The hum of the newly installed LumaSphere 2.0 system vibrated low, a constant, irritating thrum that Wei A. felt more in her teeth than her ears. She traced the convoluted wiring diagram with a pencil that felt suddenly heavy, an artifact from a simpler time. Eight hundred eighty-eight pages of dense technical specifications, each promising a new era of museum lighting, each delivering a fresh layer of complexity. She sighed, her finger smudged with graphite, pausing at a section detailing the ‘Dynamic Reflectance Algorithm 2.8,’ a feature that, after 368 hours of calibration attempts, still hadn’t produced a perceptible difference in the ambient glow on the priceless 18th-century tapestry.
It’s a peculiar torture, this relentless march of ‘innovation.’
Every update, every new version, every ‘revolutionary’ feature feels like another brick in an already towering wall of cognitive load. As someone who recently, and unnecessarily, updated a piece of software I rarely use, only to find the familiar interface swapped for something supposedly ‘intuitive’ but actually just *different*, I resonate deeply with Wei’s quiet exasperation. We’re told we need more, we’re sold on the promise of better, but often, what we receive is simply *more*. More buttons, more menus, more options that obfuscate the original, elegant simplicity that made the tool useful in the first place. It’s a collective delusion, isn’t it? This idea that progress is always additive. What if, for once, true innovation wasn’t about adding another layer, but
