2024 October 30
Hastily-written post this week — I’m under the gun to get ready to present DASCH at ADASS, which means that I need to make as much progress as I can on preparing DR7; plus there's the small matter of a nearly-continuous season-long panic attack about US politics reaching its apex (hopefully). It’s crunch time.
Related to the latter item, I’ve belatedly joined up to help the Somerville Democrats with technical support on their phonebanking operations. And, man, it has made me really mad at Zoom. Zoom got one important thing right (framing video chats as “rooms” that people enter asynchronously, rather than synchronous person-to-person-to-person “calls”), but I've been getting reminded how clunky the bulk of the software is. For me, at least, managing a participants list of a few hundred people is basically unusably slow. My laptop is pretty powerful; modern computers should not have trouble handling lists that small.
Then, of course, Zoom’s popup windows all have custom scrollbars that are tiny and behave erratically. In large events, navigating the participants list and the chat is a constant struggle. In a very narrow sense, I find this intriguing, because Zoom is far from the only software that customizes its scrollbars. GUI developers are always implementing their own scroll interface instead of using the built-in OS widgets. It’s so common, in fact, that I feel that there must be some genuinely profound social truth about why that’s the case — but I can’t put my finger on what that is. Putting aside that point of interest, it’s pretty annoying!
But it’s a lot more than just “annoying,” isn’t it? This election will have literal life-and-death consequences for substantial numbers of people, and here I am fighting with Zoom’s scrollbars.
Obviously, what I’m doing is just one speck of dirt in an enormous landscape. A whole lot of people use Zoom, though. It’s so frustrating to see this tool mostly help people, but then let them down in ways that often stem from quite narrow, technical choices. It works well enough to become a part of their lives (clearly, Zoom is doing something right to be so widely used), then fails them.
I’ve written before about how these kinds of failures, or maybe missed opportunities, seem to bother me a lot more than most other people. These days Zoom is making me feel the same way as short-sighted zoning regulations, sloppy mathematical typography, TeX’s bad documentation, or Slurm’s primitive organizational tools. I have trouble pinpointing what these things all have in common. The best term I can come up with — still deeply unsatisfying — is “systems leverage”. These are all manifestations of shortcomings in what we might call rule-based, sociotechnical systems. The beauty of these systems, if you want to call it that, is that truly they can empower people to accomplish genuinely impressive things, things that simply wouldn’t be possible if the systems didn’t exist. They offer an enormous amount of leverage by providing people with both tangible tools and conceptual models about their domains.
But if you don’t monitor and maintain these kinds of systems, that leverage can start working against you. A system designed with skill and good intentions can, of course, as easily become one that forces people into objectively negative outcomes, or subtly constrain their idea of what’s possible, as it can be one that actually helps and empowers. And since the world is always changing, the fact that a system works well now doesn’t mean that it will necessarily keep on working well in the future. So, in my view, we owe it to ourselves to survey the systems that shape our lives and help ensure that they are well-maintained.
It’s a commonplace that people often err by trying to solve social problems with technical fixes. But I think it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that sometimes, a technical fix is exactly what you need. Heck, we should celebrate those times — I don’t care what’s going on under the hood; fixing Zoom’s scrollbars is going to be a lot more straightforward than fixing the system we know as capitalism. We should never fool ourselves into thinking that these fixes are sufficient, but I’d like to think that they help make the much more difficult and important fixes achievable.