"If it works, it's obsolete"
Rules, knowledge or borders disappear from our consciousness as soon as something really works. Then we have to return to the question of why something works.
If it works it's obsolete. Ever since mottos were supposed to be posted on social media profiles, any sensible person refuses to post sayings, quotes or thoughtful sayings with pictures. I wrote one of my best essays on the degenerate cultural history of the quote. Slogans and motivational quotes work like magic spells: they conjure up something without fully understanding it, let alone being able to explain it, and hope for a group-dynamic cathartic effect that will trigger something in the audience. You've heard it somewhere before, something like that.
I recently stumbled across an allusion to Marshall MacLuhan's "If it works, it's obsolete" in an otherwise uninteresting book. I have to say: it's a shame that it's not genuinely mine. It describes my basic attitude to many things, the unnecessary difficulties I face, the stress caused by the constant question: "But what if it doesn't work like this anymore?" While others took semesters abroad or gap years, I was in a hurry to see what jobs I could get. While others enjoyed the fruits of a high potential program in a job and waited relaxed to see what they would be offered, I was stressed to find out if I could do the same elsewhere. Where others stay in the same job for 20 years or more, I question everything after two years at the latest. Where one project comes close to its end, I look for the next one instead of marketing its fruits, where something is running, I am restless if I can't take it apart and rebuild it. And where something is easy, I have serious doubts as to whether it can be good.
"If it works, it's obsolete." - Many organizations would like to give themselves this slogan as a motto. And thus prove that they have not thought the idea through to the end. Organizations only survive in routine. Widespread innovation deliriums are more an indication of how inflationary weak concepts of innovation have become than of an actual desire for change.
The idea has potential, of course. Questioning everything that works is professional doubt. This increases the urge to look under the hood everywhere, to want to take things apart and reassemble them. This creates the basis for understanding things and the ability to control them. The attitude of seeing everything that works as obsolete is a suitable motto for dealing with technology.
But then it becomes nothing more than a call to get your hands dirty and learn those basics that start to disappear as soon as something actually works. Rules disappear as soon as everyone observes them, boundaries disappear when they are respected by everyone and knowledge disappears from view when it is no longer necessary on the path to results.
This is my view of the obsolescence of what works. It is all too fitting - and in keeping with the degenerate cultural history of the quote - that in the time I have been writing this text, I have read three times from aggressive marketing preachers von B2B social networks falsely attributing the quote to David Bowie. He said that too. And he also knew McLuhan. That's just the way it is when it comes to dealing with basics.