We can't have nice things
The recurring phrase "This is why we can't have nice things" struck me harder than I'd like to admit. It's just a meme used to blame Y for the state of affairs of X. A meme that became a song. But there is something about it that bothers me deeply: we actually cannot have nice things. Usually.
Here's why:
For every X thing in our complex world, there is a small group of individuals who deeply care about it - The Boutique; there is another small group of individuals who would rather see it as something they can exploit - The Crooks; and there is a very large group of individuals who care to a certain extent, but wouldn't bother to keep X in shape - The Normies. In other words, the level of individual concern for keeping X nice follows something like a Normal Distribution.
I know, I know. This is a simplification along the lines of let that cow be a sphere. But let me make my case.
X is nice in the beginning, as it is driven by The Boutique. Once The Normies realize X is nice, they gradually adopt it, pushing The Boutique, as time goes by, to a position of lower influence. Once The Crooks realize The Normies are onboard, they find ways to exploit their naïveté for short-term profit. Then either X ends up destroyed by The Crooks or heavily damaged by the countermeasures set in place by both The Boutique and The Normies as they try to rescue it. Either way, the nice phase of X is gone for good.
I should note that The Normies tend to ruin nice things not out of malice, but through indifference and lack of concern. They demand convenience over consistency and discipline, thus creating a context that The Crooks can exploit.
The more X depends on network effects, the more reality aligns with this theory.
We're all part of The Boutique for a couple of things and part of The Normies for most other things in life. Whether you are a CEO imposing Azure on your technical team, a CFO forbidding Capex, an end user demanding Spotify on a work computer, or a wedding-DJ playing reggaeton - nobody's innocent in this game.
My former accountant was never worried about browser monopolies - his ERP software was so inefficient that being forced to use Internet Explorer was the least of his concerns. And I was never an accounting-standards zealot - he knew accounting in detail and I simply trusted he would follow the right standards. Perhaps other accountants were sloppy and he wasn't. For me, boutique accounting was not a top priority - accounting remained a practical issue. For him, boutique internet standards were not critical - a somewhat working browser was a practical concern.
This is why we can't have nice things.
You might think I'm getting overly dramatic. Let me present some depressing tech-facts from 2026, the year when the AI revolution is all over the news:
- email usability sucks / email maintenance sucks too
- we still can't interoperate "office" documents across systems without frequent formatting problems
- a single HTML rendering engine (Blink/Chromium) controls nearly 80% of the web
- software engineering follows hype cycles rather than engineering principles
- Devops is dead and buried
- social networks are filled with culture wars, garbage, misinformation, and political manipulation
These things used to be nice! At the very least, they were getting nicer at some point. Until they weren't.
Let's elaborate on 1.
Email was nice during the 90s and early 2000s. Terminal-based email clients were fast. Graphical email clients implemented threading and understood quotation symbols. Attachments were attachments. Complex software projects were often managed over email. People used email to communicate with their peers across the globe: for the sake of science, engineering, commerce, and friendship. By then, there were many different software options built on open standards (SMTP, POP, IMAP) that allowed for distributed management of email systems and personal choice with regard to clients. That was the boutique period.
Here's a screenshot from the Suse wiki showing deep threads and quoting, both perfectly handled by KMail:
What happened next? Here's how events unfolded:
- HTML crept into email, but obviously half-baked HTML wouldn't work correctly across different email clients
- attachment images and inline images got mixed up; users could no longer tell the difference, email clients struggled to render
- people started using email messages as attachments to other email messages
- stupid Winmail.dat became a thing
- stupid non-standard protocols from Microsoft Exchange prevented network interoperability
- Outlook broke email threading and quoting to the point that those email capabilities were forgotten
- Google had the opportunity to redo email usability with Gmail but, despite it being faster than Office 365, the overall usability is still not great and the implementation of "conversations" is terrible
What used to be a peaceful and interoperable communication experience turned into an email client incompatibility nightmare. I'm well aware that large corporations needed pink highlights in the message body, along with underlining and Comic Sans. Home users, on the other hand, needed cat pictures on the email signature. But at what cost, may I ask?
As this was happening, The Crooks realized that email was now being heavily used by The Normies. That opened an entire blue ocean for SPAM, commercial scams and security hacks. The Normies click on every .EXE or office document sent by email. They click on every link too. And if something takes time to react, they keep clicking.
As non-legitimate emails became dominant, inboxes were flooded and security hacks piled up. Countermeasures had to be set in place: SPAM classifiers, SPF, DKIM, gray listing, rate limiting, blocking of all "residential" network blocks, third-party blacklists, server-side virus scanning... The necessary effort to run email systems became so high that today only a handful of providers can handle it. Once this level of concentration was reached, poor interoperability stepped in - we now face deliverability hell for smaller providers. A large email provider can afford to let your legitimate emails sink into a black hole while providing no explanations. It might react if another entire large provider is unable to deliver, but small providers are left with trial and error. This is a huge incentive to concentration - we shouldn't expect additional competition on the email front. Thus, it's unlikely that usability will improve.
How can I be so confident about this? I managed email servers and supported business users for 18 years. I am not alone, by the way. To illustrate how far the email oligopoly situation is accepted, this is how Slack, a normie company that lacks the resources to make video calls work on Firefox, sees email:
From this point on, there is no way back. Email - a protocol built on Open Standards by Internet pioneers - is effectively controlled by Crooks and Normies. Because email now sucks, it's used less frequently than before, most of the communication happening inside the walled gardens of messaging apps like Slack, Whatsapp or Teams. And with messaging apps, we have mixed usability, no interoperability and no Open Standards, not to mention the obvious privacy issues. The Commons have been tragically defeated. There was no external enemy, it was defeat from within.
Going forward, it would be tempting to review the entire OOXML debacle (depressing tech-fact n.2) and draw some parallels. That's another case in which a boutique standards group working on long-term interoperability for the Commons was overrun by a coalition of Normies (pressed by short-term agendas) under dubious incentives by some Crooks. Finding out who's who in the OOXML saga is an exercise for the reader. Investigating 3-6 is extra homework. Bonus points for assessments on whether or not the Internet is now mostly ads and slop.
Lastly: one might wonder, so how come Wikipedia didn't collapse as it became popular? The answer lies in differentiating "scale of consumption" and "scale of participation/influence". While reading Wikipedia ranks high consumption-wise, being a Wikipedia editor remains a niche activity.
Can something be done?
I will say that one way to keep having nice things is to find a business that can be both sustained by The Boutique and managed by The Boutique. B2B as in boutique to boutique, whatever your boutique of choice is. Another way might be to prevent consumers/users from determining governance. Linux, for instance, which reached the hands of the masses via Android smartphones, is famous for living under the tight grip of a bad-tempered BDFL. And there is HTMX: they invite everybody to be the CEO, but in the end it's good old Carson Gross doing most of the work, while promising "no new features as a feature".
Jokes aside, I remain pessimistic: very few nice things are left and all of them are constantly under pressure. Those who care deeply will have to find their own bubble. Where is yours?