@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ Let's not think about the general-purpose computer, but instead flip it around t
### rich user experience, ux, and the desktopization of war (2014)
Tim O'Reilly's Web2.0 tried to make exciting the vision that asynchronous JavaScript requests running in the browser were going to deliver a rich experience without the user having to enrich it themselves by navigating and putting together bits. It was going to offer a lobotomized ability to create on the web without having to put together HTML. No one designed a smooth experience around having people put a little peeing-guy graphic next to some logo representing something they hated, as Geocities webmasters did. [Neocities](https://neocities.org), [tildes](https://tilde.club), and [superglue](https://superglue.it) point to – if not a homepage renaissance, certainly lively homepage energy. People say "experience" and once you're thinking of "experience" and not interfacing with a system, you lose sight of how you can direct or customize the system and not just drift through an experience. There are a lot of ways in which the care taken around "experiences" rather than "interfaces" gets real manipulative. When you make things perfectly seamless, you end up having to get to baroque elaborations once modification comes into play – an NES controller only being able to control an iPad through controlling robotic finger-likes that can touch the iPad screen. It widens the gap between the user and the personal computer, what's really going on.
Tim O'Reilly's Web2.0 tried to make exciting the vision that asynchronous JavaScript requests running in the browser were going to deliver a rich experience without the user having to enrich it themselves by navigating and putting together bits. It was going to offer a lobotomized ability to create on the web without having to put together HTML. No one designed a smooth experience around having people put a little peeing-guy graphic next to some logo representing something they hated, as GeoCities webmasters did. [Neocities](https://neocities.org), [tildes](https://tilde.club), and [superglue](https://superglue.it) point to – if not a homepage renaissance, certainly lively homepage energy. People say "experience" and once you're thinking of "experience" and not interfacing with a system, you lose sight of how you can direct or customize the system and not just drift through an experience. There are a lot of ways in which the care taken around "experiences" rather than "interfaces" gets real manipulative. When you make things perfectly seamless, you end up having to get to baroque elaborations once modification comes into play – an NES controller only being able to control an iPad through controlling robotic finger-likes that can touch the iPad screen. It widens the gap between the user and the personal computer, what's really going on.
They're proposing masking what drone operators see so they don't end up traumatized. Google masks military bases in satellite imagery, a neat prearranged filter that doesn't raise pesky questions about morality, one-click operation.
@ -60,4 +60,58 @@ Robots are interesting, and they're raising some new and some old questions. Peo
What is the undo of human-robot-interaction?
### from my to me (2021)
### from my to me (2021)
"Personal web pages are the conceptual and structural core of the WWW."
The moments at which they've been a thing, at which users have been in power – they were never "a time". There wasn't a Web 1.0, only retrospectively. The important people *never* respected amateur webpages.
"Don't see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don't participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation."
No one really liked that amateurs were taping together all kind of nonsense. Everyone's neglected what they contributed to the development of the web.
"From time to time [they] mentioned artists and web artists as exceptions to the rules they established, but not web vernacular."
There's a straight line between "the rhetoric of alienation that design experts practised in 1996" and the paternalism of the tech companies now.
Maybe web designers could be "showing gnomes the way out of corporations' front yard, if I may steal Tim Berners-Lee's metaphor."
People thought that linking to others was a noble thing to do, being connective tissue in the network a role of its own.
Some people don't see the one link IG lets you have as a restriction – they don't even know that they could have that much. Others are looking for the experience that's all funneled into one shape, and they like that there aren't links. Users don't think that links are their job any more. Companies have made that happen: a lot of the time, you can point to another entity within the walled garden, but not another server...
She remembers Wordpress as an abomination that filled the web with zombie links, but some point to it as a tool of freedom. So too do people remember the freedoms of Myspace with nostalgia, yet Myspace "took HTML as a source code away from people". And yet you compare it to what there is today and you can see why people felt like coders. So will the next thing be even more locked down than Instagram?
People were building things that they built, controlled, that pertained to them. "My", not "me." But it's a sort of subversive idea, that making something means that there's now this thing that belongs to you. It's not the way that the tech interests would like you to think.
When Yahoo bought GeoCities they put in templates, and tried to cue people to build in a Me form. You can see how "About Me" went from something marginal to the top thing. Later Facebook shifted everything to the timeline of your me.
"What can be done? How to reclaim My?
Don't collaborate! Don't post your texts where you are not allowed to turn them into hypertext.
Don't post your pictures where you can't link them to whatever you like. Don't use content management systems that turn your GIFs into JPEGs. Don't use hashtags, don't accept algorithmic timelines. In short, make a web page and link to others who still have one."
"I think that leaving the platforms and meeting somewhere else is not enough, or not even the biggest deal. The challenge is to get away from Me, from the idea that you are the centre of your online presence. Don't take this imposed, artificial role into the new environments. It will poison and corrupt the best of initiatives."
### user rights (2013)
userrights.contemporary-home-computing.org
There are a lot. I'm not going to write up most of them.
#### Undo
#### Securely delete my history
It should be available in a clear text format, not in a database that needs extra knowledge.
#### Ignore updates
Newer doesn't mean better, and better isn't better for everyone.
#### See the URL things are coming from
Apps shouldn't be able to hide that they're browsers!
#### Own data
"It's the #1 demand of the User Data Manifesto by ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek http://userdatamanifesto.org 'The data that someone directly or indirectly creates belongs to the person who created it.'"
There are concerns about this and the comments here articulate some.
#### A real keyboard (physical keys)
Someone points out well that this isn't exactly the important root thing; the right to manipulate a system using tools with functionality rivaling that of the tools used by the system's developers. (Apple devs aren't coding on iPads)
ubuntu
1 year ago