When cameras arrived on smartphones, taking photos became trivially easy, and then with social media, Facebook first, then Instagram, so did publishing them. Creating content, arguing about it, posting images: all suddenly effortless. And this seriously undermined photography as a profession. Photographers felt diminished, because now any fool with an iPhone in his hand could call himself a photographer.
But this wasn’t a problem for ordinary people, who could finally take decent-quality photos by their own standards, just have fun and share them. The same thing happened with video too, not with cinema exactly, but with video for sure. At a certain point there was a non-linearity, a jump, a qualitative difference in what you could do, and then a quantitative one too, in terms of how much content gets published.
The photographer’s move
So what does the poor photographer do? He tries to preserve his professionalism. He accepts that now everyone can do what only he used to do, the thing he was quietly gatekeeping a little, and he moves into a more specialized niche. He says, “Fine, I’ll shoot professional photos for events, for shoots, for products.” A dedicated professional service, but definitely narrower and more specific than before. And in some cases these people simply lose ground, work, and relevance.
The same thing is happening to software
I believe this is happening to software, to computer programs, with artificial intelligence. Because if it becomes a matter of a few days, with no coding skills, to build and publish what are now called microapplications, that is, apps vibe-coded with AI, made out of prompts, then in my view the work of technical people certainly continues, but it also specializes, and there are plenty of things we do now that we shouldn’t be doing anymore. I don’t quite know how this affects the number of programmers.
But what happens in the so-called attention economy when, just as in photography, images exploded rather than the art of photography? Then reservoirs formed, social networks and marketplaces of images, and then along came the famous process of enshittification. These image-based social networks, which once documented people’s lives and made them feel special, turned into endless streams of ads, memes, and assorted nonsense. Maximum respect for the meme, by the way.
Where does this go?
So this could happen to software too, but I honestly find it hard to picture how. This video is meant as a prompt to hear what you think, where you see this heading, because my ideas are still fuzzy. I keep thinking about it. If software really becomes a commodity, the way images became a commodity, and again I mean images, not photography, then for a huge number of people the need is satisfied by the image, not by professional photography. In the same way, most of the needs people have would be satisfied by microapplications, things that solve your problem, and not by professional software.
But I’d love to understand what happens. What’s the reservoir? What’s the social network? What’s the advertising like? I have no doubt it turns into a mess of ads and yet another information overload, but I struggle to imagine the specifics, and if you have any ideas it would be cool to talk about them.
Let me restate the premises. Software becomes a commodity. It becomes trivially easy to produce, so easy that it detaches from the professional world and becomes something truly anyone can do, to the point where there’s a glut of software in a thousand different flavors. Whoever does it for a living carves out a niche, but definitely has less room than before. The more this thing explodes, the more they have to specialize to do the complicated things others normally can’t.
And how does this affect content creation, the attention economy, including all these videos now made with AI that keep getting longer and more substantial? You’re starting to see videos of 30 seconds, a minute, that actually look real, where something happens, something hard to imagine. To me it’s an analogue, in terms of underlying principles, physical principles, of what happened to images. Okay.
