Trench notes
By Craig Mod
Illustration by Luis Mendo
How are apps made? Painfully with deliberation or effortlessly without thought. Blind inspiration. Eight hours over a lazy weekend. Fifty grand a day. A million dollars a syllable. Do not look for the sense in it.
Apps mirror life in their unfairness. Time spent making an app in no way guarantees successes, financial or spiritual. Grizzled developers toil for years and ‘lose’ to the ‘chain-smoking geek’ in Vietnam with the twitchy bird. Guy doesn’t even want the money.
the room is cold.
Misguided are those who deride the ephemerality of Minecraft — with the mining and use of ‘dirt’ and ‘trees’ and ‘chickens’ and ‘rock’ and ‘fire’ to build everything from the Starship Enterprise to a working CPU — but exalt apps. Apps, too, are ephemeral. Some of the most ephemeral software we’ve ever produced. Ephemeral if for no other reason than because of their gated homes. Our apps cower below the fickle whim of App Store Gods, struck down for no reasonable reasons or for very reasonable reasons. It doesn’t matter which, the end result is always the same: gone, forever.
light fire
So, mitigate? Try as we might to give physical form to our apps — to embed them in pulp beyond the reach of…
