💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2023 › 202312 › 20231205-the-end-of-good-enough.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:18:14. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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With the exception of gaming equipment, all of my computers run some flavor of Linux. Linux is much more powerful than Windows, but it's also geared toward IT professionals and other power users, which means I need to configure large parts of the OS myself. I have the freedom to easily build scripts or even standalone programs for custom data processing--on the other hand, because it's easy to do so, I'm often expected to do it on my own. The result of this effort is a fleet of systems that are by no means perfect, but certainly work well enough for my purposes.
I write these notes about Linux over Gemini, a protocol with a similar do-it-yourself attitude among its users. Gemini isn't a perfect protocol, as the endless debates about its features and weaknesses show. But, like Gopher and the early days of HTML before it, it serves well enough to allow an ecosystem of capsules to grow and thrive within its own niche.
To me, both of these things are examples of "good enough" tools. They're not suitable for every purpose, and one may be hard-pressed to argue that they're perfect for any purpose. But they are robust enough to do a huge number of things, many of them surprisingly well if one is willing to look past a utilitarian presentation and apply a little elbow grease.
The concept of "good enough" has been with humanity for a long time, probably as long as humanity has had the ability to create tools. Fire is dangerous and difficult to control, but it functions well enough to give light and heat. Clubs and arrows don't always kill prey, but our ancestors used them to great effect to stay alive. Animal hides protected us from the cold; mules and oxen powered our agriculture; even political paradigms and religious movements helped to build civilizations that empowered humans to build cities and create works of art.
But something has happened in the last few decades. In much of the developed world, "good enough" is no longer good enough. "Good enough" is unacceptable: we now demand that everything is perfect all the time. If our computers or smartphones need to restart due to an update, we bemoan the time it takes to complete the update, rather than appreciate how much uptime we do have. Routine maintenance on a car is an annoyance, despite the fact that cars last much longer and require much less maintenance today than they did even two decades ago. If our travel plans are delayed--even if our plane departs twenty minutes later than we expected--our cabins are filled with grumbling passengers, some even clamoring for vouchers or full refunds for their inconvenience. Something as simple as Instagram loading slowly garners complaints, and in the most online-addicted cases, even panic attacks. Nothing short of flawless will do for us anymore.
So many people have no appreciation or even understanding of the absolute marvel that is the modern world. The machinery that drives our modern conveniences and streamlines them into the slick products we enjoy did not develop by happenstance. They are artificial, highly-contrived phenomena that have little bearing on the processes of the natural world, and we certainly have no innate right or sovereign entitlement to any of them. In order to even be possible to realize, these systems require unfathomably complex logistical networks; decades of scientific research in hundreds of unrelated fields; billions of man-hours of engineering and labor; careful utilization of raw resources and financial capital; endless market research; support crews working around the clock on weekends and holidays; the list goes on and on. A cursory study in supply chain management and global trade is quite illuminating in understanding monumental undertaking that is the modern global economy, both physical and virtual.
I don't know where this view came from that absolute perfection is the only acceptable standard, but I'm sure many factors contribute to it. Businesses and governments make unrealistic promises in their advertisements and campaign speeches. Much of global logistics is hidden behind security fences and commercial patents, turning the system on which our modern lifestyle depends into a trade secret. Consumer apathy and entitlement is a big problem: Amazon customers want to click a button one day and see the package on their doorstep the next day, with no fuss, no questions and no excuses. The real world doesn't work like that, but no-one wants to accept that reality anymore.
The effects of this expectation are becoming so severe as to almost reach the point of parody. There have been many well-documented instances of kids experiencing anxiety attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, or even suicidal thoughts because they did not have access to the Internet or their video game consoles. Many people are utterly lost when Steam doesn't load correctly, an e-mail app refuses to connect to a server, or their Air Pods run out of charge in the middle of a podcast. These are all temporary inconveniences, but our society does not stand for even the tiniest failures.
Gemini's small-scale ecosystem is prone to many kinds of problems. Capsule owners might change certificates, change hosting providers, or have their capsule go down entirely for a while. I myself have experienced bugs in my CGI code, sometimes to the point of breaking services. Sites go up and come down quickly; users lose their client certificates; crawlers and indexers don't always work right. But we as a userbase (should) understand that these things happen. They're a part of any frontier, digital or otherwise: things break and things fail. But they're also a part of everyday life: things eventually stop working, no matter how reliable and robust they are.
The loss of "good enough" in our culture is a critical one. I believe society cannot be healthy without understanding and accepting that things do not always go right. If we must rely on everything to be perfect in order to be happy, we will never find happiness.
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[Last updated: 2023-12-05]