The negotiation cycle.

Some years back, I went to see an old friend give a talk. They’d been asked by a nearby university to speak about their design career — not just the work they’d done, but how they approached it. At one point in the evening, my friend showed editorial work they’d done for various publications: beautiful illustrations that would accompany a feature article, a longform essay, or the like. They mentioned they didn’t really do that work any more, in part because of how tiring it was to constantly, quickly, ceaselessly produce concepts for each new piece. I remember them talking about that work, and a phrase they used: “It requires you to be endlessly clever.”

I think about that line a lot.

And I was thinking about it again while reading Alan Jacobs’ thoughtful essay on what he calls “The Standard Critique of Technology” — think Ursula Franklin, Ivan Illich, and their philosophical cohort — and some suggestions on how best to expand upon it, during a time in which human society has all but surrendered to ubiquitous, all-surveying technology.¹

Anyway. The essay is quite long, and a little academic in tone. But I think it’s generally quite good, and worth your time. With all that said, I know you’re busy! If you don’t read the piece in full, these were the two paragraphs that brought me back to that old lecture hall, and to my friend’s words:

We might think of the shifting relationship of human beings to the natural world in the terms offered by German sociologist Gerd-Günter Voß, who has traced our movement through three different models of the “conduct of life.” The first, and for much of human history the only conduct of life, is what he calls the traditional. Your actions within the traditional conduct of life proceed from social and familial circumstances, from what is thus handed down to you. In such a world it is reasonable for family names to be associated with trades, trades that will be passed down from father to son: Smith, Carpenter, Miller. But the rise of the various forces that we call “modernity” led to the emergence of the strategic conduct of life: a life with a plan, with certain goals — to get into law school, to become a cosmetologist, to get a corner office.

Quite recently, thanks largely to totalizing technology’s formation of a world in which, to borrow a phrase from Marx and Engels, “all that is solid melts into air,” the strategic model of conduct is replaced by the situational. Instead of being systematic planners, we become agile improvisers: If the job market is bad for your college major, you turn a side hustle into a business. But because you know that your business may get disrupted by the tech industry, you don’t bother thinking long-term; your current gig might disappear at any time, but another will surely present itself, which you will assess upon its arrival.

As tech workers, we’re expected to constantly adapt — to be, well, endlessly clever. We’re asked to learn the latest framework, the newest design tool, the latest research methodology. Our tools keep getting updated, processes become more complex, and the simple act of just doing work seems to get redefined overnight.

And crucially, we’re not the ones who get to redefine how we work. Most recently, our industry’s relentless investment in “artificial intelligence” means that every time a new Devin or Firefly or Sora announces itself, the rest of us have to ask how we’ll adapt this time.

Dunno. Maybe it’s time we step out of that negotiation cycle, and start deciding what we want our work to look like.

I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times.