Building: A Product of Its Time

It may be widely known that craftsmanship is a product of its time. It is less known how instrumental this truth is in the craft of building present-day software. The craft of building is said to drive contemporary adoption of technology, synonymous with general progress, yet the ambitions of its craftsmen are surprisingly sensitive to their environments.

Crucially, the incentives of the environment within which the craft of building takes place disproportionately determine what ends up being built, and why. Not all builders craft software with the ambition of mass adoption, but all builders’ ambitions are framed by their environments. This should serve as a reminder that craftsmanship, even in its form as building, must be judged as a product of its time rather than against the supreme goal of mass adoption.

A craft will reflect values, views, and traditions of its environment. It must definitionally, otherwise the craftsman risks apathy from contemporaries. We are perhaps most familiar with this notion through our studies of political commentary in world history. History is rife with examples of time-aware political commentary: World War II Allied propaganda, postwar Soviet literature, even contemporary political rhetoric around American exceptionalism are all commentaries that demand that craftsmen respect their time. If politics is a response to the will of its polity, the craftsmen of its commentary must respect the prevalent values, views, and traditions.

The craft particular to the modern day is that of software engineers building. To build is to instruct computers and other electronics to display information and relations in ways that create interfaces conducive to efficient human-computer interaction. It is with thanks to builders that we prefer to book our yoga classes through an app on our phones rather than signing up on a sheet in the studio itself, in hopes that a vacancy remains in our desired class. Building is the craft that defines our modern era, and it is the success of this craft that correlates with our collective rate of technological adoption.

Yet the craft of building, whose products are dependent on the ambitions of its builders, does not unilaterally produce for mass adoption. I was recently going through my portfolio of past coding projects and was struck by the impact my environments had on my ambitions as a builder. When I was growing up in Sweden, software development was my entry into entrepreneurship. With low demands for upfront capital and even lower marginal costs of distribution, building software let me reach tens of thousands of end-users from my bedroom desktop computer. Later, at Harvard, my software projects were the extensions of my intellectual projects. I could scale a research experiment or prove a tech-oriented thesis with code. After graduating, building software was my avenue to starting a company and earning my first salary. At each stage, while the craft remained the same, the demands of my environment produced surprisingly divergent ambitions and outcomes.

Mass adoption of technology, often self-equated with human progress generally by builders, is not the only product of building. The craft itself is sensitive to its environment, and the ambitions of builders are shaped by their surroundings. Despite the quantitative nature of the craft and its revered measurement of objective progress through metrics, building is one of the clearest examples of craftsmanship as a product of its time. The techno-centric framing of the craft as a shepherd for general progress is but one of many valid interpretations and one that is produced by its environment.

We should be reminded of the power of our environments when building. More broadly, we should remain aware of how our environments’ incentives forge the ambitions of all our crafts. Craftsmanship inherits its artistry and value by virtue of being a product of its time. This truth extends to the modern-day craft of building as much as to any other craft throughout history. If we accept that building is a craft of its time, then the question is not just what we build, but what kind of environments we are choosing to build in.