Life today is brimful with marvels. The usual suspects are cell phones, computers, and even the Three Gorges Dam. Lean supply chains. Wysiwyg word-processing. We could, in fact, call the modern world a system for producing and distributing novel goods, services, and ideas.
We could, with equal justification, call the modern world a powerful solvent of what is human in our cultural arrangements. The anomie of lives based on television shows and popular music (or concerts and plays, as far as that goes). The ironic isolation among urban crowds that awaits most of us. The curious fact that we may not know (or care to know) our neighbor of twenty years, yet give to a charity to help earthquake victims half a world away.
But one of the most jarring of current phenomena is the triviality of most of the things we use, and the extreme technical sophistication that goes into producing them. Think of the froth that crowds our days and our minds: striped toothpaste (hell, any toothpaste), pop-tarts, television sitcoms, rock concerts, Playboy centerfolds, Viagra. Luxury cars, McMansions. High-end entertainment systems. And web sites. Facebook, Flickr, this very site.
There are engineers out there wearing white shirts with pocket protectors whose whole care in life is producing a jelly bean that will not stick in your hot little hand, but offers but little resistance to your slack little jaw when you throw a handful in your mouth. They know how difficult their trivial task is, and how undeserving are the beneficiaries of it. But life gives them this opportunity to do something hard, and clear, and to do it well. They feel lucky.
I have, for a while now, been playing at putting together a web site. I have all the tools at hand -- Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, HTML, Javascript -- and can use them with fair facility. Since I'm baking this thing on my own (no industrial production methods for me!) I get hung up on the peculiarities of CSS and the varied ways different browsers interact with this confusing mix of markup, scripts, and style specs. (Fortunately, I've lived long enough to simplify in one way -- no IE need apply.) But I also get hung up on design -- making a page visually appealing and its content easy to grasp. It turns out to be an extreme technical challenge to make something appealing to the public. The sites by geeks for geeks (like kernel.org) tend to be fairly stark. These guys don't quail at complexity, but they save their programming chops for deep system issues.
But in many ways it is just as important -- and every bit as difficult -- to make and sell a beer ad that will play successfully at Super Bowl halftime.
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