Book

The Code of Casualness: How Digital Products Ate the World

The air smells faintly of burnt coffee and the faint hum of servers. Somewhere, in a nondescript office in Hamburg Ottensen, Matthias Schrader is typing away, chronicling the rise of the machines—not the Terminator kind, but the ones that fit snugly in your pocket and whisper sweet nothings into your ear. The machines that have turned our lives into a series of Kodak moments, except Kodak is dead, and the moments are now Instagram stories.

Schrader, a digital pioneer who survived the dot-com bubble with his company, SinnerSchrader, has seen it all. From the early days of dial-up modems and Commodore 64s to the sleek, always-on world of iPhones and AI, he’s been there, coding, consulting, and occasionally cursing the pace of change. His book, Transformational Products, is less a manual and more a eulogy for the analog world, a love letter to the digital revolution that has reshaped everything from how we shop to how we think.

The story begins, as all good stories do, with a prophecy. George Orwell’s 1984 looms large, not as a dystopian warning, but as a starting point. In 1984, Schrader was online for the first time, connecting his Commodore 64 to another machine via a jury-rigged acoustic coupler. It was clunky, slow, and utterly magical. Fast forward to today, and we’re all online all the time. Screens and algorithms mediate our lives. Once a novelty, the internet is now the world’s most incredible convenience machine, a behemoth that has swallowed industries whole and spat them out as apps.

But how did we get here? Schrader traces the rise of the Casual Economy—a term that sounds like something you’d hear in a Silicon Valley pitch deck but is, in fact, a helpful framework for understanding the digital age. It began with the personal computer, a machine from a hobbyist toy to an office essential in a few decades. Then came the web, which turned the PC into a portal to a new world of commerce and communication. And now, we’re in the mobile age, where the smartphone is not just a device but an extension of ourselves, a remote control for life itself.

The Casual Economy is built on a simple premise: convenience is king. The companies that dominate it—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon (GAFA)—have mastered the art of making the complex seem simple. They’ve turned products into services, services into experiences, and experiences into habits. And they’ve done it all by leveraging the power of code, the invisible force that underpins everything from your morning coffee order to your late-night Netflix binge.

But code is more than just lines of text. It’s a language, a logic, a way of thinking. Schrader argues that the most successful digital products are transformational—they don’t just solve problems; they change how we live. Take Uber, for example. It’s not just a better way to hail a cab; it’s a new way of thinking about mobility that challenges the idea of car ownership. Or consider Spotify, which has turned music from a product into a service, a never-ending stream of songs tailored to your mood, moment, and life.

A power shift has accompanied the rise of these transformational products. In the analog world, scarcity was the rule. Products were finite, and value was tied to their physical form. In the digital world, scarcity has been replaced by abundance. The cost of distributing and reproducing digital goods is zero, meaning the old rules no longer apply. The new currency is attention, and the winners are the companies that can capture, hold, and monetize it.

This shift has profound implications for businesses. Those who try to cling to old models—selling physical goods in a digital world—are doomed to fail. The future belongs to those who can embrace the logic of the Casual Economy, creating products that are not just helpful but essential, not just convenient but transformative.

Schrader’s book is a call to arms for anyone navigating this new world. It’s a guide to the code that underpins the digital age, a roadmap for building products that matter. But it’s also a warning. The Casual Economy is not without its dark side. The same forces that have made our lives easier have made them more precarious. The companies that dominate the digital landscape are not just providers of services; they are gatekeepers of information, arbiters of truth, and architects of our digital selves.

As we hurtle into the future, remembering that the code that powers our world is not neutral is worth remembering. It reflects the values and priorities of those who write it. And if we’re not careful, it could end up writing us.

So, what’s next? Schrader doesn’t have all the answers, but he does have a vision. The next wave of the digital revolution will be driven by artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies promise to make our lives even more convenient but raise new questions about privacy, autonomy, and control.

Ultimately, Transformational Products is not just a book about technology but about us. It’s a reminder that the digital age does not happen to us; it’s something we create, one line of code at a time. And if we want to shape it for the better, we need to understand the forces that drive it.

The code is out there. The question is, what will we do with it?

The book is available — beautifully printed! — on Amazon (English|German) or as a PDF download here (English|German).