How the system works

If anything characterises digital products, it is their systemic nature — with rules of their own, when set against other kinds of systems such as the ones Charles C. Mann describes in his series of essays for The New Atlantis, beautifully illustrated by Julie Wallace.

The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don't inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.

We Live Like Royalty and Don't Know It, Charles C. Mann

What makes Mann's argument strong is that the invisibility is not a cultural oversight: it is the signature of success. A well-built drinking water system manifests itself as an absence of news. It only surfaces when it fails, and then it surfaces as a scandal, never as a cathedral.

Digital products inherit that condition and complicate it. They complicate it, first, in the shape of failure. An electric grid goes down completely and the blackout is unambiguous: everyone knows it happened and when. Software rarely grants that clarity. It degrades, answers two seconds late, returns wrong data without ceasing to answer, works for ninety per cent of users and not for the rest. It lives in a permanent intermediate state that no dashboard fully captures.

And they complicate it, second, in the shape of understanding. The treatment plant is opaque to us and we know it; nobody mistakes seeing a pipe for understanding a hydraulic system. Software, by contrast, offers an illusion of transparency. We see the interface, we manipulate it, we get answers, and that familiarity convinces us we know what lies underneath. It is a comfortable confusion that runs through the people who use a product as much as the people who lead it, and one I have written about in "Where your digital product begins and ends".

One practical consequence remains, and it is a thankless one. If invisibility is the signature of success, then most of the work that sustains a digital product can never be presented as an achievement. Nobody celebrates the migration that broke nothing, the certificate renewed on time, the dependency updated before it turned into a vulnerability. Organisations that only know how to recognise launches are teaching their teams, without meaning to, not to look after the cathedrals.