Living contradictions

Charlie recently gave a talk at Chain React about the future of mobile app development. I like his talks because they still sound like him: loose, opinionated, slightly nerdy. He’s an unusual CEO, a decent human, and a huge nerd. At one point he said, “picture some stone tablet, or the Constitution of the United States, or the Bible, or whatever the specs of your thing.” Great. Then he got to my favorite topic: taste. Then the perennial design-engineering gap. AI is supposed to collapse some of that distance. He also acknowledged that it isn’t quite there yet.

There’s something very SF about that phrase. Maybe it’s the unofficial motto of the software industry. Maybe of California. We’re not there yet, but presumably we’ll keep building until we are, and then the goalpost will move again.

Johnny is one of my roommates: middle-aged, divorced, liberal, pot-smoking, super chill, and working a low-wage job. We were talking about politics and technology one day, and I was explaining why I think we’re in a particularly weird moment. Social media already did something ugly to our brains... and now AI.

Johnny shrugged. Every generation thinks the new thing is uniquely fucked, he said. Radio, television, the internet. People panic, people adapt, life goes on. That didn’t land particularly well in my skull. Radio and television seemed categorically different to me. The internet maybe less so. Social media, definitely not. AI felt different again. We argued our way toward a compromise: maybe humans have been fucking it up at least since the Industrial Revolution, but somehow we kept going.

Charlie and Johnny have almost nothing in common, but they meet somewhere in my head. Charlie is obsessed with what comes next. Johnny is perfectly comfortable not knowing. I envy both.

I like making things. It’s still thrilling to have something in your head and watch it materialize in the world. But I distrust the assumption that making something faster, easier, or more powerful necessarily counts as progress. Like taste, progress is more subjective than I would have guessed.

When I admitted to Charlie that I was tired and occasionally worried about becoming irrelevant, he didn’t give me the usual technology-is-inevitable pep talk. He sympathized. That stuck with me. Apparently you can be genuinely excited about what’s coming and still feel exhausted by it.

Johnny offers something else. For all his cynicism, he’s one of the most actively hopeful people I’ve met lately. He doesn’t need a theory of where everything is going, or even to believe that the future will be good. He just trusts that we’ll keep going.

One gives uncertainty a direction. The other gives it space. I want both: the urgency to make something and the freedom not to know what it means.

I’ve seen enough variations on this spectrum to understand that nobody gets to sit entirely on one side of the argument.

Certainly not me.