To imagine different technology, we must imagine a different world

The human spirit will outlast your sales pipeline

Welcome to Ethan’s Turtles - I’m Ethan (spoiler) and I write this newsletter to explore the connection between digital design and critical theory.

I use this newsletter to explore the ideas that drive my own platform, called Clusta, for developing new ideas. If you’d like to see how I use Clusta, here’s how I developed this article. If you’d like to try it yourself, you’re very welcome to sign up.

I cracked out the walkie talkies the other week.

Of course, my housemate and I could just WhatsApp each other if we want to meet in the kitchen. We know that. But where’s the fun? Where’s the challenge? Where’s the spending half an hour getting on the same frequency?

I couldn’t tell you how long it’s been since I booted them up. I’ve had them since I was a teenager, but I’ve faithfully kept them close, in my obligatory box of miscellaneous wires and chargers and tech-y stuff that doesn’t have a purpose right now, but looks awfully important.

It’s somewhat amusing to imagine this process of re-engaging with walkie talkies as if they were part of the paradigm of the digital tools and platforms we use today.

Imagine you switch them on, and a few minutes go by. The ding and buzz comes through on your phone. You open up your email.

“Hey, Ethan, great to have you back! Here’s 10 ways {{people}} in {{London}} are using Bosch walkie talkies today.”

Then, of course, the initial walkie talkie excitement fades. One of the talkies runs out of battery. WhatsApp’s punishingly convenient mode of communication rears its head, as it inevitably would.

A day goes by, and then:

“Hey, Ethan! We noticed you haven’t tried our most exciting new features…”

And we know how the story goes. Three-to-five more emails like these, and eventually silence. Hey, they tried, and their customer engagement funnel not only increased user retention by 27%, over 12% of re-engaged users were successfully upsold.

Those poor souls have walkie talkie range boosters, multi-charge stations, they’re being arrested for interfering with radio transmissions from the international space station.

Thankfully, this is all just a bad dream. No one knows when, how or why I booted up those walkie talkies. No one knows the precise detail of the thrill, the child-like joy I found in discovering how simple technological tools can open a sandbox for my imagination.

Bad Dreams

Strange, I thought the bad dream was over.

And yet, the emails persist. But it isn’t the walkie talkies. It’s Spotify, Instagram, the email client I tried one time because I go from zero to two-thousand unread emails in a couple of weeks.

It would be simple to say that the people who run these platforms are evil. Sure, they probably are, but that isn’t the root cause of why we can’t have relationships with digital technology like we do with walkie talkies.

Technofeudalism, a term back in the zeitgeist thanks to Yanis Varoufakis, describes the current state of the digital landscape, where those who provide digital platforms through the internet must pay recurring fees to one of the big players of data centres, like AWS or Google, in order to serve their platform from servers. This subscription is then passed on to the user, who ultimately foots the bill.

Or at least, that’s the idea. More often than not, the biggest digital tech companies are never profitable, and instead raise eye-watering sums of money from venture capitalists in order to keep the lights on. Think OpenAI or Uber.

The subscription-model universe is the true villain here. Using Spotify once every few years is useless to Daniel Ek. He needs you slurping up new albums, radios and artists all day and all night. Keep it on while you sleep, or tomorrow is the day the music will truly die.

But where are we, the users, in all this?

Is using something as much as possible the same as finding something valuable? This surely depends on the the thing you are using. But in the digital world today, this is the only kind of value we measure.

But what range of value could digital spaces offer if they broke free from this paradigm?

Buttered Toast

One of my favourite things about philosophy is the fantastic words you come across that you wouldn’t have done otherwise. One of those words is qualia.

I remember one of my first philosophy teachers, Dave, would always use the example of the smell of buttered toast to explain qualia.

Qualia isn’t the smell of buttered toast itself, it’s his experience of the smell of buttered toast. It’s the creation of ‘something’ in your mind’s eye, when your nose smells buttered toast. That something is qualia.

When we measure the ‘success’ of a digital space, we do so through representative means. The number of daily active users, interactions, length of sessions, is meant to demonstrate meaning as to the positive experiences, or qualia, of its users.

But these same measures could be applied to casinos, or cigarettes, but we wouldn’t attribute their ‘success’ to a positive experience for the user.

The reality is that these measures are correlative, and could represent extreme addiction as well as they could some kind of near-euphoric value.

We build digital tools to maximise these statistics, but what if we stopped doing that. What if we built purely for the experience of the user, and no more?

The Cybernetic

There is a common thread between the technology I have used in my life which has given me the most joy. A bit like the walkie talkie, they extend a small part of myself, and in doing so, inspire my imagination to explore ideas I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

It is easy to forget, in the world of multi-billions and unicorns, that technology is not inherently valuable. It is only valuable because of us, because of the people who use the technology.

I have worked as a digital community manager for over three years, and the guiding principle I held with my work was understanding that a community is a group of people first, and any digital platform we use is simply an extension of that.

We often get this the wrong way around. We build technology, and then we coax people onto it to make it into something valuable, to prove it should receive additional funding.

But I want to see digital platforms more like walkie talkies. Even if I only use it once a year, the qualia I possess from using it is, to me, infinite in value.

I think about this idea a great deal, because I am building a platform to support people’s creative process.

This is a delicate value in many ways. So much of the joy of creativity comes from its mystery. We do not understand entirely how we are able to synthesise new ideas and bring them into the world, nor do we completely understand what drives our desire to do this.

I don’t want to solve this mystery with Clusta, I want to celebrate it. I want to create a digital space where your creativity is welcomed, but not forced. Like how one of those mechanical hand grabbers can help you reach the top shelf, I want Clusta to help your imaginative mind explore the possibilities and connections between what were once disparate ideas, and ponder something new.

The beauty of creativity is you never know when things will come together. It is delicate, and not readily available.

As such, there is no use measuring Clusta as a platform in terms of consistent usage, or depth of usage. Indeed, there is almost no point in measuring Clusta at all.

I built Clusta because I wanted a space that matched the structure of how my creative mind works. It is a joy to use, and others who use it have found this same joy.

The value of imagining a world free of technofeudalist subscription isn’t just that we can stop bothering everybody to keep using digital platforms all day - it’s that we can imagine digital spaces that have value completely separate to what is out there now.

Clusta doesn’t fit easily into the current world of digital technology. But people will always be creative, and they will always have the drive to put something into the world that didn’t exist today.

The human spirit will outlast your sales funnel, and it will only be stronger for it.

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