ux (13. 521)

Vis-à-vis a recent post airing online exasperation, we felt this expanded list of rage-inducing shortcomings in networking and technology, via Kottke, to be quite resonant and an thorough examination of what’s a bug and what’s a feature and wither and wherefore the friction and disconnects occur. Through the lens of Pope Leo’s first encyclical, On Human Diginity (known by its incipit Magnifica Humanitas), a lengthy treatise about the struggle to uphold our universal commitment to society when awash in alienating artificiality, we look at that frustration and fatigue that grinds us down with the mill of a thousand micro-interactions that don’t need to be—not exactly a force majure or existential crisis, in a landscape where many are possible, in isolation but taken together nonetheless inform out experience and seep out into the real world: touchscreens in cars, having to scan a QR-code to read a menu—or having menu items reshuffle themselves whilst one is ordering at a kiosk, being lectured to about the Anti-Christ, shoehorning AI into everything, forced updates at the worst possible time. The final items on the list do address the industry’s insatiable drive to commodify and fetishise everything, which is a bad thing, and though maybe not a direct consequence of the litany of disruptions for the end-user, peppered with rubric—Jesus wept, but possibly of supplanting the frictions and imbalances of capitalism (see above) with new obstacles, leaving the experts and agents nowhere to go. Much more from Brian Phillips and The Ringer at the link above.