The slow death of the power user.
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@koen_hufkens We can't all be "power users" in everything we use. I'm 100% OK with instant usability. If someone wants to just use a computer without knowing how it works that's no different from me wanting to just use clothes without knowing about weaving and stitching. Yes, that means that I'm dependent on Big Sewing. I'm OK with that. I don't want to be a self-sufficient peasant who can do everything he needs to survive but can't go to the opera.
@DrHyde @koen_hufkens When I started using computers as a child in the 1980s, you had to know a lot about the machine if you wanted to do anything remotely interesting at all other than playing games. I built my first PC from components as a teenager back in the early 1990s. I used Windows 3.1 only for the applications that needed it, running everything else from the MS-DOS command line because typing with ten fingers is much faster than clicking with three (I've always had three button mice before the scroll wheels came). In 1997, I installed my first Linux distribution on my 486, and I have been using Linux ever since. Mostly in dual boot configurations, starting Windows for the software that needed it, but over time, Wine became better and better at running Windows software on Linux, and nowadays most of my machines are Linux only.
I do like convenience though; for many years, Ubuntu was my favourite distribution, until it started becoming enshittified and I moved to Mint. While I know how to set up everything manually, I prefer something that installs quickly and easily, where everything comes with a decent default configuration you rarely need to change.
My desktop environment of choice is KDE, it has been KDE since version 1.0 in the late 1990s, mostly because I like the look and feel better than GNOME, and I like how much I can tweak it. Tweaking user interfaces is something I like to do; I like it with a lot of bling, a lot of eye candy, custom themes, custom designs, every single UI element tailored to my preferences.
Unfortunately, I never really got into software development, I'm too impatient for that. I do write some software of my own, but that's almost exclusively small single purpose command line tools written in Pascal or Python. -
@DrHyde @koen_hufkens for sure.
It's probably isn't a coincidence that "power users" try to rack up skills across disciplines, so that they can reap as many benefits as possible.
@buckfiftyseven @koen_hufkens do they? Plenty of people are "power users" in just one or two disciplines, or at most in parts of several disciplines that they use together to achieve a single goal.
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@buckfiftyseven @koen_hufkens do they? Plenty of people are "power users" in just one or two disciplines, or at most in parts of several disciplines that they use together to achieve a single goal.
@DrHyde @buckfiftyseven I think the discrepancy between someone who is proficient, mostly because it is their job, and power users is that the latter enjoy the challenge. In short, do you like to understand how things work - in addition to just learning a skill for money.
The anemia of most hardware stores is probably a similar sign of the times as the omnipresence of stuffing things in "the cloud".
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@jonathankoren I luv hand puppets. Did you graduate reach arounds?
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The slow death of the power user.
"This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations"
@koen_hufkens Haven't read the article (yet!), but this excerpt is quite convincing.
FYI to all, this has a name. It's called "deskilling." It's also how we've been trained to buy pancake *mix* even though it's three ingredients and the whole point is they're very very easy to make.
It serves capital to slowly deskill us all to the point where we're dependent on them for *everything* rather than being able to make and fix things for ourselves and FOR EACH OTHER bc none of us is an island.
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@DrHyde @buckfiftyseven I think the discrepancy between someone who is proficient, mostly because it is their job, and power users is that the latter enjoy the challenge. In short, do you like to understand how things work - in addition to just learning a skill for money.
The anemia of most hardware stores is probably a similar sign of the times as the omnipresence of stuffing things in "the cloud".
@DrHyde @buckfiftyseven There is an irony in this as the times have never been better to be "a maker", yet on the whole there seems to be a regression.
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@koen_hufkens Haven't read the article (yet!), but this excerpt is quite convincing.
FYI to all, this has a name. It's called "deskilling." It's also how we've been trained to buy pancake *mix* even though it's three ingredients and the whole point is they're very very easy to make.
It serves capital to slowly deskill us all to the point where we're dependent on them for *everything* rather than being able to make and fix things for ourselves and FOR EACH OTHER bc none of us is an island.
@OrionKidder Exactly, many end up being pancake mixed, or at least confused.
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@OrionKidder Exactly, many end up being pancake mixed, or at least confused.
@koen_hufkens The verb "to pancake" could catch on, here.
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@koen_hufkens The same percentage of people explore this technology deeply enough to understand and control it. The rest treat it as a black box or appliance with 'magic' inside.
@fast_code_r_us There is the market penetration angle, but the lack of repairability is a part of this as well. When things are made intentionally difficult to understand, not because they are, but because it protects business interests, you lose out.
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@DrHyde @buckfiftyseven There is an irony in this as the times have never been better to be "a maker", yet on the whole there seems to be a regression.
@koen_hufkens @DrHyde I suspect the ratio might be kind of the same as it always was. But certainly people who have curiosity and want to learn to do things with their fingers, can. YouTube videos on fly tying have ridiculous views. Especially considering that no one *needs* to tie a fly.
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@fast_code_r_us There is the market penetration angle, but the lack of repairability is a part of this as well. When things are made intentionally difficult to understand, not because they are, but because it protects business interests, you lose out.
@koen_hufkens I agree; companies have gotten very clever and the current laws protect them instead of consumers.
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The slow death of the power user.
"This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations"
@koen_hufkens [1] Thank you for naming this so precisely. This resonates — but from a different angle. In your framing, technology companies are the agents, the user is the victim. In networked defence systems, the dynamic is the same but stakes are categorically higher. The agents are system architects and doctrine writers. The victim is the human controller — formally present in the loop, substantively blind to what the network produces and why.
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The slow death of the power user.
"This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations"
@koen_hufkens [2] I've been developing BIEI — the Battlefield Intelligent Emergence Index — measuring emergent intelligence in networked combat systems. The uncomfortable finding: as network intelligence grows, operator comprehension shrinks. This gap is not a bug. It is a structural consequence of emergence. BIEI doesn't reverse this. But it measures it. You cannot govern what you cannot measure.
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@koen_hufkens We can't all be "power users" in everything we use. I'm 100% OK with instant usability. If someone wants to just use a computer without knowing how it works that's no different from me wanting to just use clothes without knowing about weaving and stitching. Yes, that means that I'm dependent on Big Sewing. I'm OK with that. I don't want to be a self-sufficient peasant who can do everything he needs to survive but can't go to the opera.
@DrHyde @koen_hufkens I agree but also I don't think this is in conflict with the premise presented here. You should be able to be either a casual software user *or* a power user, *and* you should be able to grow from the former into the latter if you desire.
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@koen_hufkens We can't all be "power users" in everything we use. I'm 100% OK with instant usability. If someone wants to just use a computer without knowing how it works that's no different from me wanting to just use clothes without knowing about weaving and stitching. Yes, that means that I'm dependent on Big Sewing. I'm OK with that. I don't want to be a self-sufficient peasant who can do everything he needs to survive but can't go to the opera.
@DrHyde @koen_hufkens I would suggest there are two main differences in your example. First, you can probably wear clothes well without knowing much about them. You can even easily switch brands without knowing anything about weaving. This is not the case with, for instance, operating systems.
Second, even if you don't weave or dye, you can probably sew. Or at least have a friend who can sew well enough to repair your clothes. But most people don't have phones with changeable batteries.
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@DrHyde @koen_hufkens I would suggest there are two main differences in your example. First, you can probably wear clothes well without knowing much about them. You can even easily switch brands without knowing anything about weaving. This is not the case with, for instance, operating systems.
Second, even if you don't weave or dye, you can probably sew. Or at least have a friend who can sew well enough to repair your clothes. But most people don't have phones with changeable batteries.
@distrowatch @DrHyde "But most people don't have phones with changeable batteries."
Anymore, that's a design choice. Not in the least inspired by wanting to sell more phones.
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The slow death of the power user.
"This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations"
@koen_hufkens This hurts.
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The slow death of the power user.
"This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations"
@koen_hufkens I would disagree with the term 'power user' but I have tinkered when it comes to mobile phones and computers somewhat as switching from running pirated to Windows to GNU Linux Distros and rooting a Huawei to run custom ROM on it !
I switched to many FOSS alternatives over the years, and always had an issue when people just gave in to persistent ads on Youtube and other apps (while I had been using third party open source apps which disable those ads)
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@koen_hufkens I've had similar thoughts. I think companies, perhaps Apple especially, pushed walk-up usability, as opposed to things you learned first. "The Missing Manual" era.
But it's not completely on them. They tapped a demand. Most people don't want to learn things, especially first. Even if it might yield higher ease of use, later.
Luckily with #FOSS and #Linux we still have the option to learn things second. Even things as ridiculous and productive as vi (and descendants).
@buckfiftyseven @koen_hufkens I think it's more about 'options' and sadly nowadays most of the tech companies are not interested in providing such options.
I remember noticing the 'rounded rectangle' in Corel Draw when no such feature was available on Adobe Illustrator somewhere around 2011 (or maybe it was the other way around) and when I later dabbled into other programs I learnt that most of them had some unique features (options)
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The slow death of the power user.
"This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations"
@koen_hufkens If you need a similar analogy outside of tech, look at cars.
