About 6 months ago, I teased a series on the idea of facadeware, largely starring our lemon of a Grand Cherokee, but speaking more broadly to a problem with how we’re developing technology. Specifically, I defined this concept as:
Facadeware: superficially advanced gadgetry with an actual net-negative value proposition.
I’d like to start unpacking that and write my series. Now, I’m not going to do what so many bloggers do and promise to write regularly again, since I have no idea if I’ll be able to back that up. But I am now through my two relocations in two months, settling into a permanent location, and hoping to have at least a thin sliver of free time to once again indulge my deepest passion: ranting discursively on the internet.
(I won’t belabor the point here, but for anyone interested, I’ll add a personal update as a footer to this post.)
Before I tell the tale of my Jeep in subsequent posts — and tell it, I will, rest assured — I want to expand on the concept of facadeware. I also want to reemphasize that I would no longer feel good about applying the label “technologist” to myself, descriptively or aspirationally. And that’s not because I now mostly do bureaucratic business ownership stuff for a living.
It’s because I no longer thing “technologism” is worth aspiring to, given the state of technological advancement.
Handing in My Technologist Card
Before going any further, I’d like to reiterate that I still like to program, build, tinker, and improve. Hell, just tonight I performed some quixotic field surgery on a Keurig, successfully bringing it back from the dead briefly, before it re-died in a blaze of cooking circuitry. It isn’t a question of my tastes or interests changing, but rather that I increasingly don’t think that the way we, humans, are advancing technologically is a net positive.
In fact, I’d go so far as to claim that I think we have collectively, technologically regressed over the last 10-15 years, notwithstanding a never-ending slew of phones that are slightly bigger, or thinner, or… something… each time. Technology in this time has advanced, in a sense, for some definitions of “advanced.” More computations are happening, and the cost of that computing is going down. Various things are getting faster, more parallel, and certainly they’re spewing shit at us in higher volumes than ever before. Endless scroll wasn’t around 15 years ago, and we now have that. So, that’s, uh, awesome, I guess.
Things are progressing down a path. There are undeniably more gerbils running in more, bigger, gerbil balls, flinging more gerbil poop into the universe than ever before. Nobody can look at our world and be anything but impressed at the advancements in gerbil poop per cubic meter per hour.
But does gerbil poop, impressive in its volume and efficiency, make anyone’s life better?
A Meaningful Definition of Advancement
At this point I’m going to back slowly away from the gerbil metaphor and trust that you’ve absorbed my implicit point that more-faster-cheaper isn’t a synonym for better. But if more cores and circles on the back of my phone aren’t necessarily better, what is necessarily better?
What indeed is the purpose of technological advancement?
Well, I’d argue that the purpose has historically been to improve the lives of users of the technology. For most of my life, and the 20th century preceding my life, I think one could argue that this was generally the primary goal of most technology (allowing for the exception that a lot of advancement comes from weapons research and is later repurposed for benevolent applications). Technologists built stuff to make their and others’ lives better. The user was the hero, and the technology was the enabler of the hero’s journey.
To drive this home consider the fictional Star Trek universe. I’ve recently learned a term “solarpunk,” that, if I’m understanding it correclty, could describe that universe. In that world, the crew of the Enterprise says things like “computer, make me an 8 course Thanksgiving meal” and it just happens without a lot of navel-gazing and mythologizing about how the computer does it and how it’s disrupting the farming industry.
The fabricator, the warp drive, the holodeck — these things all just serve the occupants of a galaxy with a substantially better standard of living than we enjoy. Centuries of technologists focused on improving the lives of others led to meaningful, life-changing outcomes. This is what I signed up to participate in when, 30 years ago, I started to consider myself an aspiring technologist.
And this is categorically not what we’re doing any longer. So I’m out.
Where We’re Heading Instead
When I first arrived at our new home in Phoenix, the plumbing wasn’t yet hooked up to our fridge, so I was temporarily forced to make ice cubes in trays, like some kind of savage of a bygone millennium. I went to Walmart and bought a couple of ice cube trays and found myself pleasantly surprised by an advancement in this technology, even though I paid like 40 cents for them or something. They had a lid that fit over the top with a coverable hole in it, so that you could easily fill them and walk to the fridge without sloshing water all over yourself.
I thought to myself, “this is a legitimate, genuine improvement that makes my life better in a meaningful, if tiny, way.”
I then realized that was more than I could say for most of my SaaS subscriptions and gadgets.
Google has recently pioneered new ways to punish me for using uBlock Origin. Our Jeep has recently showcased a major breakthrough in showing ads on our nav system. Netflix and other streaming services have explored sophisticated ways to annoyingly turn off my TV if they think their engagement stats are dropping, and they’ve happily shared that knowledge with traditional telecom companies. And everything, and I mean everything, has some kind of moronic AI chatbot that nobody wants, and serves only to explode the failure density of every applied technology in our lives.
Technology is no longer done for us. It’s done to us.
We are no longer the beneficiaries. We’re the marks. Improving people’s lives via technology has taken a backseat to extracting money, time, and attention from them via the same.
And, again, with that, I’m out.
The Perverting of Incentives
So what changed, exactly? Well, I promise you that I’m not going to treat you to some oversimplified “{Tech Company} is evil” take on this. I’d like to look at it more structurally because I think a combination of factors have body checked us off course from a Star Trek future to one that looks more like Ready Player One, with notes of the Matrix.
1. A Preoccupation with Efficiency
Let’s start with something easy. If we anchor the true measure of technological advancement to the question, “does it improve someone’s life,” B2B technology immediately occupies a weird gray area.
To understand what I mean, imagine that I invented a magic orb that allowed you to complete all of your work twice as fast as you currently do. Does that improve your life?
Well, it depends. Do you go from a 40-hour week to a 20-hour one and use the rest of your time for Tai Chi or Cricket or whatever people do? Or do you just immediately start producing what used to be 80 hours of output in your designated 40-hour work time?
The difference matters a lot. If you do the first thing, your life is way better. If you do the second thing, the shareholders of your employer’s lives are way better.
I would argue that thing two is a lot more likely, should I hand you this magic orb. As such, one could argue that B2B technologies rarely improve people’s lives, except indirectly the lives of stockholders. And, while I wouldn’t argue that this is exactly a bad thing, it does mean that B2B technology advancements are generally pretty orthogonal to increase in quality of life.
And yet, B2B advancement occupies an absolutely massive slice of the total amount of tech work and R&D that we see. Our collective preoccupation with improving efficiency is a pretty serious distraction, even before you get into the weeds of how much posturing and bullshitting tends to emerge naturally from B2B transactions around technology (a topic for another time).
2. Performative “Geeking Out”
Another development related to posturing and bullshitting is performative enthusiasm around emergent technologies. As a quick shorthand for my point here, consider how when things like crypto and gen AI hit the scene, all sorts of people were suddenly super, even weirdly, into them. And very, very happy to say so again and again and again on LinkedIn.
I trace the roots of this back to the explosion of software engineering as a viable career path and bootcamp culture. At some point, genuine enthusiasm gives way to performative enthusiasm. You talk about eating, breathing and sleeping some stupid Javascript library less because it genuinely blows your hair back and more because it’s culturally appropriate, or you think some line manager wants to hear it.
The way this feeds into value-free software and facadeware is via main character syndrome. If you’re entirely focused on navel-gazing about what you’re using and how you’re using it, you tend to lose the plot on building something that anyone wants or needs. “Is anyone going to use this? Who cares? It’s microservices in the cloud for AI. That’s the real headline.”
3. The Explosion of Subsidized Cheapness
I grew up without cable television until I was maybe 14 or 15. And this was before it was sort of hipster cool to go around telling everyone how you don’t have a TV or cable. We were just behind the curve, I guess.
And because of this, I grew up in a world where television offered a relatively (by today’s standards) benign Faustian bargain. We didn’t value television enough to pay for it. And, we didn’t have to… provided we were willing to sit through some commercials for sponsors generous enough to subsidize my viewing of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. It was a great time to Cowabunga, indeed.
Of course, sponsored programming long predated my 80s cartoon watching, but this was a relatively limited concept, historically. This is no longer true. The world has absolutely exploded with crap that we kinda sorta want but aren’t really willing to pay much, if anything, for. And the world has similarly exploded with increasingly subtle, complex, and insidious Faustian bargains.
At no point in its existence has Facebook managed to not suck enough that people would pay in any kind of quantity for membership. So what does Facebook do? Improve the product to the point where users value it enough to pay for it? Scrimshaw! Preposterous!
Nah, they engage in a carefully choreographed long game of precision enshittification, letting you doom scroll through boomer rage bait to your heart’s content. At least, to your heart’s content as long as you’re willing to sit through weird ads and have your usage and personal data mined and sold off to the highest bidder.
The last 20 years has been a kind of Cambrian explosion of low value crap in our lives that sticks around only because the actual cost to us is hidden, opaque, deferred, and complex. This is what I mean by subsidized cheapness.
4. Initially Unprofitable Monopolies and Funded Long Games
And, hey, speaking of Facebook (or, Meta, I guess, at least until Zuck decides to rename them “AI” or “Crypto” or something that will be the absolute death of whatever he names it), let’s talk about another trend heavily interwoven with enshittification. I’m talking about a dark pattern that has emerged in the world of venture capital.
I’ll lead with a (slightly oversimplified) example: Uber. In a nutshell, the business strategy is this:
- Disrupt an existing paradigm (which, to be fair, could use a bit of disruption) with something interesting and novel enough to attract a lot of users.
- Price it in an unsustainable way to encourage exponential growth.
- Use that hockey stick user curve to secure an endless river of venture capital.
- Use that venture capital to continue operating massively unprofitably until you habituate your users and drive the existing paradigm and any would-be competitor out of business.
- Look around, see that you have a monopoly and an addicted user base, and get busy with your enshittification to start paying back investors.
- Use funds and position to create an unassailable moat around your monopoly (or cartel, depending on the specific brand).
Now I don’t really want to get into any political stances here, and please don’t interpret this as me taking an implicit stance calling for more regulation (my feelings on this are both complicated and not overly relevant at the moment). What I want to zoom in on here is the relatively small window of time here during which anyone is actually trying to make users’ lives better. Or, at least, that might coincidentally happen during the course of pursuing the first-class goal.
If you’re executing this playbook, your first-class goal is to demonstrate an ability to attract new, active users along an initially exponential curve. One tactic to achieve that would be with an actual value proposition for them. I’d argue that Uber had this — summoning rides with better transparency and cash not changing hands was a legitimate improvement to quality of life. But this isn’t necessarily required. You could also get a bunch of daily active users with network effects, trickery, rage bait, or any other number of things that exploit human cognitive bias.
And after the initial period of attracting users, there’s pretty much zero incentive to improve their lives in any way. You do need to retain them, but remember that they’re habituated and you’ve created a monopoly, so the demand is relatively inelastic. This asymmetric situation means that you’re now probably better off deploying technology to exploit them than to win them over. What’s the point of the latter? You’ve already won.
5. Recurring Revenue and the Rental of Everything
Exploitation isn’t limited to well-funded startups by any stretch of the imagination, either. “Recurring revenue all the things!” is hardly unique to Silicon Valley or venture backed startups in general. They’re simply equipped to play longer games than others, but you can find pointlessly recurring revenue in everything from hot dog loans at Costco to bootstrapped info-product hustlers moving from selling courses to community memberships.
As a business owner that sells high ticket items into the enterprise, I can wistfully (and jealously) appreciate the stability of recurring revenue compared to the big game hunting of enterprise deals. So much so, in fact, that we’ve developed a subscription product-service hybrid offering. I’m not above the allure of recurring revenue, and in general, I’m probably not completely free of being part of society’s facadeware problem. But I digress.
In a world where we’re all told how much better an ‘investment’ owning a home is than renting one, we’re ironically all moving toward renting absolutely everything else in life, all the time. Remember when you bought music or movies and owned those? Not anymore, thanks to streaming! Remember when you’d go to the store and buy Microsoft Office? Not anymore, thanks to SaaS! Remember when you owned the infrastructure and servers on which your applications ran? Not anymore, thanks to the cloud!
We increasingly rent everything and own nothing because, as any landlord will tell you, collecting rent is just good business. (As with property, there are certainly valid use cases for subscriptions/rent — I wouldn’t in good conscience have subscription offerings if I didn’t think they provided value).
The problem with every business trying to optimize for leasing things to everyone is that it creates incentives for facadeware.
If there’s a durable component to the offering, it’s in the provider’s interest to make things that need replacement more frequently. If utilization has material cost, your best customer is one that doesn’t actually use or remember they’re paying for the offering, like a gym membership. And so on and so forth. Thus what winds up occurring is the deployment of technology in zero sum situations that treat customers as adversaries: UX that makes it harder to find the “cancel” function, for instance.
6. Decoupling User from Customer
The US has just the worst imaginable healthcare system — a snarled mass of bureaucracy involving insurance companies, government, regulation, and, for some reason, your boss. Franz Kafka would blush if he got a load of a routine physical for someone in the US.
And one of the many reasons for this is the complete severance in the market of supply and demand. Walk into a hospital and ask for an Advil, and ask what it costs. “$13,274 for one Advil!? I’m going to ask my insurance company about this!” “Oh, I didn’t realize you had Bureaucratic Cross Bureaucratic Shield, you should have said so! It’s only $450 for that Advil in that case. Oh, wait, nevermind, Mercury is in retrograde, so tell you what, we’ll just give it to you for free.”
In between consumer and producer of goods and services in US healthcare, there exists an opaque and capricious bureaucracy in the form of insurance companies and micromanaging legislators. In that climate, meaningful value signals between the transacting parties cease to exist.
Technology seems to be following the collapsing US healthcare system down this same path, where the user of a technology and the customer are increasingly rarely the same person. The aforementioned Facebook comes to mind. You, dear reader, are not Facebook’s customer — you are the product. But this is also true in more benign senses in, say, the B2B world. A VP of software decides to buy some tool after the tool vendor’s sales team treats him to a golf retreat, and suddenly all of the department’s engineers are users, but not buyers, of salesman’s technology.
Do a quick inventory of the tech that you use in your life, versus the tech that you explicitly pay for. Do you personally send checks to Google or Apple for your phone’s OS? How much of your work software do you pay for? Youtube, TikTok, Facebook, et. al. Writing any checks for those? Sending any bitcoins anywhere or venmo-ing them? If you are paying any of these vendors, it’s likely a token fee compared to the price you’re paying in ads, attention, and enshittification tolls.
When the user of an offering and the buyer are not the same person, incentives get weird and perverse. Fast. And when you think of it this way, is it any wonder that the technology is usually done to you, rather than for you?
For the most part, you’re digital cattle. The technology in your life exists to keep you lean, tender, calm enough not to damage your valuable meat, and just far enough north of miserable not to make an adrenaline-fueled dash for the exit.
Can We Get Out of This Mess?
Having gone through a lengthy exercise in defining and lamenting about the problem, I want to move on to a note of hope, and talk about what I think is a viable alternative. Because I do have a framework in mind that can at least alleviate the crushing feeling that everything technical sucks these days. And maybe we could even start nudging gradually back toward a more solar punk future.
I’ve given this a lot of thought.
At first I thought the path to joy could lay in re-simplifying transactions. Let’s shoot for a world free of Facebooks and rentals and get back to a paradigm of buying and selling via direct value exchanges. But this would require a lot of onerous regulation and buy-in, and it’s not exactly catchy. “Hey, let’s go back to, uh, doing commerce, but, you know, the simple kind,” to which all reading would likely respond, “okay, grandpa, let’s get you home.”
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, while simple and direct incentives would certainly help, their absence isn’t the root cause of the facadware epidemic in which we find ourselves. I think complex transactions and technology that actually improves people’s lives could coexist.
Solveware as an Antidote to Facadeware
Instead, the solution came to me as I failed to fix my Keurig.
I had my last Keurig for 7 years or something and used it heavily. This was a reliable machine, and I have every reason to buy a new one. Except, I don’t want to. I won’t.
And that’s because every experience I’ve had in the last few years is that new things absolutely suck. I’ll get into this in a lot of detail when I talk about my Jeep and some detail with an upcoming facadeware taxonomy. But they’re genuinely cripplingly flaky, due to a combination of no incentive to make them last, and utterly unsustainable complexity with a million points of failure. I don’t want a new Keurig, because I suspect it’s going to be an ownership nightmare and, more critically, an endless problem.
And conceiving of this endless problem was the aha moment.
I don’t want a fancy coffee maker with bluetooth. I don’t want one that tweets. And please, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t force one with “AI” on me.
I want a coffee maker that reliably makes me a cup of decent coffee in a few minutes, day in and day out. I want it to fade into the background and make “morning coffee” a permanently solved problem. In fact, I don’t care if it’s a coffee maker at all, as long as “decent, warm, morning caffeine” is, again, a permanently solved problem.
I want solveware.
Good technology, I realized — technology that meaningfully improves people’s lives — is technology that durably or permanently solves my problems. Perhaps the platonic ideal of this is a measles vaccine. As a child, in an event I’ve long forgotten, someone stuck a needle in me and made measles a permanently solved problem in my life. My little ice cube tray thingy made spilling on myself while walking from sink to freezer a permanently solved problem.
And thinking about the fictional Star Trek universe, how would you really think of things like the holodeck and the fabricator? Nobody on the show was performing excessive maintenance on these techs, or “geeking out” about how they were made. In that universe, they are solveware. They fade into the background, permanently solving meaningful problems, like hunger, time spent cooking, and gaming/recreation.
Redefining Expectations
I can’t draw a map to how we can stop being victimized by and buried in facadeware. I’m not really a group project kind of guy, and I’m not big on forming the kinds of plans that start with “if we all just…” (No good plan starts with those words)
What I can do is invite you to reframe how you look at and evaluate technology. I can invite you to stop viewing prototypes and PoCs as victories or proof of much of anything. I can invite you to stop evaluating technology based on whether it can accomplish something and to instead evaluate it based on whether it can accomplish something so reliably it becomes boring. And I can invite you to look at every technology in your life and ask “does this permanently solve a problem I have?”
Now when I’m talking about permanence here, I’m not trying to suggest that something should never fail in order to be considered a quality-of-life improvement. If I truly had my coffee problem permanently solved with the caveat that I’d have to swap machines every 7 years, that’s close enough permanent to be genuine solveware. It’s when the cycle time slides backwards, the maintenance overhead gets higher, the useless features mount, and the ads start, that we slide back towards facadeware, where the thing creates more novel problems for me than it actually solves.
I’m also not suggesting that all problem-solution pairs have a duration of “forever.” Maybe my doctor will tell me to quit caffeine this year, in which case I might have been better off with some kind of coffee delivery SaaS thing. Sometimes bridge solutions work, and some problems are ephemeral.
But using judgement to navigate those caveats, you can still start to think about technology less as an assorted bag of features, and more as a way to eliminate cognitive overhead in your life and shorten your todo list. At least, that’s what technology should do. So ask yourself about your various subscriptions and gadgets, are they actually succeeding in solving a valid problem in your life, today, and on an ongoing basis? Or are they just making your problems recur, multiply, and evolve?
If it’s the latter, toss them. Demand more.
Alright, that’s enough words for now. I’m enjoying picking up the digital pen again and have already started on a facadeware taxonomy. After that, I’ll have developed the lexicon to properly tell the tale of my Jeep Grand Cherokee, which is essentially a mobile museum of facadeware.
Coda: What I’ve Been Up To, for Those Interested
If you’re still reading, or if you skipped down here out of curiosity, here’s my situation and why content here has been sparse. My wife and I (and eventually our son) have been digital nomads for the last 10 years. We’ve done that while retaining a lake house, where we would usually spend summers, and then we’re roam the US in the winter. Usually warm parts of the US.
That lifestyle has historically been compatible with running our marketing service business, Hit Subscribe. But over the last year a few things have all kind of piled up together. The most important one is that our son is reaching Kindergarten age, so it’s time to grow up and settle down. 2025 has thus had us shopping for a permanent home and navigating those logistics, eventually deciding on the Pheonix metro area.
On top of that, we made the decision to convert our lake house into a vacation rental, rather than trekking all the way back every summer and spending time in Michigan. So late summer and fall were spent moving our things out of the lake house, living in a nearby AirBNB, and doing the work to convert the house to a rental. Then, after 2 solid months of that, we hauled and shipped everything we owned to Pheonix, moving in here on December 1st, and arriving with 0 furniture. So the last month and a half has been furnishing the house, organizing, unpacking, and all that fun stuff.
And even more on top of all of that, we’ve navigated a pretty serious expansion of the Hit Subscribe offering ladder, bringing a product to market in addition to the business’s traditional services. This required a shift in both the nature of the work that we were doing, and some reorganization of the business itself.
So as you can probably imagine, I haven’t had a lot of time to blog, even if rants have bubbled up inside of me from time to time, with no outlet. But I’m now somewhat settled and hoping to change that.
The post Technology Done to You, Not for You appeared first on DaedTech.
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