When it comes to most things, I’m an extraordinarily patient person. I don’t get fussy when it takes too long for a restaurant to send out the food I’ve ordered, or when I have to wait for hours in a cramped sitting area at a doctor’s office. But despite my generally patient nature, I’m always impatient when it comes to the future. I want it now. I want to be living in the world of tomorrow, today. It just can’t come fast enough.
I’m honestly not sure why. For the past decade (at least), I’ve felt that the world was generally getting worse with each passing year. But yet I still feel this way. I guess it’s a natural inclination towards optimism that I struggle to turn off.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that important things take time. It’s easy to rush things out prematurely, without taking the care to consider the impact, or the unintended consequences. It’s easy to rush things out half-baked, before they’re truly ready. Good things take time.
The good news, though, is that we have the time.
I was fortunate enough to spend my formative years during the period of tech history where things were changing rapidly. Every few months there was some exciting, life-changing gizmo. The DVD, the iPod, the portable media player, the PDA, the netbook, the smartphone, and a steady but impressive evolution of laptops from bulky, awkward slabs to sleek and lightweight mobile machines.
It was exhilarating, and it often felt like it was impossible to keep up with the pace.
I first used Linux back in 2008, on Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”. Coming from Windows XP, it was almost mind blowing. But as I continued to watch the tech world unfold, it felt like we were always trying to catch up. We were always one step behind the “big guys.”
But then, something funny happened; the innovation slowed. The free software alternatives got better and better. They started supporting more hardware. They gained more features. The user experience improved. The visual design made leaps. In many cases, it far surpassed its competition.
How did that happen?
It happened because the move fast, keep iterating, keep growing phase is just that; it’s a phase. Eventually, everything runs out of steam. And on the scale on decades, centuries, and millinea, the five or six years of catch-up are utterly meaningless.
There’s a quote from the movie “Spotlight” that sticks with me: “The church,” it is said, “thinks in centuries.” It’s less concerned with the immediate present, and more concerned with how it’s positioning itself for the future.
It’s a poor example because in this instance the Catholic church was covering up hundreds of horrific sexual abuse cases and protecting the abusers, but the sentiment of moving slow and thinking on larger time scales is nevertheless prescient.
We now know, roughly, what a computer is. We are starting to have a pretty good idea of what a phone is. I suspect that in the future we may figure out that they are the same thing. The innovation hasn’t stopped, but it has plateaued. We’re now in a position where free software can catch up to, and surpass, the alternatives (and, in many cases, already has). And the great thing about free software is, once that happens, with proper maintenance and care, it really can stand the test of time.