Omar Rizwan
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@omar,
I was looking at this Paul Dourish book earlier which opens with this critique of computers as being optimized to save programmer time instead of human time
it's funny how 90s and early 00s commentary on computing has opposite problems to those we have today: that computers had these overcomplicated UIs designed by programmers, they had all these settings, they had terrible security, and so on
Omar Rizwan
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@omar,
while today I would say the opposite of all those: that computers have these oversimplified UIs designed by designers, that they can't be customized, that they're so locked-down that you can't create new things or automate your workflow, that there's a ceiling on how much you learn about them...
Omar Rizwan
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@omar,
anyway, I wonder if something like 'computers are not secure' is a comparatively legible and solvable target, but the things that were lost (programmability, 'freedom') are more intangible, harder to articulate
Omar Rizwan
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@omar,
or as clear use cases for computing emerged (games, social media, documents, chat), industry optimized for those millions of users and created almost fixed-function 'computers' that do those really well, while being general-purpose computers only in a vestigial sense