Developers love contracts, i.e. types and type systems. Except, and especially, when they don’t. Contracts tell us, this module has a few functions and they definitely take these inputs and produce these outputs. Some languages (Haskell, Elm) even encode the possible side-effects of calling a function in the types. Contracts place useful, and sometimes comforting, constraints on the relationship between two bits of code.
A consequence of software eating the world is real-world contracts became weaker. Physical objects no longer have the constraints that made them special before.
That fancy car you bought might mix artificial engine sounds in with whatever’s playing on your speakers. It may also collect data on where you’re going, upload it through a cellular data connection you’re not even paying for, and sell it for “marketing”. All of this a departure from what was previously considered the “contract” for a high-end car.
That porch camera an e-commerce giant sold you so people don’t steal packages off your porch may also be accessible to their customer support. Or, the police. Again, a departure from the contract most of us grew up with for household electronics.
That book you bought might get “turned off” if it’s no longer a good business for the vendor. It might get changed if words in it were wrong or politically inconvenient. You guessed it, not quite the contract most of us expect from a bag of words.
That computer-enhanced movie you went to see might get revamped wholesale because the teeth are creepy, a human hand where a cat’s paw should be was overlooked, or because people were having too much of a laugh about the whole movie. Notably, this is not Martin Scorcese’s vision of what cinema should be.
Before they were software it was natural that cars, books, appliances, vinyl, etc. had better contracts:
To understand why books are still around, and why they delight as they do, we need to do some “media accounting” — What are the costs (individually, socially) of engaging with certain media and mediums, apps and publications?
Understanding the contracts into which we enter with media helps demystify why physical books (and, similarly, vinyl, analog film, et cetera) not only remain compelling, but become more compelling the more their digital twins grow vast and fuzzy.
Stab a Book, the Book Won’t Die – Craig Mod
The software we’re building today is in almost every way superior to the immutable objects we created before. But I can’t help think that the constraints that make a copy of Cat’s Cradle, The White Album, an Omega watch, or a Porsche 911 special might make software better as well.
Perhaps what we need is a little less change and a little more purpose.
Adam Keys is typing 