Technology

I believe the way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. The elephant in the room is a dated understanding of the role of both design and engineering, which in turn shapes how organizations hire, manage, and produce digital things. These companies invest billions of dollars building teams, processes, and tools on top of an immature discipline and an outdated waterfall model that ends up being detrimental to productivity, team happiness, and ultimately, the resulting experiences we bring to life.

Slowly, the tools of the hand disappear. This is a lamentation for lost tools and a quiet manifesto describing our desire for slowness. We write not in opposition to computers—in fact we are in the midst of bringing them into our studio—but rather it is a discussion about the importance of slowness. We write in support of slowness.

My problem [with Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision], from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It's a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is terrible.

This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you're a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact.

The AI glut significantly exacerbates the issue of misinformation and low-quality content. The current state of AI technology lacks the nuanced understanding and ethical judgment necessary to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the content it produces. This gap in capability opens the floodgates for misinformation to spread unchecked, fracturing discourse, heightening divides and hampering decision-making.

This all boils down to one thing. Human curation is now more critical than ever. As algorithms churn out vast quantities of information with varying degrees of accuracy and quality, the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against the tide of misinformation and mediocrity. Human curators bring nuanced understanding, contextual awareness, and ethical judgment to the table—qualities that AI, in its current state, is fundamentally unable to replicate. 

I’ve led infrastructure at a startup for the past 4 years that has had to scale quickly. From the beginning I made some core decisions that the company has had to stick to, for better or worse, these past four years. This post will list some of the major decisions made and if I endorse them for your startup, or if I regret them and advise you to pick something else.

A name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, presented by Douglas Engelbart on December 9, 1968. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing:

• windows,
• hypertext,
• graphics,
• efficient navigation and command input,
• video conferencing,
• the computer mouse,
• word processing,
• dynamic file linking,
• revision control,
• and a collaborative real-time editor

Conventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.

...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.

The basic argument of the [Standard Critique of Technology] goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).

The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices (Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones.

I decided to record every broken interaction I had during one day.

If I decided to invest time into thinning this list down, I could theoretically...reduce this list from 27 down to 24. At least 24 annoyances per day I have to live with. That’s the world WE ALL are living in now. Welcome.

In the past ten years, the computer has thoroughly transformed graphic design practice. But this book is about a different revolution, a second computer revolution. Now computers are transforming a deeper level of visual communications fundamentals, becoming more than a sketching, composition and production tool for graphic design. Electronics are becoming communications’ delivery medium, the context, the content and a conceptual world as well. This form of graphic design is no longer linear and two dimensional. It is hyperfluid and six-dimensional, adding the dimensions of real time, motion, sound and interactivity to our two traditional XY coordinates.

...This vast field desperately needs to define its process and professional content– a philosophy and curriculum, and an identity. It even needs a name. The terms “new media” and “multimedia” are problematic, their vagueness and ambiguity contributing to the misconception that anyone familiar with the software tools is qualified to practice in it. “Computer graphics” and “website design” describe the product rather than the conceptual process of designing.

The reason we build software is to get something done, to solve some problem. That destination is what guides our adoption of technologies.

With any given choice, the question is: does this technology fundamentally alter my chances of solving this problem? If the answer is "no", then just go with the boring choice. It doesn't make a difference, so why would you give up the benefits? If the answer is "yes, it makes us much more likely to succeed," then you get to move on.

...Use the boring things until you absolutely cannot succeed with it, and you'll get a lot further a lot faster.

We are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.

The above is a map of all Hacker News posts since its founding, laid semantically i.e. where there should be some relationship between positions and distances. I've been building it and some other interesting stuff over the past few weeks, to play around with text embeddings. Given that HN has a lot of interesting, curated content and exposes all its content programatically, I thought it'd be a fun place to start. [Case Study]

Let me argue that the actual dawn of user interface design first happened when computer designers finally noticed, not just that end users had functioning minds, but that a better understanding of how those minds worked could completely shift the paradigm of interaction.

Increasingly, I think UX doesn't live up to its original meaning of "user experience." Instead, much of the discipline today, as it's practiced in Big Tech firms, is better described by a new name.

UX is now "user exploitation."

Steve Jobs showing Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf how to use a Macintosh Computer

What are the effects of this enumeration, of these metrics that count our social interactions? In other words, how are the designs of Facebook leading us to act, and to interact in certain ways and not in others? For example, would we add as many friends if we weren’t constantly confronted with how many we have? Would we “like” as many ads if we weren’t told how many others liked them before us? Would we comment on others’ statuses as often if we weren’t told how many friends responded to each comment?

In this paper, I question the effects of metrics from three angles. First I examine how our need for personal worth, within the confines of capitalism, transforms into an insatiable “desire for more.” Second, with this desire in mind, I analyze the metric components of Facebook’s interface using a software studies methodology, exploring how these numbers function and how they act upon the site’s users. Finally, I discuss my software, born from my research-based artistic practice, called Facebook Demetricator (2012-present). Facebook Demetricator removes all metrics from the Facebook interface, inviting the site’s users to try the system without the numbers and to see how that removal changes their experience. With this free web browser extension, I aim to disrupt the prescribed sociality produced through metrics, enabling a social media culture less dependent on quantification.

Today I want to discuss just one bedrock of real world life that is often neglected—or frequently even mocked: Ritual.

I know how much I rely on my daily rituals as a way of creating wholeness and balance. I spend every morning in an elaborate ritual involving breakfast, reading books (physical copies, not on a screen), listening to music, and enjoying home life.

Even my morning coffee preparation is ritualistic. (However, I’m not as extreme as this person—who rivals the Japanese tea ceremony in attention to detail.)

I try to avoid plugging into the digital world until after noon.

I look forward to this daily time away from screens. But my personal rituals are just one tiny example. There are many larger ways that rituals provide an antidote to the more toxic aspects of tech-dominated society.

The Builder mindset often eschews policy completely and focuses on the macro issues, rather than the micro complexities. It is a mindset that seeks to find very elaborate, hypothetical-but-definitely-paradigm-shifting, futuristic technology to fix current problems, instead of focusing on a series of boring-sounding and modest reforms that might help people now.

…The worst version of Builder mentality is that their dreams become reality, but instead of maintaining their creations, they simply move onto the next Big Thing, leaving others to deal with the mess they’ve made.

Back in school my professor, Canadian economics superhero Larry Smith, explained debt this way (paraphrased): debt is stupid if it's for instant gratification that you pay for later, with interest. But debt is great if it means you can make more money than the interest payments.

A family that takes on high-interest credit card debt for a visit to Disneyland is wasting money. If you think you can pay it off in a year, you'll pay 20%-ish interest for that year for no reason. You can instead save up for a year and get the same gratification next year without the 20% surcharge.

But if you want to buy a $500k machine that will earn your factory an additional $1M/year in revenue, it would be foolish not to buy it now, even with 20% interest ($100k/year). That's a profit of $900k in just the first year! (excluding depreciation)

...Debt is bad when you take out the wrong kind, or you mismanage it, or it has weird strings attached (hello Venture Debt that requires you to put all your savings in one underinsured place). But done right, debt is a way to move faster instead of slower.

Fulfillment is a multimedia installation that examines aspects of the “hidden-in-plain-sight” landscapes of e-commerce, cloud computing, crypto-mining, as well as the legal contracts that bind us to these technological systems. Both horrified and fascinated by the dematerialized digital systems of transaction and communication, Linder uses pen and paper to critically reconnect the digital world to one of tangible nature.

It is thought-provoking that this sense of estrangement and detachment is often evoked by the technologically most advanced settings, such as hospitals and airports.

Despite its very different political-economic DNA, the blogosphere has become enshittified as clearly as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Not just at the level of aging software, but at the level of the aging people who inhabit it, maintain it, and continue to churn out content on it, though at a rapidly decelerating rate. And it’s hard to blame any particular party in the picture. The technical decisions that lead to the sort of messy problem that afflicted this site can’t be attributed to malice, objectionable politics, or billionaires behaving badly. They’re within the band of ordinary technology management decisions I see all over the place in my consulting work. Humans are just not good at building complex technologies that mature to a graceful immortality. The WordPress-based blogosphere is at the outer limit of complexity we are capable of getting to.

The process of competition ensures a better user experience, and at the same time disincentivizes companies from engaging in too much enshittification. But it would seem like the decline of Myspace or the decline of Research In Motion (the maker of the once popular Blackberry, which was superseded by the iPhone) are more of the exception than the rule. After a certain threshold is crossed in terms of market saturation, competition becomes less of a threat.

...So even if [Doctorow] is right that big tech companies are becoming shittier, I don’t see the final stage in which people leave the platform ever happening either, or that better platforms arrive and introduce competition. We’re stuck in stage three forever.

I remain mystified by what seems like an exponential increase in the need to communicate induced by the availability of a ready new means to do so, just as new highway capacity produces increased traffic. Witness the cabdrivers who talk uninterrupted on the phone as they travel the city, or the truly huge numbers of people who speak on the phone as they walk down the street: the medium has clearly become the message, if the meaning of the message remains somewhat opaque.

Remember when tech wasn't all sleek slabs and monotone minimalism? When gadgets were vibrant, playful, and dared to be, well, weird? Yeah, me too.

...In the recent past, we used to get new devices all the time. Palm Pilots, Tamagotchis, calculator watches, even clunky walkie-talkies – they weren't all game-changers, but they were sparks in the tinderbox of creativity for engineers and product managers the world over. They pushed boundaries, sparked imaginations, and kept the tech world humming with the energy of ‘what if?’

That's the real magic of new funky gadgets. It's not about the specs or the price tag (though, let's be honest, who can resist a new toy, and at $200 it’s an easy purchase to tinker with). It's about the audacity to be different, to inject a little fun into what some would say is now simply another part of change-averse corporate America. It's a neon sign flashing: you don’t have to be a trillion dollar company to build a device. That’s cool.

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

It has become exceedingly clear to me that the average company is not a suitable environment for someone that cares about the craft of programming. To make things worse, once your standards are high for yourself, I'm guessing that only the top 1% of companies in terms of workplace culture is not a personal offense. The only options laid out before me are:

1. Have my own business be successful
2. Find a top 1% company in terms of engineering culture
3. Leave the technology space

...It's a given that the tech industry is large - very, very large. I can't even begin to guess at how many jobs there are available for people who can make computers do things for a living. But something that I'm starting to very sincerely believe, and I don't know how it could be otherwise, is that the number of jobs for serious people is probably very, very small.

Soylent embodies the hubris and pitfalls of tech culture’s impulse to reduce the irreducible. The same naive confidence that code can optimize every aspect of our lives — the mindset that produced the mantra “everything should be as easy as ordering an Uber”- convinced Rhinehart and his team that they could engineer a better human fuel in defiance of millions of years of evolution. It’s an attractive illusion that technology can neatly solve the messy realities of existing in a body, of being a biological creature instead of a computer.

But again and again, biology proves more complex and unpredictable than software, with squishy and distinctive needs that aren’t so easy to generalize. Soylent is hardly the first or last startup to run aground chasing the seductive vision of human perfectibility through technology. But it offers a vivid object lesson in the limits of this worldview.

...My takeaway from Soylent is this: You can’t simply hack humanity into a more optimized version of itself. Our needs and drives have been shaped by millions of years of co-evolution and won’t be engineered away by a coterie of coders — no matter how much pedigreed venture funding they secure.

Because, in the end, even the most powerful code can’t reprogram the squishy, gloriously inefficient realities of the flesh.

The ugliest part about tech is the lingo, the language, the words that we use to describe our work and each other.

...For example, the way we describe the different kinds of work. In this world there are managers and “ICs”—individual contributors. Those are the folks who, ya know, get stuff done. They build stuff. They draw the mocks, write the code. To me, calling these folks “ICs” has always been dehumanizing, lazy, and sloppy. It makes it sound like we’re all parts in a giant machine that can be easily replaced with the flick of a switch.

...But besides the tone and feeling of this cruel abbreviation, there’s two reasons why I hate calling people who work this whole dumb “IC” thing.

First, it’s buck wild to me that managers don’t need an abbreviation or shorthand. This tells you something about how they think about the labor of employees, that they can be so easily abbreviated.

Second, there’s no such thing as “individual” contributions! All work, all labor—regardless of job or industry—is a collective. The problem here really starts at school, as they set you up in competition with your classmates and you have to see yourself as the hero that has to do everything for yourself. But actual, real work outside of school requires collective effort to get anything meaningful done.

Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear. The pendulum swings back and forth, which isn’t a bad thing

Billions of dollars have shifted toward an entirely new category of technology without any real consideration of whether they'll be good products that users will like — or whether said products might actually harm users — because these companies are not interested in useful innovation or what will actually make their products better at the things they're meant to do. Instead, they are interested in pumping stocks and showing the ability to grow their revenues every single quarter, even if doing so doesn't make the actual purpose of the company stronger.

There are ways to integrate new technology into a core product that doesn't end in disaster.

The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.

This is the reason a Nintendo console never has the fastest chips or the beefiest specs of its generation; instead, its remixes components in an interesting and generative way. Think of the Gameboy’s monochrome screen, the Wii’s motion controller, the Switch’s smartphone form.

[Gunpei Yokoi] is talking about reliability and predictability, in performance and supply alike. He wants the components to be boring, so their application can be daring.

Much of what Barthes says about photography rings true only if we are thinking of its traditional chemical/mechanical phase. Polaroids provided instant memories but digital photography seems entirely devoid of any qualities of past time.

...It is ironic, then, that one of the most memorable tributes to Barthes comes in the form of an image that would have been inconceivable without the benefits of digital technology. In 2004 Idris Khan made a photograph entitled "Every page...from Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida," in which he combined the pages in a single image so that Barthes's text and pictures reproduced in the book peer at the viewer through a dense fog of their own making. (The return of the read!) It is as if decaying and enduring memories of the book's successive pleasures—first words and last—have been compacted into a ghostly blur of almost impenetrable purity.

In 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something ‘made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was handmade. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and ‘dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced ‘perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual?

...we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.

Create good problems to have. You want to build easy things with obvious shortcomings that create problems at scale. Good problems to have are good problems to solve… later.

What makes a problem good to have? A good problem to have is a problem that emerges after the flywheel is already spinning. It emerges at scale, under rapid growth. Since the flywheel is already spinning, the momentum of the flywheel can be turned toward solving the problem. A rapidly growing ecosystem will be intrinsically motivated to solve obvious problems of scale.

A bad problem to have is a problem you face before you have a product, before you have PMF, before you have growth, before you have a community, before you have any momentum.

Don’t build “perfect” technology.

This first-generation Vision Pro hardware is severely restricted by the current limits of technology. Apple has pushed those limits in numerous ways, but the limits are glaring. This Vision Pro is a stake in the ground, defining the new state of the art in immersive headset technology. But that stake in the ground will recede in the rear view mirror as the years march on. Just like the Mac’s 9-inch monochrome 512⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠342 pixel display. Just like the iPhone’s EDGE cellular modem.

But the conceptual design of VisionOS lays the foundation for an entirely new direction of interaction design. Just like how the basic concepts of the original Mac interface were exactly right, and remain true to this day. Just like how the original iPhone defined the way every phone in the world now works.

So, you’re thinking of building a new thing. It’s going to be a lot like that other thing that already exists. In fact, it seems so similar that lots of folks are asking you why you’re building a new thing rather than using that existing thing, or maybe adapting that existing thing to your needs. Those people have the right general instincts—rebuilding a thing that already exists and works is seldom a good bet—and you have other important things to do. On the other hand, you seem convinced that your thing will be better in important ways. You also point to a long history of innovation where folks had similar doubts. That, too, is correct. After all, Newcomen and Savery’s steam engines weren’t much better than what they replaced (and ended up being a pretty big deal).

I tend to be biased towards innovation. Towards building. I think most advice for technical leaders over-emphasizes the short-term risks of innovating too much, and under-emphasizes the long-term risks of innovating too little.

Motorola developed what it called a 'technology shelf', created by a small group of engineers, on which were placed possible technical solutions that other teams might use in the future; rather than trying to solve the problem outright, it developed tools whose immediate value was not clear.

Everyone who interacts with computers has in important ways always already been programming them.

Every time you make a folder or rename a file on your computer, the actions you take through moving your mouse and clicking on buttons, translate into text-based commands or scripts which eventually translate into binary.

Why are the common conceptions of what a programmer and user is so divorced from each other? The distinction between programmer and user is reinforced and maintained by a tech industry that benefits from a population rendered computationally passive. If we accept and adopt the role of less agency, we then make it harder for ourselves to come into more agency.

It seems this transformation, from physical object to vector of data, is a general and oft-repeated process in the history of technology, where new inventions begin in an early experimental phase in which they are treated and behave as singular individual things, but then evolve into vectors in a diffuse and regimented system as the technology advances and becomes standardized.

In the early history of aviation, airplanes were just airplanes, and each time a plane landed or crashed was a singular event. Today, I am told by airline-industry insiders, if you are a billionaire interested in starting your own airline, it is far easier to procure leases for actual physical airplanes, than it is to obtain approval for a new flight route. Making the individual thing fly is not a problem; inserting it into the system of flight, getting its data relayed to the ATC towers and to flightaware.com, is.

Latency in modern computer interfaces, with modern OSes and modern applications, is terrible and getting worse. This applies to smartphones as well. At the same time, while UIs were much more responsible on computers of the past, those computers were also awful in many ways: new systems have changed our lives substantially. So, what gives?

Electricity is the everyday manifestation of vestal fire: a cool, clean, quick current coursing through infrastructures, rather than the raging messy snapping terror of uncontrolled fire; but at one end or the other of the electrical gastrointestinal tract, there is inevitably smoke and ash. Electricity is repressed fire, as we see in the supposedly eco-friendly idea of cloud computing.

A man was sent to fix a problem with one of our doors. When I encountered him he was enlarging a hole in the door with a grinder so the lock would latch. I looked at the door and noted that that door was not latching because the screws holding the hinges to the door-frame had corroded and the door had dropped. I pointed this out to him, and suggested that he replace the screws in the hinges instead. He looked at me with incomprehension and said, “Look, I’m a lock guy. I’m not a door guy.”

...when you identify so strongly with one particular technology or one tech stack you inherently limit your ability to frame technical problems from alternative angles. You risk becoming fixated on problem solving instead of problem framing.

The difference between problem solving and problem framing is one of intellectual curiosity and attitude. Problem framing often requires a willingness and ability to transcend disciplinary boundaries, to grapple with things that are incongruous or incompatible or simply outside your skillset. A problem cannot be solved—or at least solved well—if it has not first been fully understood, examined, and framed well. And this means developing skill in asking questions. But it’s hard to be curious and ask good questions when you automatically self-identify as “lock folk,” approaching every possible problem as a lock-shaped problem.

The principle of “good enough”  is a rule in software and hardware. It indicates that consumers will use products that are good enough for their requirements, despite the availability of more advanced technology.

I've been thinking about this idea a lot lately. In fact, I've had the beginning of a blog post titled “Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should” sitting in my ideas folder for several weeks now. Just because you can afford the fanciest, most powerful device doesn't mean you should buy it. I fall into this trap myself from time to time, and this is a good reminder for all of us not to get caught up in it. “Good enough” truly is good enough despite the availability of more powerful technology.

Mac(os)talgia is exploring my 2020 work-from-home routine with an added touch of nostalgia. How would have the same workflow looked like with the tools of today and the limitations of yesterday. Unreliable internet, little disk storage, macOS 9 and much more.

And that ascent rocket, the most important piece of hardware in the lander, was a caveman design intentionally made so primitive that it would struggle to find ways to fail.

What technologies or tools make you think of that phrase — “a design so primitive, it struggles to find ways to fail”? (HTML & CSS might I suggest?) I would love if more of my digital tools and services employed this ethos.

But modern tools (and space hardware, apparently) seemingly go in the opposite direction. They go out of their way to create problems that can be solved with technology.

On Artemis, it's the other way around: the more hazardous the mission phase, the more complex the hardware.

As Devine noted about computing, perhaps we haven’t even scratched the surface of what can be done with little.

Apollo showed us that.

The modern computer, with its generic styling and overloaded activity, creates a cognitive environment defined by urgent, bland, Sisyphean widget cranking — work as endless Slack and email and Zoom and “jumping on” calls, in which there is always too much to do, but no real sense of much of importance actually being accomplished.

In McNamara’s construction we find an alternative understanding of work, built now on beauty, craftsmanship, and focus. Replacing everyone’s MacBook with custom-carved hardwood, of course, is not enough on its own to transform how we think about out jobs, as these issues have deeper roots. But the Mythic is a useful reminder that the rhythms of our professional lives are not pre-ordained. We craft the world in which we work, even if we don’t realize it.

This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.

Computers can aid humans in our most noble endeavors: art, science, thinking, self-improvement. But today’s dominant computing platforms increasingly work against the needs of creative professionals. Ink & Switch is an independent research lab working on this problem.

1. The process by which new domestic labors and laborers arise as a consequence of digitalization and technological services;
2. A framework for examining who the service workers are (beyond a gender binary) behind the maintenance and labor tasks created by our technological conditions;
3. A creative strategy for addressing the hidden costs of digitalization and its effects on those outside of labor protection laws.

Fascination with this potential for control of our environment has prompted the invention of mechanical systems that have made natural thermal strategies seem obsolete by comparison.

There is a time to build and a time to repair. Repairing what is broken is difficult and important work that requires contextualizing technology and working within creative constraints…If we just keep building without repairing what exists or applying lessons learned along the way, we will continue to spin our wheels as the same problems accumulate and amplify. In this way, our technology may evolve, but our relationship to it (and to each other) can only degrade.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

I think I’m going to get shouted at on the internet for this suggestion, but I think MDN core documentation content needs forking and an alternative platform needs to develop from that forked, attributed content that has a sustainable funding and leadership model. Mozilla ain’t providing that.

...The way I see it, if you mix a group of extremely technical writers and people that actually build stuff on the web together, the outcome will surely be great. I’m also likely slightly projecting here because I am not smart enough to read a spec, or even dry technical docs and understand them. My brain isn’t wired up that way. But, if there’s an interactive, inspiring demo, you bet I’m gonna soak up that knowledge like a sponge and I know I speak for many others who are similar to me.

The point I’m making is we as a collective can do so much better and importantly, look after an extremely valuable resource better. Something that’s focused on what it is, rather than something that’s good, but frequently gets enshittified by terrible leadership decisions.

A common existential concern of mine when I was suffering from undiagnosed anxiety as a teen (I am, of course, completely fixed and normal now) was that one day humans would run out of words. There is a finite number of words, my thinking went, and a finite number of ways to order them before we inevitably started to repeat ourselves. I’ve since traded this spiral for more tangible anxieties, but lately it’s been creeping back into my consciousness as news like this makes the rounds: “Flink, who recently acquired Cajoo, will no longer be sold to Getir.”

...Flink has acquired Cajoo but will not be sold to Getir. Viterra might merge with Bunge. Ape holders can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape. All these very real sentences carry the whiff of a society that has completely run out of words. We’re not just creating new ones, but introducing entirely new sounds into our lexicon, and these are in turn credulously repeated in headlines in a way that, frankly, borders on gaslighting. You can’t just say “bunge” like that’s a thing we say. I’ve never said “bunge” or anything like it in my life.

Society, in other words, has abandoned words for syllables, and the tech industry is the worst offender.

Andy and Bill's law is a statement that new software will always consume any increase in computing power that new hardware can provide.

Beware of loops. Loops kill you. With loops you don’t go anywhere. If you start feeling a loop, step back and try to refocus.

...What I was trying to convey when talking about loops, if I remember well, was something in between these two meanings, the literal and sociologic one. Something like an environment in which a person becomes so involved and enveloped in their interests and reverberations of such interests, that they lose sight of the actual importance of such interests and simultaneously of the actual influence these interests have on their worldview. That’s why I was talking about bad habits and little addictions.

The biggest determinant for success in a technology company is the speed at which it operates and learns – the “clock speed” to use a CPU analogy.

...When someone says “Let’s have a follow up conversation”, what is the implicit unspoken understanding of when that should happen?

In companies I’ve been at, that has ranged from a few hours to the next day to the next week to …perhaps never. This little test usually tells me a lot about how fast your organization/company works.

I believe our job as designers is to give you what you need as quickly and elegantly as we can. Our job as designers is to take you away from technology. Our job as designers is to make you smile. To make a profit by providing you something that enhances your life in the most seamless and wonderful way possible.

In the twenty-first century, the question most of us ask when disaster strikes is not "How could God let that happen?" but "Who screwed up?" This is a salutary development: We take responsibility for the world we live in. Whether or not our world is the best of all possible worlds, it is a world we have made for ourselves. We live in an engineered landscape, on an engineered planet. Our cities and farms, our dwellings and vehicles, our power plans and communication networks—these are all creations of human artifice. If we don't like it here, we have only ourselves to blame.

Some may find puzzling or distasteful the parallel I am drawing between the study of nature and the study of technology. After all, nature is good and good for you, whereas everyone knows that technology is ugly, evil, and dangerous.

A few centuries ago—say, on the American western frontier—a quite different view prevailed. Nature was seen as savage, hostile, cruel. Mountains and forests were barriers, not refuges. The lights of civilization were a comforting sight. We took our charter from the book of Genesis, which grants mankind dominion over the beasts, and felt it was both our entitlement and our duty to tame the wilderness, fell the trees, plow the land, and dam the rivers.

I strive for a future where people feel more alive, connected, creative, and fulfilled than ever. I work across disciplines because I believe bringing this future involves technical, psychological, moral, and aesthetic dimensions.

All of my work deals with our relationship to technology: how we shape it and how it shapes us. Technology can augment our powers, accelerate our goals, and transform our environment. But it may destroy our nervous systems in the process. While I’m fascinated by technology, the conservation and elevation of the human spirit is ultimately what matters to me.

Accordingly, I believe technology must do two things to be good: 1) it must serve a good purpose, and; 2) it must make a person better by virtue of having used it. Within this framing, I don’t see humanness as a set of limitations that technology should augment or transcend. Instead, I see humanness as a set of virtues that technology should enrich.

This way of thinking about technology and human fulfillment runs through everything I do.

“How Lord Northcliffe Heard Two Oceans At the Same Time,” the headline from the October 1917 issue of Electrical Experimenter magazine blared.

A Fermi estimate is a quick-and-dirty solution to an arbitrary scientific or engineering analysis problem. Fermi estimation uses widely known numbers, readily observable phenomenology, basic physics equations, and a bunch of approximation techniques to arrive at rough answers that tend to be correct within an order of magnitude or so. The term is named for Enrico Fermi, who was famously good at this sort of thing.

…It struck me that there is counterpart to this kind of thinking on the synthesis side, where you use similar techniques to arrive at a very rough design for a complex engineered artifact. I call such a design approach Dyson design, after the physicist Freeman Dyson, who was one of the best practitioners of it (not to be confused with inventor James Dyson, whose designs, ironically, are not Dyson designs).

Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the bureaucracy’s internal function.

...Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how engineering organizations can adopt a variant of the No Wrong Doors policy to directly connect folks with problems with the right team and information. Then the first contact point becomes a support system for navigating the bureaucracy successfully.

What happens when it stops being “don’t make think while I’m trying to complete a task” to simply “don’t make me think” full stop?

Convenience. Ease of use. Seamlessness.

On the face of it, these all seem like desirable traits in digital and physical products alike. But they come at a price. When we design, we try to do the work so that the user doesn’t have to. We do the thinking so the user doesn’t have to. Don’t make the user think. But taken too far, that mindset becomes dangerous.

Marshall McLuhan said that every extension is also an amputution. As we augment the abilities of people to accomplish their tasks, we should be careful not to needlessly curtail what they can do:

Here we are, a society hell bent on extending our reach through phones, through computers, through “seamless integration” and yet all along the way we’re unwittingly losing perhaps as much as we gain. The mediums we create are built to carry out specific tasks efficiently, but by doing so they have a tendency to restrict our options for accomplishing that task by other means. We begin to learn the “One” way to do it, when in fact there are infinite ways. The medium begins to restrict our thinking, our imagination, our potential.

The idea of “seamlessness” as a desirable trait in what we design is one that bothers me. Technology has seams. By hiding those seams, we may think we are helping the end user, but we are also making a conscience choice to deceive them (or at least restrict what they can do).

I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it. 

But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complex technological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide, manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils.

There are two classes of problems caused by new technology. Class 1 problems are due to it not working perfectly. Class 2 problems are due to it working perfectly.

...Class 1 problems arise early and they are easy to imagine. Usually market forces will solve them. You could say, most Class 1 problems are solved along the way as they rush to become Class 2 problems. Class 2 problems are much harder to solve because they require more than just the invisible hand of the market to overcome them.

...Class 1 problems are caused by technology that is not perfect, and are solved by the marketplace. Class 2 problems are caused by technology that is perfect, and must be solved by extra-market forces such as cultural norms, regulation, and social imagination.

Foregrounding maintenance and repair as an aspect of technological work invites not only new functional but also moral relations to the world of technology. It references what is in fact a very old but routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility.

The installation consists of two networked machines. Both display on their monitor a classic romantic poem. One of the two computers is infected with an encrypted stealth virus and contaminates itself as well as its connected partner. The virus contamination runs over the period of the whole exhibition, in which the visitor can witness the ongoing process by watching the mutations on the monitor texts slowly taking place. The poetries presented on the two monitors act as visual indicator and textual interface for the infection provoked by the active virus.

Consider, for example, how “broken world thinking” can benefit product design. What if the person (or team) who invented a new technology collaborated with the person (or team) who would one day repair the same technology? What if the innovation stakeholders and the infrastructure stakeholders collaborated closely with the end users? What if every new product designed by a technology company was designed in such as way as to factor in what happens to the product after planned obsolescence?

In the automobile's technological middle age, it is hard, if not impossible, to tune or repair one's own vehicle. Technical standardization of cars has occurred, and with it the elimination of the user's access to the machine itself. At the same time, the infrastructures that once served those who did not use automobiles atrophied and vanished. Some may say they were deliberately starved out. Railways gave way to more and more roadways. And thus a technology that had been perceived to liberate its users began to enslave them.

We are surrounded by documents of all kinds, from receipts to letters, business memos to books, yet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as out reading and writing habits are being questioned and transformed by new technologies ad practices. What is the future of the book? Is paper about to disappear? With the Internet and World Wide Web, what will happen to libraries, copyright and education? Starting with a simple deli lunch receipt, Scrolling Forward examines documents of all kinds from the perspectives of culture, history, and technology in order to show how they can work and what they say about us and the values we carry into the new age.

What you have here are 100 dispatches spanning that decade of thinking and writing about how technology sustains, mediates, and conditions our experience. These are the essays that, in my view, have remained useful exercises in thinking about the meaning of technology. Prominent themes include the relationship of technology to politics, memory and time, ethics, and the experience of the self.

Even with all the features and plugins, Canvas presumes certain ways of organizing classes that might not be universal, just typical. And if (like me) you’re an atypical user, you have to choose between constantly fighting with the system or gradually doing more and more things the way Canvas wants you to do them. This, by the way, is why it’s never true to say that technologies are neutral and what matters is how you use them: every technology without exception has affordances, certain actions that it makes easy, and other actions that it makes difficult or impossible. A technology whose affordances run contrary to your convictions can rob you of your independence — and any technology deployed on the scale of Canvas will inevitably do that. It will turn every teacher into an obedient Canvas-user. I don’t want to be an obedient Canvas-user.

The obsidian flake and the silicon chip are struck by the light of the same campfire that has passed from hand to hand since the human mind began.

• What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
• What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
• Does the use of this technology bring me joy?
• What limits does the use of this technology impose upon me?
• Upon what systems, technical or human, does my use of this technology depend? Are these systems just?

Working in the typical dot-com office was an admixture of frenetic pace and a relaxed overall atmosphere, exemplifying that chilled-out anxiety which was the general mood of the 1990’s.

Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters. Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.

"The point is to get people to peel those visors off their faces, to remove the goggles, to abandon the screens. Those screens whose very purpose is to screen the actual world out. Who cares about virtuality when there's all this reality—this incredible, inexhaustible, insatiable, astonishing reality—present all around!"

The command line is pure language, and to exist in it is to practice all the reality-shifting and world manifesting power of metaphor and dialogue. This is a place of empowerment, tangible creativity, and mystic bewilderment. While it can be dangerous, it’s also exceedingly helfpul if you know how to listen.

By World War II, we seem to have come to take new gadgets for granted or relied upon advertising to inform us of what was new. Whereas our great-grandparents apparently found the latest improvement on the fountain pen or the bicycle of intellectual interest, most people in our generation take only a commercial and utilitarian view of such things.