A couple months ago I

that I think we should be writing software criticism the same way we do for movies, literature, etc.

A quick stroll through my search history tells me that just before tweeting this I had been reading a review of Lauren Oyler’s new essay collection, as well as

on Gwyneth Paltrow’s nautical Wellness Experience, the Goop Cruise. Oyler first drew some notoriety off the back of a couple scathing reviews of generally-well-regarded books. Retracing my steps, I was probably thinking about the role criticism can play in a creative ecosystem, and I wondered why we (people in the indie tech scene) don’t write reviews of software, and why we don’t have a culture of doing so.

I think that’s a bad thing!

Good critique is

There are a lot of benefits to a field/space/scene/movement having a strong and healthy culture of critique.

gets into those benefits as applied to the tech scene in more detail and nuance than I can in this

great piece

about the ongoing need for tech criticism, and I pretty much agree with most of her points.

However, the type of critique she talks about is grander in ambition and more outward-facing that what I’m envisioning. I’m thinking about a future where people in the/my/any small-scale/scrappy/local indie tech scene write (and tweet) reviews and criticism of the software that they and their friends use and make, and I think that future is slightly better than the status quo! I think that within the indie tech scene

• good critique has a network effect. Well thought-through and fair critique helps those being critiqued improve their craft, but it also helps whoever is writing and whoever is reading that critique. Forcing your thoughts about anything onto paper is a great way to figure out what you really think and deepens your understanding about what you’re writing about, but also with critique specifically, the act figuring out why something is good or bad or mediocre or disgusting or beautiful is a really effective way of developing your understanding about the medium itself. And furthermore, good critique, especially of a subfield or topic you’re not incredibly familiar with, is a great onboarding tool for those subfields. It gets you up to date and explains the table stakes, where people are coming from, what’s in play, which is an important first step for actually engaging with it. I can’t tell you how many of my google searches are something along the lines of like “What do people who do/work in Y think about Z?“. Lastly, the actual network: if you write something relevant to the people who you engage with on social media, and you post about the thing you wrote, people will respond to you! And they’ll add their own opinion or critique your critique and you (and anyone who reads it without participating) will come away with so many more viewpoints to consider and this is a good thing! Diversity of thought is good for us all.
• I also think good critique contextualizes a work and situates it in its moment. It adds to the historical record of the community, which is imo a good thing in and of itself, because the ephemerality of much of the internet is not conducive to extended documentation of a community and its thoughts. But far from only helping those looking back, this documentation also helps people understand a community and its scene at the time of review, both by, as mentioned in the last bullet, letting people know what, in broad strokes, people are thinking, but also by providing historical context on why a given review subject is being evaluated as it is, (a recent example of this kind of critique done well is the
  pitchfork review of brat,
  which I like because it does a great job of contrasting the album’s themes with the dominant threads in the recent pop landscape). On a more personal note, when I first joined Fermat in 2022 and for a while after, I was totally unaware of the tools-for-thought movement/moment that was/is going on, and it wasn’t until listening to the
  Muse postmortem podcast,
  the first episode of that podcast I had listened to, that I feel like I really had a good handle on what was going on, although sadly, only retroactively. Having some kind of body of writing and critique I could reference in order to understand that context as well as how different players were situated in it, and what everyone was thinking would have been a godsend.

roasting your friends

The indie tech scene (or at least mine, maybe yours is different!) is missing this culture of review and critique, and so is missing out on a lot of the benefits mentioned above. But also, there are

many

great

writers

in the

space

, and we’re all worse off for not hearing more of their thoughts on what we’re all making. Tell us!

(A quick side note: the build-in-public movement/ethos is a great step towards this. Sharing your work in public, especially while it’s at its most malleable, prompts a lot of the same discussion and yields a lot of the same benefits I talk about above. This is good and people should keep sharing their work! But it’s a stepping stone: discussion on twitter about work usually lacks a bit of oomf often present in more formal, longer form, thought-through criticism)

I do get though that no one wants to talk critically about the things people (especially their friends) have put a lot of work and years of their life into. No one wants to be mean! But (well-thought-out) critique is good for everyone involved, so I think we should all do it anyway. No, I know, I know, it’s still scary. So, dear reader, I humbly offer up

on the altar: please tell me why it sucks and what we’re doing wrong (or why you like it even!). Tell us why rolling our own canvas was a mistake! Tell us why removing most of our end-user programming is a betrayal of the movement! Feedback is always welcome.

in conclusion

Criticism of art, and of things people create in general, is fundamentally a Good Thing, in large part because intellectual challenge of work is one of the best ways to improve it: it drives the craft forward. And while I don’t think you need to be, for example, a director, to criticize films well, I do think you need to love films. I happen to know a lot of people that love software and the incredible things you can do with it, and I want to hear what they have to say about the craft.

thanks for reading!