The hill that Roman Mars would die on:
Way back during the OPEC crisis, I started worrying about the then-bipartisan consensus on what was going to make America the most competitive nation in the world:
Americans are the smartest people in the world, so we'll put our whole population through college and monopolize all the world's jobs that require a college degree. And ...
Americans are the hardest-working people in the world, so we'll be more efficient than everybody else.
And neither of those sat well with me. For one thing, the most efficient system has zero redundancies, no spare capacity, so if anything goes wrong, everything goes wrong -- it fails gracelessly. But I knew there was more to it than that, but 50 years later I was still struggling to put it into words well.
This year marks the 15th anniversary of 99% Invisible! If our little design podcast were a person, it would be old enough to have a provisio
For the 15th anniversary of the awesome podcast 99 Percent Invisible, one of the listener questions was "what design hill would you die on?" And after waffling a bit about the way the question was phrased, this is what Roman Mars said, which I wish I'd said any time in the last 50 years:
ROMAN MARS: "... the march to make things more and more efficient makes the world a worse place. And I think of that in terms of advertising. The idea that we were going to efficiently measure how effective advertising was through clicks and eyeballs and stuff erased all of the extra money that made all the journalism and all the pop culture that you cared about in the 20th century–it made it all possible. The inefficiency of the advertising system made everything good in this world. I think that the idea that you’re trying to get things to be as efficient as possible is actually a terrible world-destroying idea.
ROMAN MARS: "The most efficient restaurant is a ghost kitchen that has no storefront because that’s inefficient because it could be empty sometimes. And it’s a ghost’s kitchen that just ships you a thing and has an underpaid delivery person and brings it to your door and you never leave. And this is stripping away all the goodness of the world in those cities. I think efficiency is absolute garbage, and that is the design-related hill I’m willing to die on. I feel like you should always be allowing for great deals of inefficiency to make a nice designed city–a nice designed system–and make it work. I really hate the focus on efficiency.
ROMAN MARS: "Not only does it destroy all these good things, it takes money and gives it to the worst people–the platform creators and the tech people–instead of all the loose, empty change and tips and things. And it’s not like things are cheaper or things are better. Money is being transferred to the wrong people instead of creators and people who make the world a better place through community and creation."
VIVIAN LE: "Yeah. A more efficient world is a place where more people are left out, essentially. More people are going to be more inefficient the more people that are included."
ROMAN MARS: "Yeah, totally. You need friction. You need the space of creation–that open freedom of an inefficient system where money sloshes around inside of it. These frictions and inefficiencies are what make everything good about the world."
