In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
I didn't read all of it because its very wrong but one thing he is right about is that the average technology enjoyer has no idea how much they are being abused, disrespected and taken advantage of every time they engage with technology. Mostly because they have no frame of reference. As a seasoned technology user I have experience wading through the sewage of proprietary mainstream technology but people like me make up almost 0% of the total consumer base.
i am no tech wizard but i am easily in the 5% percentile on my region and even i have no clue of how much i get abused.
That's the thing that gets me as well. People just accept these horrible patterns in software as being completely normal.
Most don't even have any memory of tech not trying to fuck them over at every chance it gets. Most have forgotten and the younger folks who grew up on Apple's shit never got a chance to know what a file system is.
I feel this, both with computers and with video games. "Smart"phones are possibly one of the worst developments in tech, when taking into account what capitalism can and has done with them. What could be a device that is centered around helpful things like GPS, is instead focused around being addicting and keeping you glued to the digital world at all times. And even GPS has a dark side, in the location tracking that is tied up in it.
Indeed, I feel like technical illiteracy has paradoxically increased as computers have become more common place. Even among software developers, a lot of people don't really understand how things work at a basic level, and just cargo cult solutions.
From a blog post that is popular at the moment:
Persist logs? What on earth could that option be for? My logs never disappear.
And here I was, when AJAX first released, I struggled to wrap my head around making it work. I didn't last long in webdev, it just wasn't my forte. At best I can shell script some tasks these days but I'm way too out of practice at this point.
🤣