Here’s a dirty little secret the tech industry spends billions trying to hide from you: there are humans in the machine.
Not “human-centric design” humans. Not focus-group-tested buyer personas named Sarah who love cloud-based synergy. I’m talking about actual, messy, sleep-deprived people who sat in a room somewhere and dragged sliders, wrote janky workarounds, and made gut-check calls that wound up shipping to millions of devices.
We’ve built this grand, sterile illusion that modern software just… appears. It drops from the cloud like pristine digital rain, completely frictionless, objective, and corporate. If a bug happens, it’s an anomaly. If an interface is hostile, it’s just a metric to be A/B tested. We treat software like divine law carved into silicon tablets by an infallible committee of PMs.
It’s a lie, and it’s making our digital lives miserable.
Karri Saarinen recently wrote about this exact illusion, reminding us that there is always someone behind the software. Someone made the call. Someone chose to bury that unsubscribe button three menus deep. Someone decided that your notification settings needed to reset every time there’s an “update.”
And yet, we’ve scrubbed every ounce of personality, blame, and humanity out of the things we build. Why? Because accountability is bad for margins.
Think about the last time you used a tool that genuinely drove you up the wall. Maybe it’s an enterprise dashboard that requires a five-step authentication dance just to look at a pie chart, or a note-taking app that suddenly decided your local files belong in its proprietary subscription ecosystem. Your first instinct is to curse the abstract void. You yell at the screen. You blame “the algorithm.”
Stop. There is no algorithm. There is only a guy named Dave in Austin who has three kids, a mortgage, and a VP of Product breathing down his neck demanding increased engagement metrics, so Dave had to make the notification bell flash red forever.
When we pretend software is an autonomous force of nature, we let the creators off the hook. We’ve created an entire ecosystem of software development where nobody has to own the ugly consequences of their design choices. Code gets refactored, teams get restructured, and suddenly bad software is just “the market shifting,” as if the UI didn’t deliberately trick grandma into buying a yearly subscription.
Remember when the web had personal sites? Remember when you could tell who made a thing because their weird fingerprints were all over it? Now, everything looks like it was generated by the same generative-AI-worshipping blandness machine. Every landing page is a gradient background, a 3D isometric illustration of a floating cloud, and a value proposition about “streamlining your workflow.”
It’s corporate Brutalism for your browser. It’s designed to offend no one and inspire nothing.
We need to drag the humans back into the spotlight. We need to stop hiding behind brand voice guidelines and sanitized release notes written by AI. If you ship a terrible piece of software, your name—or at least your team’s real, accountable reputation—ought to be attached to it. Not as a target for harassment, obviously, but as a reminder that creation is an act of human agency.
Until we stop pretending software is magic and start treating it like the deeply flawed human artifact it is, we’re just going to keep drowning in beautiful, frictionless garbage.
Hot take: If you’re too cowardly to put your actual face and name on the product you built, you shouldn’t be allowed to ship it.