The Tyranny of Convenience: Expounding on F.G. Jünger’s Observations of Technology

Introduction

The idea that convenience drives technological adoption shouldn’t come as a great surprise to anyone who has been paying even a modicum of attention to how this field has been developing in the last couple of decades. And it’s true. Things have indeed become more convenient and as a result, society more dependant on technology.

But this tendency brings with it some important implications which are worth taking a closer look at, particularly in the context of the ICT sector. Most of the wealthiest companies in it can attribute their existence to convenience. Apple’s entire raison détre is based on taking existing technology and making it more convenient - desktop computers, laptops, laser printers, networking, smartphones. The initial reason for Google’s meteoric rise was just how much quicker - and hence more convenient - it was at returning search results. Microsoft built their entire empire on a different kind of convenience - by the convenience of being the de facto standard and therefore more convenient to stick with than to switch. This “convenience by coercion” is a big reason why we see so little real innovation in ICT and I will return to this point later in this essay.

We see this same form of convenience in the ecosystems the various vendors have built around their physical products. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a product that didn’t also come with some form of “cloud” component. Interestingly, it’s also increasingly difficult to find products that highlight convenience in their promotional material. A stark contrast to just a couple of decades earlier when the terms “user friendly” and “easy to use” were found in nearly every product description. Convenience, it seems has become a given. So much so that very few digital products come with operating manuals anymore.

Which brings us to the data brokers which the general public usually refers to the social media platforms catering to the convenience of multiple parties - the users for not having to maintain their personal website and the advertisers for not having to know their customers. And by “advertisers” I also mean cybercriminals and geopolitical adversaries. As we become more dependant on technology through our obsession with convenience, we end up making the less technology-dependant solution much more inconvenient. Take for example the case of any grocery store suddenly losing the ability to accept card payments.

In this essay, I try to expound on these topics particularly within the ICT paradigm which, due to it’s latent, but all-permeating presence presents us with some unique challenges.

The Hidden Complexity of Convenience

We cannot talk about the convenience of technology without talking about the hidden cost of said convenience. Especially in the realm of ICT where unimaginable complexity often masks a seemingly trivial user interface. Take for example your average ride hailing service. What would be the honest and complete system requirements for a service such as this to function?

For starters, the customer has to be carrying a computer with them at all times. That computer must have a high-resolution display and a massive battery. An always-on connection to the Internet - perhaps the most complex system of systems ever devised by humankind. It must also have a direct connection to the constellation of GPS satellites hovering over 20 000 km from the surface of the Earth and a detailed map of wherever the user is located to plot those coordinates on.

Then there's the app itself - most likely tens of thousands of lines of code, created and maintained by hundreds of people, probably in different programming languages, running on top of millions of lines of other code that power everything from the smartphone's operating system to the various code libraries and development frameworks chosen as requirements by the applications developers. But how does the app actually get to the phone? For that we need another piece of convenience - a digital store, a marketplace - which requires it's own several layers of complexity and infrastructure.

Finally, we get to the "intelligent" part of this service - the central hub that stores all the information necessary for it to function. Your name, current and future location, purchase history, credit card details, your driver's name, license plate number, vehicle make and model etc. All stored "in the cloud" which is yet another convenient term for a vastly complex piece of technology - the modern data center.

And all of these parts need constant maintenance for engineering errors, infrastructure maintenance, environment changes and business logic updates. A universe of immensely complicated technology deployed and running 24/7 just so that the customer doesn't have to call the taxi company and talk to a human being. Or raise a hand to hail one from the street.

The Technical Cost

The obvious cost here is technical. In masking this complicated machinery behind even the most trivial applications, we create an administrative burden that only gets heavier as the system evolves. A burden that - when not handled properly - begins to incur its own cost - a phenomena we refer to as “technical debt”, which - just as financial debt - also comes with its own interest. That something is "complete only when there's nothing more to remove" is a beautiful design principle which unfortunately seems to hold true only in the planning phase of a particular product. The actual implementation typically works in the opposite direction - by adding things until "there's nothing more to add" at which point the whole system is often deemed too complex to maintain. It appears there is a direct link between convenience and the technical complexity of an ICT product. Simply put, the more convenient a technology is, the more ground it has to cover to deliver that famous "seamless experience" which directly results in more complexity.

The Social Cost

When we abstract effort behind a veneer of convenience, we also help to devalue that effort. Resulting in what Ezio Manzini so insightfully calls a design-driven culture of carelessness. You don't have to curate your photo library - simply purchase more cloud storage! You don't have to own your tools or entertainment - just rent them! You don't have to learn how to cook - just use our app and a courier will deliver you your dinner. You don't have to learn how to write efficient computer code - our state-of-the-art data center can make it run fast.

Convenience centralises expertise and skill and by so doing undermines society's diversity and resiliency. When we use the ride-hailing app, we not only change our behaviour, we also help change the market until the app is our only option. If our phones’ electronic address books made us forget peoples phone numbers and birthdates in a single generation, how long will it take self-driving cars to obliterate our ability to steer a vehicle?

Convenience creates a dependent relationship. Like a strange version of the proverbial fisherman, it took us generations to learn how to fish and how to build our own fishing gear only to surrender these skills so eagerly to digital technology. We are hooked by the prospect of not having to maintain our own tools and as a result trade autonomy for convenience. Especially if the outsourced option is provided to us for free. At least for the time being. This reminds me of a quote from Edward Tufte: “There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users”.

So on one hand, convenience expands our technical ability, while simultaneously lessening our technological sovereignty. It sounds almost like a contradiction, but it actually isn’t.

Engineers Are People Too

Thus far we have looked at convenience’s driving force as it applies to the market and the consumer, but that force acts upon the industry itself with equally far-reaching consequences.

Remember, the convenience factor applies to all people, not just end users. The vast majority of ICT engineers today are still human and we will take every opportunity we can get to make our lives more convenient. After all, building these complex things can be very complex. Our corner-cutting measures includes using ready-made software components that, while solving a certain problem, may end up creating a whole slew of others that we did not foresee. This practice has a tendency to introduce what is professionally referred to as "bloat" which comes with severe impacts on performance and resilience especially at scale. Implications that have very tangible effects in the physical world as well - increased energy consumption and network congestion, shorter battery life and device life span - just to name a few. It has also resulted in less and less tech vendors operating their own infrastructure evidenced by the myriad of “AAS” - abbreviations we have on the market today (Software As A Service, Infrastructure As A Service, Platform As A Service, etc).

Easily the greatest convenience in the ICT sector among engineers and the one that has had profound and I would argue mostly negative implications on the industry has been the practice of patching products after their initial release. This convenience came about as a result of a prior convenience - the transition from physical media to online distribution. This doesn’t mean that we didn’t have software bugs before, just that their business costs were now significantly lowered. Companies - in the all-important strive to be the first to market - could release incomplete products, let the public be the beta testers and then release patches to hopefully fix some of the errors. This problem has existed in software for decades, but has recently become especially prominent in the gaming industry.

Looking For the Perfect Balance

All of this begs the question - is there a "right" amount of convenience that we should strive for in our designs? A “goldilocks zone” that strikes just the right balance between effort and convenience? A level that makes "the impossible possible and the difficult less so" while still maintaining our personal agency?

When you ask people this question they usually tend to think that the level of technological dependency society was at during their formative years. We can attribute parts of that to nostalgia, but I can honestly attest that the late 90s objectively achieved that. We had pretty much all of the major technical capabilities we enjoy today (general purpose computers, databases, networking, mobile telephony, hyper- and multimedia, electronic banking, etc), just with a much smaller footprint and greater market diversity. But this was also a time when "being online" was more of a choice than a necessity. More importantly, one needed a certain level of technical capability to “be online” in the first place.

This is a difficult question already for the mere fact that what is convenient for me might be just the opposite for you. I’m sure there are many that would argue that calling a taxi is much more convenient than installing and using an app. But I would nevertheless like to propose at least one generalisation - that it’s important to have options. Yes, technology does seem to have a tendency to grow towards a certain dominant design, but we should scale back our efforts at having it replace all other designs.

In other words, if a bank is able to convince 90% of their customers to do their business online - saving the bank money by closing 90% of their physical locations, they should also be able to invest more in the remaining 10% for the people that still depend on physical banking services. We would do well to remember that very few people left behind by technical progress do so by choice.

Convenience as a Tool for Change

It is often said that enacting technological change is trivial compared to changing people's behaviour. Knowing all that we know about the driving force of convenience in technological change, we can also harness it to steer change in a certain direction. The idea is very simple - if you want people to behave in a certain way in a technical context, make that behaviour the easier, more convenient option!

The record industry spent the the beginning of the new millennium in a futile fight against piracy, but it was Apple - a music industry outsider - with their first successful digital music store that actually had a measurable effect on piracy. By simply making the legal option safer and more convenient. Six years later Spotify would take the convenience to another level by eliminating the purchasing step altogether. And with it the idea of actually owning your music collection. Convenience is truly the most powerful aid in our toolbox in governing technological development.

On The Delusion of the Saving of Labor

Jünger’s thoughts on how technology actually makes us work more really resonated with me. Ever since the introduction of ICT into the general public and particularly during the Personal Computer revolution - we were treated by glimpses of a less laborious future. Of how the computer would do to knowledge work what industrialisation had done to manual labor. That the computer would free us from the mundane and let us focus on the creative. “Mass production becomes mass productivity” was a famous line in Apple’s Industrial Revelation ad from 1990. Good times. It’s a wonderful idea that I and many of my peers believed in. Unfortunately, it never really materialised. Almost 30 years later, the vast majority of us are still working 40 hours a week and whether or not we simply get more things done is arguable to say the least. A select few of us managed to automate ourselves out of the drudgery of office work, but many more succumbed to burnout and depression. Convenience as a "low-pass filter"

Technology is a tool, but it's also an ecosystem and a community. When we make something more convenient, we not only lower the barrier to entry to use a specific tool, we also change the makeup of the community. In the early days, the web was mostly populated by engineers and academics because you pretty much had to be one or the other to participate. That created a certain culture which derived its values from the culture of its population. There existed a healthy level of scepticism towards online content which was measured more by the merits of its message than by how many followers its publisher had on a given platform. We were the judges of this ecosystem - not some recommendation algorithm. ICT hadn’t had enough time to change our behaviour - we were still changing it instead.

Likewise, a certain barrier of complexity between a technology and the general public can act, if you will, as a certain kind of cell membrane. Harmful content (in the widest sense of the word) had been a part of online culture since the very beginning, but in the halcyon days, the spread of that content happened strictly between people that knew how to find it in the first place. Nowadays, we are much more aware of all types of content and the hazards they may pose, but the overwhelming power of convenience of access makes fighting this problem about as futile as the record industry's war with piracy.

Vendor Lock-in as Convenience

How does competition between existing brands work in today's technology sector? Certainly not by the “old rules” of capitalism of building a superior product at a lower cost. Today’s ICT brands don’t have to compete at all because customer “loyalty” is achieved by making it increasingly difficult to switch to a different product. Technically speaking you can still migrate from Android to iOS (or vice versa), but why would the vast majority of consumers go through the hassle when the new platform is pretty much identical to the current one? We see a similar mechanism at work in our social media platforms - yes, competition exists, but the main selling point seems to be “we’re not them” while being identical in features and functionality but without any of your existing contacts. This is a sad fact with no easy solution. I applaud policymakers attempts to break up these oligopolies by means of antitrust legislation, but I fear those measures will not be sufficient. Yes, certain corporate synergies may give these companies an unfair advantage, but it is primarily the lack of compelling alternatives combined with the effort involved in switching that is keeping society hostage. A better approach might be promote local development and interoperability through standardisation.

Enter AI

The current generation of AI systems are the ultimate example of the topics I have touched upon - the tyranny of convenience through its proliferation of complexity, wastefulness and subjugation of personal agency. Additionally, it is also encroaching on human creativity - the one area that ICT was supposed to promote. Large Language Models are incredibly expensive to develop and train putting them out of reach from just about the wealthiest of corporations. To be fair, the same thing could have been said about computers up until the seventies, but it is difficult to imagine AI going through something similar to that of the PC revolution if already just for the fact that we are allowed to use these systems for free.

Conclusion

In 2000, I was working as a service technician at an Apple service provider when a customer walked in with a laptop from 1989. When asked why she used such an antiquated computer, she replied that it was much more convenient to use something that could basically do only one thing. She was a writer. Most of us would not trade the convenience to do virtually everything on a single device, yet few of us would argue that the distractions that come with that convenience are in some way positive. It is my sincere hope that more people start thinking about the technology they use in terms of what they actually want as opposed to what is most conveniently thrust upon them by the industry. That we would choose the convenience that is actually beneficial to us and remember that there is value in effort. That exercising our freedom to find our own technical solutions is both rewarding and fun. There is little doubt that convenience is the primary driving force in the development and adoption of new technology. In my essay, I tried to exam this insight from different aspects, particularly as it applies to the current ICT paradigm. Perhaps my most insightful, if not entirely earth-shattering observation is that we can use convenience to change behaviour - both of end-users and engineers alike and that this mechanism works both ways. After decades of change driven almost exclusively by the prospect of convenience, I am happy to see an increasing number of people also take note of how unsustainable this race to the bottom really is.

Bibliography

Manzini E. “Livable Proximity: Ideas for the City that Cares, 2022

Kelly K. “What Technology Wants”, 2010

Fry H. “Hello World”, 2018

Jünger F.G. “The Failure of Technology” (Die Perfektion der Technik), 1946

Gehlen A. “Man in the age of technology” (Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter), 1957

Berg-Beckhoff G, Nielsen G, Ladekjær Larsen E. Use of information communication technology and stress, burnout, and mental health in older, middle-aged, and younger workers - results from a systematic review. Int J Occup Environ Health. 2017 Apr;23(2):160-171. doi: 10.1080/10773525.2018.1436015. Epub 2018 Feb 20. PMID: 29460697; PMCID: PMC6060856.