widely accepted reading of the-west-wing, as such, is that of a liberal Fantasia, not because it depicts the Bartlet administration as being liberal, but because it depicts a world in which the best possible thing you can do is to try very hard to do the right thing — and the liberals, or really the centrist-leaning Democrats, are the ones who do that.
It’s a cliché, but that is a notion I haven’t encountered in a long time. In software, there was a time when design was in the ascendancy and we were advised that paying attention to what the user needed and wanted was key. (That is poorly worded.)
Of late, the focus has been on scale, productivity, whatever Kubernetes is, and now AI. It is about the potential to do things, pure motion and ability. But is it trying our hardest to do the best thing?
No. It never starts with “the best thing.” It starts with either finding a new way to make money off people’s attention, occasionally giving them a new “toy,” and of later productivity for productivities sake.
We don’t really need AI and code generation. We were doing just fine before all of that.
And, of course, the unspoken best thing is for the employee, founder, investor, etc. to make money.
The best thing for the user is whatever makes me the most money is the unspoken ethos of tech.