App Ideas, Personal Effectiveness and Click Bait
Who is allowed to be creative? Are all self-help books the same?
Because I make apps, people tell me their app ideas. These are often expressed in hushed, intimate confessions, as if they’re telling me their life stories or their darkest fantasies. “You won’t steal my idea?” they say tentatively. I won’t steal it, I tell them. There really is no risk of this. Without fail, the ideas are atrocious. “Oh, interesting,” I reply when they tell me their idea, trying to think of something encouraging to say.
The ideas are always complex but specific to a niche audience. They would require a huge amount of work, investment and infrastructure for so little pay off. There is no route to market. No way of making them viable. “Imagine if you had a device that told you how much salt you could eat that day,” they say. “What if there was an app that rated supermarket bananas,” I nod. “I guess you could expand into rating all sorts of products,” I say, trying to see how BananaRater could work. “Oh no,” they say, looking annoyed, “only bananas.”
Often the ideas already exist. “Imagine if there was a site where you could log films you’ve seen, and it would recommend other films you’d like.” There’s no point in saying there is such an app. When they discover it already exists, they shrug and lose interest. I wonder why they think anyone would use their app, given they won’t even download an identical one, and it was their idea. “Yeah,” they say, turning up their nose at the app that does what they imagined, “I guess that is more or less it.” The idea that they were so excited by a few seconds ago is now so boring they can’t even be bothered to look at the App Store screenshots.
Perhaps people come up with these “ideas” because their idea of what makes a good app is distorted by the strange market we operate in. A lot of apps make no sense. There are opaque commercials, loss-leaders subsidized by tech companies trying to gain market share. Many apps don’t even have a paid option. A decade ago, Dropbox bought Mailbox (a free email client that only worked with Gmail and iCloud) for $100 million. One hundred million dollars. They shut it down less than two years later. Chrome, WhatsApp, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, WordPress. Free operating systems. Free audio editors. Free video editors. But at the same time, software companies are all worth a fortune. You can see why people think their idea for an app that shows you the nearest ice cream van will make their fortune.
Part of the problem, I think, is that we believe ideas are valuable rather than implementation. Ideas are weird, sly things, existing in a Platonic state, unbothered by reality. Keatsian unbuilt apps are sweetest. But in reality, an idea without implementation is just an idle thought. Yes, a good idea can make or break a product. But on their own, ideas are nothing.
In the same way that people approach me with app ideas, authors say people tell them ideas for books they’d like to write. A thriller where the detective committed the crime. Zombies invade the Roman Empire. A wizard goes to the Moon. Perhaps this is something deeply human, the drive to replicate achievement. To see if we can add to the great pool of human endeavour. Or to measure ourselves against it. The perennial human question: can I have a go? This is why we lose interest when we find our app idea already exists. It isn’t about the idea, it is about it being our idea.
Maybe, also, there is something about apps, these nebulous digital phantasms that take up no physical space in the real “meat-space” world, that distorts our sense of reality. And perhaps the same is true of books. They are “just” words on a page. The difference between an app existing or not existing is, for most people, “just” pixels on a screen.
Software is so close to thought, we lose track of the work required to make it. In an instant, I can imagine an app that would cost millions and take decades of person-effort to build. I think most people would struggle to comprehend the amount of human labour that has gone into creating our digital world. Yes, they are pixels on a screen, but choosing which pixels is like choosing which letters to type to create a novel.
Elsewhere
Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules by Chris Taylor in Mashable:
But hey, if it's all pretty much the same stuff […] why stop at distilling it into a single book? Why not condense the repeated lessons of an entire genre into one article?
In many ways, this is a silly listicle. 11 rules cribbed from 200 years (or 2,000 years) of human thought. And you can certainly see these 11 rules as a load of trite aphorisms that don’t meaningfully connect with our lives. And yet, book after book returns to them. Perhaps these self-help ideas are the best insights we’re ever going to develop as a species.
[W]hen you strip it down, there's very little new information. […] Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius gave tweet-sized advice in Meditations; so did Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanack. Even self-help parody isn't new. Shakespeare did it with Polonius' "to thine own self be true" speech in Hamlet: basically a bullet-point list from a blowhard.
As I scroll down this list, I think, as with app ideas: these ideas are cheap and easy and almost worthless. It’s what you do with them that counts.
What Clickbait Tells Us About the Evolution of Print and Online Media by Holly Baxter in LitHub:
Back when newspapers were mainly print and the digital evolution was merely a spot on the horizon, we used to talk about “making readers eat their vegetables.” What this meant was juxtaposing less exciting, but more worthy, content with the salacious stuff the masses were presumed to want. The sordid details of a politician’s affair appear on the same page as a feature about the economy; the profile of the pop singer is placed a few pages behind the Middle East correspondent’s dispatch from the Lebanese border; the sports pages are always, always at the end. Readers had to be cajoled into consuming high-brow content, went the thinking. Push the broccoli rabe of the policy announcement before rewarding them with the strawberry soft-serve of this summer’s fashion must-haves.
Form and content, we used to say at university, are linked. In architecture and industrial design, they say “form follows function”. In the world of software engineering, we talk about domain-drive design or Conway’s Law - software design ends up mirroring the org chart of the organisation that built it.
Whenever you create a platform or format or vessel of some sort, it inevitably shapes the content you put into it. When you digitize something (news, photos, social interactions) you never end up with an exact digital replica of what you started with. The form changes the content.
Perhaps this another aspect of today’s emerging theme of ideas and implementation. Ideas on their own are formless, but as soon as they become real they start being affected by the way you implement them.
Creativity is Not a Scarce Commodity By Howard S Becker:
Perhaps we can go three for three and bring this article around to ideas as well:
[T]here’s another kind of reason why creativity, though discoverable everywhere, seems scarce. And that’s because it is scarce. We can distinguish two kinds of creativity here. One kind consists of an original idea or scheme, something someone thinks up that others haven’t already thought up, and another kind that is not only dreamed up but is then pursued, turned from an idea into a plan, a finished prototype, an idea fleshed out into a working plan which is then built, an organizational invention which people in the organization actually implement, an artist’s vision that becomes a finished work.
To put it in classic Steve Jobs terms: “Real artists ship”. An aside - as much as I like this quip, I always find a disconnect between ‘artists’ and ‘ship’. Something about ‘ship’ makes me think of mass production and commodification. To my mind, it implies an uncomfortable corollary: real artists exploit their work. I wonder what we mean by ‘real’ in that sentence. And, perhaps, ‘artists’ too. I take the phrase to mean work that exists is worth more than intended work (Keatsean unheard melodies again) but the language choice leaves me feeling uneasy.
Becker’s piece is really about who is allowed to be “creative”, both in the sense of whose ideas do we take seriously, but who is allowed to claim that credit (spoiler alert: it’s to do with power). But it also has insights that I found quite striking about working in large organisations.
What they wanted was a panacea, something that would get rid of everything they didn’t like without changing anything they did like. And they liked a lot of things, more than they disliked the other things, so nothing was going to change
I’ve been in that meeting a few times.
Finally, an idea that I’ve been half mulling over for a while, but haven’t quite framed as cleanly as this:
Every organization has to solve problems it can’t admit it has […] no one in the organization will be able to recognize these creative solutions because doing that would require admitting that there had been a problem to solve.
But then, I remembered, RD Laing already said this all before in Knots:
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
We’re back to ideas again. “Everything that needs to be said has already been said,” André Gide remarked, “but since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
That’s all for today,
Simon