Tech-last

Her’s one example: many years ago I couldn’t get folks on a team to stop talking about emoji. At every turn folks would see the popularity of emoji bloom around them and then they would try and slam it into the website we worked on together. Emoji all the things! The team was obsessed with the emoji they were seeing in emails and websites and apps that they couldn’t imagine a world without them. They believed that our humble website looked out of touch without emoji, where I loudly, aggressively argued that by chasing trends we would never be the ones to set them.

A few months later, the obsession was gone. Overnight we stopped talking about emoji and now every other conversation was focused on some half-baked project about chatbots. Then it was crypto of course, then a few years later it was NFT junk that disappeared just as quickly as it came, and now, today, again with the chatbots. Although they’ve improved quite a bit, I still believe that once the initial excitement wears off it’s easy to see how these tools spit out mostly useless and irrelevant chunks of words that you can’t ever trust.

It’s cool tech, sure. But it ain’t a product.