The slow death of the power user.
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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.
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@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.
@koen_hufkens @DrHyde Exactly, people have largely come to accept that they can't swap batteries on a phone. People would be outraged if they were told they couldn't alter their clothing or change a tyre on their car.
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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 that quote from the article affords far too much perspective to big tech companies... and if you look at what's happened in the free software world of GNOME UIs and things like that, it's clear it's more a (misguided) attempt to simplify things for the "benefit" of the user
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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 As a teacher my students had absolutely no understanding of files. At one point we wanted them to put documents they made for a class in that class' folder. They couldn't understand why they would ever want to do that.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
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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 @koen_hufkens "analogy isn't perfect" shock!
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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 Definitely really well put. I've personally noticed this with websites and working with them, as they are so large for no particular reason. Abstractions built upon abstractions of frameworks, to the point where using the vanilla JavaScript APIs may as well be a cardinal sin.
And to top it all off, it isn't even necessary for JavaScript to be as present for most sites. News sites with all their advertising partners seem to be the most egregious example of this, with some sites having several MB of just pure JavaScript.
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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"
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@koen_hufkens I saw a neat hiring trick once: an ISP had hidden the instructions on finding the job application in DNS TXT records. Without modest DNS and a few other networking skills you didn't get to even apply.
I might have to resort to that if the "power user" situation is as bad as the article suggests. I guess I just don't hang out with the wrong people...
@TallSimon @koen_hufkens The old alt.hackers newsgroup was a little like this. You needed a moderator's assent to join and post, but there were no moderators: Everyone in there had figured out how to bypass moderation.
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@TallSimon @koen_hufkens I saw something similar done for a web developer position. It looked like the application page (linked from one of the big job boards. Probably Monster; this was well before Indeed or ZipRecruiter) was broken, just a blank white page. In the end, I had to use curl to get the application. It basically filtered out people who lacked even the bare minimum curiosity required to check the source to figure out why/how this mission critical page was seemingly broken.
@gordoooo_z @TallSimon @koen_hufkens
I once saw a website where the first thing printed to the DevTools console was a message congratulating you for your curiosity, with a link to a job application page. -
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 It's this all over again: http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/
Look, we've had the Raspberry Pi revolution since then. We may not be in great shape but self hosting and homelabs are a thing, for those that want to step into the wilderness there's plenty of opportunity to do so. -
R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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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 @koen_hufkens fun fact, if you mix it yourself you can put as much vanilla as you want in it :DDD
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@OrionKidder @koen_hufkens fun fact, if you mix it yourself you can put as much vanilla as you want in it :DDD
@ireneista @OrionKidder @koen_hufkens that's true of literally anything
You can add vanilla to anything to make it more delicious, even to vanilla itself!
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