>> Some smooth brains
Nintendo struck gold with the original Switch, and instead of leaning on their “what-if-we” philosophy that has guided their console creation in the past, they decided to play it safe with the Switch 2.
While it’s hard to blame them for this approach, I’ve gotta say, I’m so tired of all the best technology in the world becoming so mundane and boring.
Phones, smartwatches, game consoles, and especially the games themselves have all become formulaic copy/paste crap year after year.
The product pump is the death of creativity.
The Great Smoothening—(Boring Wins the Quarter).
The Great Smoothening or just “smoothening”, is the process where raw, weird, human passion is sanded down by a thousand data points until it’s smooth, safe, and utterly devoid of any personality. “Boring” for short.
We’ve gotten so efficient at finding the common denominator that we’ve optimized the "soul" right out of our products.
While the indie scene is stronger than ever, I miss the time when creatives were the heads of the large companies. Now, all of the large companies are guided by numbers and charts instead of passion and taking chances.
Why have we gotten here? My guess, Analytics.
Never in any other time in history have we had the ability to test a product’s performance like we do now. Not only that, we can test how users use the product—why, when, and how long.
That's not all, companies have been finding new ways to exploit us to gather even more points for their crusade of smoothening.
Now, they are at the point where the average analytics track how many times a day you interact with a product, what times of day, and the locations you normally interact with it. There is even software that records your real-time mouse movements and touch points to show how you interact with a company’s software.
In the more egregious cases, companies can now also see your predicted mood based on what you share online, or products and locations you usually visit when you post sad or happy things on social media. Meta has been accused of doing this very thing to young girls.
THIS TRAIN IS OUT OF CONTROL.
In a world where "Number Go Up" is the only metric of success, risk is treated like a disease.
If we ignore all of the egregious privacy infractions, this still leads us to stale, bland products.
When you don’t have creative visionaries and risk takers at the helm of a company, you get stuck with smooth brain losers who optimize for predictability over originality. Why risk innovating and hitting it big, when you can almost guarantee that you hit the forecasted numbers for the quarter.
Thus the smoothening of our humanity continues on…
It’s honestly such bullshit and I’m so sick and tired of everything boiling down to lines on a graph moving upward. Even on passion projects, it’s easy to get caught up in the rat-race.
I myself will look at my analytics and see how well it performed. And even though I lie to myself and say that it doesn’t influence how or what I write about, I know subconsciously it's impossible for me to not be affected.
Let's love the weird—(Get rid of “E”-for Everyone)
The solution is to champion the weird! Love the people and products that go against the grain. Products and ideas that were made, because someone wanted to see it made, not solely as a vehicle to make money. We need to see more opinionated ideas for us to invest into.
There need to be more products that are NOT FOR YOU. Products that are not made for everyone.
An easy example that I just received was Panic’s Playdate console. It's a tiny gaming handheld with a crank, no backlight, and a one-bit screen. The graphics are really limited and you can only play in ideal light, but FUCK they decided to make it anyway.
>> playdate handheld console
God dammit, I love this thing. It says “FUCK YOU” to so many conveniences we are used to, but that middle finger has allowed a community of interesting and quirky people to make games for it.
The XTEINK is another example that barely has internet access, no online store, slow, tiny, and only has a file browser for a library, but so damn lovable!
>> XTEINK X4
Let's stop accepting the bare minimum for everything and start embracing the weird, the bizarre, the risk-takers, the highly opinionated ideas and products.
Products are just the symptom. When we train ourselves to only consume what the algorithm serves up, to only buy what tested well, to only make what the numbers approve--we start smoothening ourselves. Our taste, our weirdness, our gut feeling that something rules even though it can't be explained and backed by their charts.
STOP THE SMOOTHENING OF PEOPLE.
Please, for all of us—fight the smoothening and embrace the weird.
/squawk <~
by untitled_operator
In the spirit of weird, check out my pika page if you want to see this site in it's original glory. It's definitely opinionated.