Among the essays Jef Raskin distributed but never formally published is a short, bracing piece titled “Next Time Can Be Worse.” Its argument is unfashionable and, on a first reading, almost sour: that the widespread assumption of inevitable progress — the comfortable belief that each attempt at anything will improve on the last — is not merely naive but actively harmful, because it removes the urgency required to make improvement actually happen. Read in 2021, against the state of the software the essay was partly about, the piece reads less like pessimism than like a quietly accurate forecast.

This page is editorial commentary on that unpublished essay; the archived text is preserved separately. The aim here is to ask why a warning written by an interface designer about the false faith in progress should have aged into something close to description.

The Argument, Stated Plainly

Raskin’s claim is structural rather than gloomy by temperament. People assume the future will be better than the present, so when something fails — a policy, a technology, a design — the reflexive response is reassurance that it will be fixed next time. Raskin’s objection is that this reassurance is a sedative. Without deliberate effort, vigilance, and a willingness to learn from mistakes, there is no mechanism that guarantees the next attempt improves on the last. Systems can degrade. Knowledge can be lost. Institutions can weaken. The very belief that improvement is automatic undermines the work that improvement requires, because it dissolves the sense that anything urgent is at stake.

He drew his examples broadly — from history, technology, and public life, cases where assumptions of inevitable advance had been disproven by decline. But the essay carried particular force coming from a man who had spent decades watching his own field, human-computer interaction, make choices he believed degraded the experience of using a computer. Raskin did not see the evolution of desktop interfaces as steady improvement. He saw a sequence of compromises that often privileged marketing and feature-count over usability — improvement assumed rather than earned, and therefore frequently not delivered.

What 2021 Software Looks Like Through This Lens

Set the essay beside the discourse around software in 2021 and the fit is uncomfortable. The dominant complaint among serious users this year is not that software fails to advance but that advance and regression have become hard to tell apart. Applications grow heavier with each release. Native programs are increasingly replaced by web-technology shells that consume far more memory to do the same work. Interfaces are redesigned on cycles driven by the need to appear new rather than by any measured gain in usability, and the redesigns routinely move or hide functions that worked. Startup times lengthen. Familiar features disappear into menus, or vanish, between versions.

None of this is the failure of progress in the sense of computers becoming less capable — they are vastly more capable than in Raskin’s day. It is the failure of progress in the specific sense he cared about: the experience of the person using the software, measured against their own goals, does not reliably improve and sometimes plainly worsens, even as the version number climbs and the marketing insists otherwise. “Next time can be worse” is, in 2021, simply what longtime users say to each other when an update lands. The essay predicted the sentiment.

Why It Is Not Mere Grumbling

It would be easy to file Raskin’s essay, and the 2021 complaints it anticipates, under the perennial grumbling of people who dislike change. Raskin’s framework forecloses that reading, because his standard was never “the old way was better.” His standard was measurement. He insisted throughout his career that interface quality could be quantified — that you could time how long a task took, count the errors, and compare versions on the evidence rather than on the marketing. By that standard, “improvement” is a testable claim, not a default to be assumed.

The essay’s real target is the abdication of that test. When an industry assumes its next release is better, it stops measuring whether it is — and once you stop measuring, regression becomes invisible, because no one is looking for it. Raskin’s pessimism, properly understood, is not a prediction that things will get worse. It is a warning that without measurement and vigilance there is nothing to stop them from getting worse, and a culture of assumed progress supplies neither. The 2021 software that consumes more and delivers less is not a betrayal of his prediction; it is the natural product of the complacency he described.

The Discipline the Essay Demands

What “Next Time Can Be Worse” asks of a designer, or of any maker, is harder than optimism and harder than pessimism. It asks for the refusal to assume either direction. Progress is possible — Raskin spent his life trying to produce it — but it is contingent on effort that must be made deliberately and verified empirically, every time. The essay’s bleakness is really a demand for accountability: do not tell me the next version will be better; show me the measurement.

Re-read in 2021, the piece functions less as a forecast that came true than as a diagnostic still worth applying. Every software update that claims to be an improvement is an invitation to ask Raskin’s question: improvement measured how, against what, for whom? Where the answer is “we assumed it,” the essay’s warning is live. Things can get worse next time. They often have. The only defense is to keep checking — which is exactly what the comfortable faith in progress persuades people to stop doing.

Related:

• Next Time Can Be Worse — Raskin’s essay, archived →
• The Effectiveness of Mathematics: Raskin’s Reply to Wigner →
• Core Principles of Humane Interface Design →
• Return to Jef Raskin Reference →

External references: the broader literature on software bloat and measured usability is collected at the ACM Digital Library; for Raskin’s archived papers see archive.org.