6 ms·

Zygmunt Bauman was right on the mark, 25 years ago. > Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fra

Zygmunt Bauman was right on the mark, 25 years ago. > Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) 'post-modernity' and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, 'liquid modernity', is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago 'to be modern' meant to chase 'the final state of perfection' -- now it means an infinity of improvement, with no 'final state' in sight and none desired.

jmathai 4y ago
This may sound silly and be off topic but I believe this is what got me to peruse a career outside of programming. This accurately describes modern life and, I think by extension, modern software development.
- epups 4y ago
  May I ask why? It seems to me that, facing a fast-changing world as described in the article, you would be best served perfecting a skill such as programming to navigate it.
  - jlarocco 4y ago
    I can't speak for the OP, but I've felt this way too, and for me it's because I feel that while most industries are changing for the better, software development seems unusually short sited in chasing new stuff. Most industries are improving as they change, where software (from my perspective) is regressing or just pointlessly churning. The concepts and abstract skill of programming is undoubtedly useful, but the implementation details and how it's done are going to be replaced by something worse in 3 years. I think it bothers me because I'm attached to it, and it's disappointing to see it move in directions I don't like or that feel wrong to me. It's all "market forces" and "public opinion" and nobody controls it, but it would be less depressing in an industry I didn't care about.
    - jmathai 4y ago
      That’s correct. I’ve been programming for 25 years (until I changed careers, still in tech). Software in web development, at least, has a quickly shrinking shelf life and the value it creates (besides intellectual stimulation for developers) seems very very small.
    - packetlost 4y ago
      I whole-heartedly disagree that software engineering is getting worse. The languages, ecosystems, security, processes, etc. are pretty much all far better than they were 10 years ago. You really just have to ignore the loud individuals in the "web3" and JavaScript (JS has largely calmed down lately though) spaces.
      - dopeboy 4y ago
        I think there are aspects of it that are getting worse. Is React better than using vanilla JS? Yes. I like not storing state in the DOM. Is it worth the layers of abstraction, both mental and infrastructural? This is a difficult question to answer.
      - jlarocco 4y ago
        I'm curious if you'd share examples. I think I'd sum up the last 10 years as the web and mobile ecosystems doing a mediocre job trying to catch up to where native apps were 20 years ago. My overall development experience writing C++ 10 years ago was actually better than writing C# and Typescript now. The more interactive environments like Jupyter notebooks and browser dev tools are nice, but they're still not as featureful or as interactive as a good Lisp environment. For consumer software we're nearly in the same place we were 25 years ago, except we took a round trip through the web, and now we're back to downloading native apps, which are more "secure" in some sense, but are funneling private data off to strangers, making it overall worse. And our hardware is 100x more powerful but our software is 1000x more bloated to make up for it. And the business model of consumer software now is to treat the user like an idiot and monetize them as much as possible. Business software has some bright spots, like IAAS, SAAS, etc. but they're kinda just regurgitating ideas from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Security is a funny one because it's technically better, but overall worse because software that wouldn't be connected in the past now "has to" go online, opening it up to attack. There is a lot of good, like the open source world, and Linux and FreeBSD gaining popularity, but even those have dark sides, like corporations exploiting them as a source of cheap or free labor.
- hypomanic 4y ago
  Did you end up changing careers?
  - jmathai 4y ago
    Yes. But not too far away. I went into product management.
yanowitz 4y ago
As were Marx and Engels, 175 years ago in the Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”
- poszlem 4y ago
  Their diagnosis was okay, it's the proposed cure people have a problem with.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    There's actually very little written by Marx or Engels on any kind of proposed "cure". Marx himself reacted very negatively to the idea of "writing recipes for cook-shops of the future." He didn't think it possible, nor desirable, to draw up plans. The "cures" in the 20th century were on the whole written by people with far simpler minds and uglier motives. Their actions don't take away from the value of Marx as an analyst and critic of capitalism.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      What little they did write in the Manifesto did plenty of damage all on its own, and it served as a step-by-step guide for most of history's failed communist states. (Particularly the bits of making "despotic inroads" on the existing systems)
      - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        I don't disagree, but I also think much has been lost in translation between 19th century phrases and language and conventions vs now. Context of the time was revolutions in the context of a mix of brutal 19th century monarchies/dictatorships, proto-capitalist/mostly agrarian economies, and brutal badly regulated industrial capitalisms. The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" in particular has a very unfortunate history and ... interpretation.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I will add to this. In every corporate environment I was a part of, 'the only constant is change' was a common refrain.
nradov 4y ago
Such statements are profoundly ahistorical. Pre-modern life was far more fragile, temporary, vulnerable than anything which people in developed countries experience today. Life for most people involved constant risk of violence, starvation, and disease.
- thewarrior 4y ago
  Yeah but I didn't have to learn how Spear.JS worked in the new monthly update in order to go catch food. The skills I needed and my relationships did not change as often.
  - enraged_camel 4y ago
    Food is actually a profoundly bad example to make your point, because food security before modern times was non-existent pretty much everywhere, even if you had the necessary skills to grow or catch it. :)
    - thewarrior 4y ago
      The supply of food was unstable but the means to find it was not changing all the time. Once you built up a certain foraging / hunting skill the skillset is done. You don't have to relearn it 10 times.
- enraged_camel 4y ago
  While that is true to a certain extent, what is also true is that the overall rate of change for pretty much everything was much, much slower before modern times. If your situation was relatively stable, that slow pace of change could mean a certain amount of safety and security in certain contexts.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Nonsense. Pre-modern life was anything but stable, safe, or secure. People were subject to invasions, pestilence, bad weather, plagues, accidents, the list goes on. Anyone who believes that the rate of change was slower in pre-modern times is simply ignorant of history and archaeology. There are many types of change beyond just technological change.
blippage 4y ago
It's interesting to contrast this with Japan. Japan has some of the longest-lived companies [1]. Construction, hotels, sake and confectionery feature prominently. Meanwhile, the average company lifespan on the S&P500 went down from 32 years in 1965 to 20 years last year. [2] I suspect that the difference has a lot to do with culture. The Japanese companies with a long life are probably smaller, family-run, and don't go aggressively for growth. When your company has been going for over 200 years, I imagine one feels a sense of "don't fuck it up." Compare that to the US, where it's always ever onwards and upwards, always going for growth. The Japanese have some ideas which seem bizarre to the West. Like, companies in those positions might "adopt a son". Typically they're 25-30 year-old men who take on the name of their adopted families. They then run the business (although presumably not straight away). Seems weird, but look at the results. These small Japanese businesses seem more in-tune with their regular employees, too, treating them like an extended family, to some extent. There's no hire and fire mentality that we've been seeing lately; with the likes of Microsoft scooping up a big workforce only to turn around a couple of years later and reverse it. It's a shitty way to treat people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1259275/average-company-lifespan/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1259275/average-company-...
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  > The Japanese have some ideas which seem bizarre to the West. Like, companies in those positions might "adopt a son". Typically they're 25-30 year-old men who take on the name of their adopted families. They then run the business (although presumably not straight away). Seems weird, but look at the results. Family-run companies don't have an agent-principal problem companies with a dedicated corporate management layer have, but they have a problem of inheritance: when the old owner+manager dies, the new one must be one of his children, but this is a very limited pool of potential successors. What if your sons are all rakes and louts? Someone who loves working for your business and shows a lot of potential is a much better heir if he's willing to become your son-in-law. The whole "adopt a son" thing is just a bit of legal fiction the preserve the family name.

jmathai 4y ago

This may sound silly and be off topic but I believe this is what got me to peruse a career outside of programming. This accurately describes modern life and, I think by extension, modern software development.

epups 4y ago
May I ask why? It seems to me that, facing a fast-changing world as described in the article, you would be best served perfecting a skill such as programming to navigate it.
- jlarocco 4y ago
  I can't speak for the OP, but I've felt this way too, and for me it's because I feel that while most industries are changing for the better, software development seems unusually short sited in chasing new stuff. Most industries are improving as they change, where software (from my perspective) is regressing or just pointlessly churning. The concepts and abstract skill of programming is undoubtedly useful, but the implementation details and how it's done are going to be replaced by something worse in 3 years. I think it bothers me because I'm attached to it, and it's disappointing to see it move in directions I don't like or that feel wrong to me. It's all "market forces" and "public opinion" and nobody controls it, but it would be less depressing in an industry I didn't care about.
  - jmathai 4y ago
    That’s correct. I’ve been programming for 25 years (until I changed careers, still in tech). Software in web development, at least, has a quickly shrinking shelf life and the value it creates (besides intellectual stimulation for developers) seems very very small.
  - packetlost 4y ago
    I whole-heartedly disagree that software engineering is getting worse. The languages, ecosystems, security, processes, etc. are pretty much all far better than they were 10 years ago. You really just have to ignore the loud individuals in the "web3" and JavaScript (JS has largely calmed down lately though) spaces.
    - dopeboy 4y ago
      I think there are aspects of it that are getting worse. Is React better than using vanilla JS? Yes. I like not storing state in the DOM. Is it worth the layers of abstraction, both mental and infrastructural? This is a difficult question to answer.
    - jlarocco 4y ago
      I'm curious if you'd share examples. I think I'd sum up the last 10 years as the web and mobile ecosystems doing a mediocre job trying to catch up to where native apps were 20 years ago. My overall development experience writing C++ 10 years ago was actually better than writing C# and Typescript now. The more interactive environments like Jupyter notebooks and browser dev tools are nice, but they're still not as featureful or as interactive as a good Lisp environment. For consumer software we're nearly in the same place we were 25 years ago, except we took a round trip through the web, and now we're back to downloading native apps, which are more "secure" in some sense, but are funneling private data off to strangers, making it overall worse. And our hardware is 100x more powerful but our software is 1000x more bloated to make up for it. And the business model of consumer software now is to treat the user like an idiot and monetize them as much as possible. Business software has some bright spots, like IAAS, SAAS, etc. but they're kinda just regurgitating ideas from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Security is a funny one because it's technically better, but overall worse because software that wouldn't be connected in the past now "has to" go online, opening it up to attack. There is a lot of good, like the open source world, and Linux and FreeBSD gaining popularity, but even those have dark sides, like corporations exploiting them as a source of cheap or free labor.
hypomanic 4y ago
Did you end up changing careers?
- jmathai 4y ago
  Yes. But not too far away. I went into product management.

yanowitz 4y ago

As were Marx and Engels, 175 years ago in the Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”

poszlem 4y ago
Their diagnosis was okay, it's the proposed cure people have a problem with.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  There's actually very little written by Marx or Engels on any kind of proposed "cure". Marx himself reacted very negatively to the idea of "writing recipes for cook-shops of the future." He didn't think it possible, nor desirable, to draw up plans. The "cures" in the 20th century were on the whole written by people with far simpler minds and uglier motives. Their actions don't take away from the value of Marx as an analyst and critic of capitalism.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    What little they did write in the Manifesto did plenty of damage all on its own, and it served as a step-by-step guide for most of history's failed communist states. (Particularly the bits of making "despotic inroads" on the existing systems)
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      I don't disagree, but I also think much has been lost in translation between 19th century phrases and language and conventions vs now. Context of the time was revolutions in the context of a mix of brutal 19th century monarchies/dictatorships, proto-capitalist/mostly agrarian economies, and brutal badly regulated industrial capitalisms. The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" in particular has a very unfortunate history and ... interpretation.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I will add to this. In every corporate environment I was a part of, 'the only constant is change' was a common refrain.

nradov 4y ago

Such statements are profoundly ahistorical. Pre-modern life was far more fragile, temporary, vulnerable than anything which people in developed countries experience today. Life for most people involved constant risk of violence, starvation, and disease.

thewarrior 4y ago
Yeah but I didn't have to learn how Spear.JS worked in the new monthly update in order to go catch food. The skills I needed and my relationships did not change as often.
- enraged_camel 4y ago
  Food is actually a profoundly bad example to make your point, because food security before modern times was non-existent pretty much everywhere, even if you had the necessary skills to grow or catch it. :)
  - thewarrior 4y ago
    The supply of food was unstable but the means to find it was not changing all the time. Once you built up a certain foraging / hunting skill the skillset is done. You don't have to relearn it 10 times.
enraged_camel 4y ago
While that is true to a certain extent, what is also true is that the overall rate of change for pretty much everything was much, much slower before modern times. If your situation was relatively stable, that slow pace of change could mean a certain amount of safety and security in certain contexts.
- nradov 4y ago
  Nonsense. Pre-modern life was anything but stable, safe, or secure. People were subject to invasions, pestilence, bad weather, plagues, accidents, the list goes on. Anyone who believes that the rate of change was slower in pre-modern times is simply ignorant of history and archaeology. There are many types of change beyond just technological change.

blippage 4y ago

It's interesting to contrast this with Japan. Japan has some of the longest-lived companies [1]. Construction, hotels, sake and confectionery feature prominently. Meanwhile, the average company lifespan on the S&P500 went down from 32 years in 1965 to 20 years last year. [2] I suspect that the difference has a lot to do with culture. The Japanese companies with a long life are probably smaller, family-run, and don't go aggressively for growth. When your company has been going for over 200 years, I imagine one feels a sense of "don't fuck it up." Compare that to the US, where it's always ever onwards and upwards, always going for growth. The Japanese have some ideas which seem bizarre to the West. Like, companies in those positions might "adopt a son". Typically they're 25-30 year-old men who take on the name of their adopted families. They then run the business (although presumably not straight away). Seems weird, but look at the results. These small Japanese businesses seem more in-tune with their regular employees, too, treating them like an extended family, to some extent. There's no hire and fire mentality that we've been seeing lately; with the likes of Microsoft scooping up a big workforce only to turn around a couple of years later and reverse it. It's a shitty way to treat people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1259275/average-company-lifespan/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1259275/average-company-...

orthoxerox 4y ago
> The Japanese have some ideas which seem bizarre to the West. Like, companies in those positions might "adopt a son". Typically they're 25-30 year-old men who take on the name of their adopted families. They then run the business (although presumably not straight away). Seems weird, but look at the results. Family-run companies don't have an agent-principal problem companies with a dedicated corporate management layer have, but they have a problem of inheritance: when the old owner+manager dies, the new one must be one of his children, but this is a very limited pool of potential successors. What if your sons are all rakes and louts? Someone who loves working for your business and shows a lot of potential is a much better heir if he's willing to become your son-in-law. The whole "adopt a son" thing is just a bit of legal fiction the preserve the family name.