My brother Dan Mercer recently published some thoughts on what it would look like for software to more effectively support users’ deeper intentions and values.
In 2022, I built a personal web app called Trickle. It’s an ordered task list that shows me only my topmost task, to encourage me to focus on a single task at a time. By constantly reminding me of what I intend to be doing, it helps me be intentional with how I spend my time while using technology.
Using Trickle has made me wonder: what more could technology do to support my intention and direct my attention where I really want it? How could software adapt to my goals and plans to facilitate focus? What would software look like if it made my personal intentions its highest priority?
Riffing on the growing “local-first software” movement, he terms this idea focus-first software. I think it’s an important idea, and a worthy goal for software makers to strive for.
At face value, it seems that industry incentives would be an insurmountable obstacle, but I think there are a few reasons for hope. Specifically, I think it’s helpful to compare it to the digital privacy movement. While idealistic solutions like Solid pods have yet to catch on, privacy concerns are a lot more squarely within the Overton window than they were a decade ago.
One thing that helped the privacy movement was clarity. People started to see clearly the downsides of privacy-invasive tech and that privacy mattered more than they thought. Software supporting one’s values and attention doesn’t currently have the same conceptual clarity, but I think if it could be made to, customers would be much more wary of business models that are anti-focus-first, just as they are increasingly wary of privacy-invasive business models.
I also think focus-first tech as a concept has an advantage over privacy-friendly tech: focus-first-ness is verifiable by the end user. With privacy-friendly tech, you either have to accept a “trust me bro” from the software producer, or (rarely) you have some technically-dense verification process that’s unusable for end users. But with focus-first tech—especially if we can achieve end-user awareness of what makes tech focus-first—it’s something that a nontechnical person can see for themselves.
Besides, is it actually idealistic to imagine building software that people don’t automatically view as hostile and unreliable? I suspect most software engineers want to build this kind of values-supporting software. Most people want to make the world a better place.
Furthermore, as malleable software becomes more prevalent in the age of AI, I think we’ll see a “seizing the means of production” where even nontechnical people will shape software to align with their needs and values. Software producers could, if they chose, ride the front of this wave instead of chasing after it, by embracing these focus-first ideas up front in their software designs.
Industry incentives change with the Overton window. I think there’s a lot that could be done (and is already being done!) to make that window slide—and I think Dan’s essay is a great start towards creating the conceptual clarity that will fuel that slide. I’m excited to see where this idea goes.
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