It’s not just you, software is getting worse.

You may have noticed that software seems to be getting worse lately, it’s even resulted in a term called “enshittification,” coined by Cory Doctorow. He also has called it “platform decay,” and we would add an older term to the mix called “dark patterns.” 

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification…” - Cory Doctorow

Let’s quickly define dark patterns as well, these are UI strategies that essentially abuse their users. Perhaps most famously, Facebook would hide, remove, or simply uncheck for you the privacy settings back in the day. Like enshittification, this essentially comes down to a philosophy that says scamming and abusing my users is the best way to make money off of a technology product. That is bad philosophy, it’s short-term thinking at best, and it’s probably not going too far to call it sociopathic. Yet it appears to be the norm in technology today.

A technology company building software from bad philosophy will tend toward short-term thinking and therefore eventually fall short. One example is Activision’s acquisition of Blizzard. They took a long-term thinking leader and juiced it for some short-term cash. Blizzard had a successful relationship with its gamers that Activision wasn’t able to continue; they lacked good philosophy. 

Unlike Activision, original Blizzard understood the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, they applied better philosophy, resulting in better products. When programmers adopted Agile (a modern software development philosophy), they were able to build better software. In 2003, Google developed the philosophy of Site Reliability Engineering, which later became the standard for large scale IT infrastructure. In the first example, better philosophy resulted in better relationships with customers. In the second two examples better philosophy enhanced companies' ability to wrestle with reality. 

Here at Third Eye Tech we incubate a number of projects we believe in, projects that come from good philosophy. Perhaps the most clear cut example is Zenbox, a product that uses cutting edge technology with zen principles to bring people into certain brainwave patterns associated with meditation practice. Other times the projects are not so on the “third eye” nose as it were. Take Fire Meetings, a plugin that helps you track the cost of meetings you attend. Like so many plugins, it’s a form of taking the power back from technology rather than mindlessly losing ourselves in it. 

Our name, Third Eye Technologies, stems from the idea of mixing traditional wisdom with emerging technology. Our company DNA is rooted in being a solution to the problems outlined above, a counterexample that rejects the prevailing practices we see at work in today's predatory capitalism. Instead we believe in holistic health for our company, our employees, our software, and the users of our software. 

Let us know what you think, we’d love to hear of examples both positive and negative!