Day: September 17, 2013

The drift of current design is to rub out all traces of human agency in computer and web use ("here, let the machine do that for you") while at the same time dispensing endless hype encouraging people to express their individuality by sharing.

Olia Lialina thinks "user" is not a bad word, and posits a resourceful, skeptical (ideal) individual somewhere between the programmer/designer/hacker who sneers at "average" consumers and the imagined helpless n00b most "apps" are designed for. Joking on the "general purpose computer" and the "Turing test" for artificial intelligence, she posits the General Purpose User or Turing Complete User.

Fleshing out this conception further, this person:

Dislikes being infantilized by his internet service provider ("uh oh, you're not logged in")

Scorns URL shorteners that anonymize incoming links.

Offers cigars to people who quit Facebook (on Twitter but nobody's perfect).

Questions whether top level domains are the future of the internet.

Uses Raspberry Pi to block ads at the WiFi router level.

Asks why use "HTML5" when a GIF would work. (Prompting one genius to comment "Paddy, you really need to stop listening to Moody. He knows next to nothing about the web. Esp. its technologies.")

Earlier post