I used to co-manage a software company. My co-founder is Lebanese, so we built a team in Beirut with an office right on the Levantine Sea. Great software engineers there, great front end talent. But Lebanon was pass by there. And not just in the usual “stuck between factions in an eternal global crisis zone” way. The financial system first collapsed (no problemthe team said), and then the pandemic hit hard (we are fine), then Beirut was partially destroyed in a port explosion (a terrible day, but we’ll get through it). Then we learned that people were powering their homes with DIY solar or diesel generators (don’t mention it) and get internet through mobile hotspots (almost always works well). We have rented spare apartments for people who have trouble getting home (not necessary, but thank you) and figured out how to pay people when the banks were melting down (appreciate it). On January 6, 2021, they released Team USA, “Your shot is ridiculous.”

All of this gave me a great appreciation for how boring America was. America has been so boring for so long that other countries have held their wealth in dollars and oil oligarchs have hoarded empty apartments in Manhattan. America was so boring that for decades the tech industry was able to do disturbance his mantra. Young people would find something new through technology; VCs would bail it out with cash, creating a market for new buyers and sellers; and established players would hilariously trip over themselves trying to compete. They would fail and we would laugh. Need more progress? Just do more tech. Smartphones, drones, teledildonics, IoT – whatever, let’s blow the world up again.

This type of progress certainly generates a ton of activity. But it’s also strange when you consider how many lives in the world, historically and currently, including American lives, are extremely disturbed by toxic spills or the whims of royalty or goats that swell and die. Disruption is a philosophy for the bored, for people who live in reasonable climates and don’t have tanks in the street. But America has recently become much less boring.

I think of the photo of the guy wearing horns in the Senate chamber. The technologists are on the hook for that one. Because the Internet spawned the Web, which spawned the social, which spawned Trump, which spawned all that and the Supreme Court, which spawned deer, and all I’m saying is that technology can’t be responsible for one kind of progress and wash its robot hands off the other. Borders do not evaporate in the cloud; they become thicker. Distances are becoming more and more expensive to travel. The grids wobble. For several weeks this year, it was difficult to buy pretzels. You can’t just say “software is eating the world” and relax. Software has already devoured the world, digested it and produced a new world, and that’s where we live.

I once enraged a client because I promised in a meeting to build them a “big boring software platform”. They took me to a fancy bar to yell at me. “We didn’t pay you to be bored! ” they said. “We paid you for the excitement!” I had to explain how, in technology, “boring” can be an asset, a way to build for growth, how things that seem exciting, like New York, are built on boring things, like sewage or the investment bank. An ever-changing consumer economy can be fun in the moment, but have you ever seen the floor of a movie theater when the lights come on? (Of course, I paid for the customer’s drinks.)

Stability is a hard sell, I grant you; the reward is far. No hominid has ever thought, “If I stick this stick in a termite mound, in 50,000 generations, my offspring will pay for five streaming services, including Peacock.” They thought, “I’m sick of chasing these termites everywhere when there’s a real termite fountain there.” And suddenly, at that time, they were devouring the world. Humans are here for a while, not for long.

Fast forward 50,000 generations of monkeys. Clearly enough, now is the time to learn how to fetishize stability. As I write, the asphalt in London is hot enough to heat up your fish and chips. The solutions to the crisis (crises) are terribly long-term and require hundreds of trillions of dollars, billions of people doing their part. What’s a monkey with a stick to do?

In this, I think the Internet industry has a precedent to offer. The world of technology is endless and exhausting, and everyone will tell you that their giant thing is the real next thing. But you can still see the big, boring, and real future of the field by looking at the on-ramps — code schools, certificate programs, “master it in 30 days” books. One year, everyone was learning Rails in coding boot camps. Next was JavaScript. Then many boot camps closed, and now it’s DevOps (software development plus IT operations). These are the things the industry needs right now, over a two- to five-year horizon. And stick around long enough and you’ll find a lot of old Unix and Java code under the new stuff – boring systems, a stable stack of technologies so reliable we forget about them.

So I’m on top of the progress and I’m done with the disturbances. Stability is my new best friend. Not the big stuff, the UN level stuff. Leave that to the smart macrothinkers with European accents and interesting all-weather clothing, or the sad Americans with Substacks. What I’m going to work on, for the rest of my career in the tech industry, hand to god (OK, I’m an atheist and easily distracted, so caution reader), is making pretty little tutorials and tools – better sticks for nicer monkeys. I’m currently working on my first tutorial, on how to parse NetCDF files filled with climate data using the Python programming language to save the data to an SQL database and integrate it into a traditional web-based workflow . This is my DevOps! Who knows, maybe one day someone will open a school for stability. Everyone will want to run it and no one will want to mop the floor.

This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue. Subscribe now.