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Comment by pjmorris | Hacker News Reader

You (we) may be experiencing future shock: "too much change in too short a period of time", from 'Future Shock', Alvin Toffler, 1970.

FTWA [0]:

> Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change overwhelms people. He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation"—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock he popularized the term "information overload."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

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At 52 - and still developing stuff, still advising, etc. - I'm more suffering from "Future Annoyance" than shock. I'm despairing at the seemingly huge wastage going on - the rapid shifting from one javascript framework du jour to the next, the rapid versioning of e.g. Qt from 5 - where I ported one of my apps - and bang we're already at Qt6 now ffs!

And on and on it goes. It seems multiple 1000's of man-hours of work happens in the tech world, only to get dismissed and dumped in favour of $new_exciting_thing, and it's getting annoying and disappointing.

It seems to be a case of rather than iterating on something, someone else comes up with $new_thing and that becomes the fashion du jour for a period of time - lots of people quickly jump ship to the new thing - until /that/ stuff gets dumped in favour of $some_new_new_thing. Repeat ad-nauseum.

I'm undecided on whether that's a bad thing or not - but the pace of the change(s) is what I'm finding more Annoy than Shock.

"Future Annoyance" is definitely the word. I know it's not just me because it hits our entire team all at once when something stops working.

We deal with a lot of clients so we use Skype, Teams, GotoMeeting, Zoom, you name it. But Skype regularly causes collective "WTH!?" in our team. Skype devs seem to love moving things around without warning. Or putting features like "ring group" being an extra button after you "call group". Most recently they moved how you close a picture when you're in a call. Why they did this I have no idea. But I saw it catch multiple people on my team.

Honestly, I'm tired of it. The cognitive load of all of this is too high. I have work to do.

edit: I should add an observation. Whenever a feature is first changed or simply moved, it almost certainly means it's not going to work. Quality in this day and age is non-existent.

At my previous job, we used Webex Teams. It was fine when it worked, but it always had annoying bugs. There was a new release every month or so, and while the annoying bugs often went away, they were inevitably replaced by new annoying bugs.

At my new job, they use Microsoft Teams. While I haven't experienced most of the problems being described here, I'm not particularly impressed. I did have to spend about 15 minutes one day trying to get a call to work with a coworker, because it kept totally locking up. I finally solved the problem by disconnecting my microphone, even though I had used it successfully earlier that day. Teams working again with my Samson mic, but who knows when it will poop the bed again.

Kids nowadays have no respect making single-page applications on their iPad. Seriously though, the old days of writing software from scratch are gone. This reliance on frameworks and the associated toolchain complexity is a big mistake. There is a reason C is still loved after 50 years and that is because it is simple. It's too bad we're going backwards.

"C is still loved"

Citation needed.

:waves:

You can cite me for one! I didn't even grow up on it, it was honestly a more recent thing for me to pick up seriously, I wrote significant amounts of JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Rust and various LISPS before I seriously used C in anger. Nowadays it's the language I reach for second most often after JS and it's honestly something I often really look forward to writing. I love how it just gets out of my way and lets me do things, it's so fucking refreshing.

you should checkout zig, its the closest thing to c with a lot of the rusty edges removed

I'm undecided on whether that's a bad thing or not - but the pace of the change(s) is what I'm finding more Annoy than Shock.

The most dangerous aspect of this phenomenon is that the platforms our applications run on are now highly unstable. We live in an era when software like operating systems and browsers will happily update itself whether we want it to or not. You can't build a castle on sand and expect it to stand when the tide comes in.

At least if the platforms provided stable, standardised foundations, those application developers who wanted to provide software with longevity and compatibility could do so. But the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google seemingly have no interest at all in providing those stable foundations any more. If everything is throwaway junk then everyone needs to buy the new throwaway junk next week too.

> Qt from 5 - where I ported one of my apps - and bang we're already at Qt6 now ffs!

It was 8 years between the release of Qt5 and Qt6. Qt's one the things I consider quite stable compared to many other frameworks these days.

I think you mean from Qt4 to Qt5.

When I first started writing Python apps using Pyside/Qt4, it was just before the transition to Pyside2/Qt5.

I put off moving my Captain's Log app from one to the other until I couldn't put it off any longer. Then, it seems only a year or less, we have Qt6 now.

Qt5 was release in 2012. Qt6 was released in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_version_history

Thanks.

I think my timing was more down to the production readiness of Pyside2, which meant I had to hold onto using PySide and hence Qt4 before PySide2 was ready/mature enough to trust porting my existing app to.

I'd read that book for the first time only about a year ago. It has some warts, but in general has aged spectacularly well.

It is weakest on predictions of the significance of specific technologies, many by those directly involved in their development or promotion. Some of those have panned out (most notably, of course, information technology), but most haven't, proving impractical or nonviable, occasionally socially unacceptable.

The cautions about psychological overload are strongly on-point.

Where the book is likely underappreciated is in its predictions of social change. These have largely been so successful, especially about youth culture, gender, and race, that the prior state seems utterly foreign to anyone born afterwards. The predictions to a large extent are our present reality, and seem trite simply on that basis.

(This is a general challenge in forecasting: unsuccessful forecasts are glaringly obvious, successful general ones are too ubiquitous to be apparent.)

Toffler cites a great deal of research (though in following up on his footnotes, some citations seem inaccurate), and both the original sources and subsequent works citing them are of interest. He leans particularly heavily on Herbert Simon, a polymath (psychology, sociology, economics, mathematics, AI) with many powerful insights (and a few blunders).

Blaming the majority of social problems on it is just plain silly. Take any given time period n from present day t - n and expand it into a stasis for decades. It wouldn't evaporate social problems if we were stuck using dos, let alone the majority of them.

The actual stressor that gets fixated upon and scapegoated appears to be something ironically very old and unchanged - memento mori. The Eiffel Tower was called hideous and something to tear down to those who knew the city long before its placement. For those later it was a part of Paris and tearing it down would be sacrilege. Beyond a certain point in life everything new becomes a marker of your obsolescence as you personally remember how things were before. Those after you never would.

This comment doesn’t address the implications of the rate of change constantly accelerating.

No, this is not future shock - quite the contrary.

Future shock comes from "enormous structural change". As David Graeber pointed out, major structural change and scientific breakthroughs slowed down to a crawl.

E.g. we don't have teleportation, warp engines and computers integrated in our skulls. Not even flying cars. Compare it with the changes between 1910 and 1960.

Here we are seeing the opposite: endless churn and reinvention of the wheel around very minor stuff.

Graeber got a lot of backlash for pointing out this facts. We are not supposed to criticize the gods of technology.

Smartphones are basically computers in our skulls, a radical shift in human existence from not looking at computers for most people to being tied to one for hours a day. You can pretend the world isn't rapidly changing but that's just a bias to living in the present. Of course we haven't invented fantastical physics defying devices yet but the technological difference between now and 1970 is just as start as the one between 1910 and 1960, just in different ways.

> We are not supposed to criticize the gods of technology.

The downvotes are coming as expected.

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