane is in danger of stalling. “It costs about 50 bucks in our money, and works just as well as all our bells and whistles,” he said, getting a big laugh.

If only his audience had realized this was nothing to laugh about…