Fri 29 November 2024

As I was "delightscrolling" (the opposite of doomscrolling) around on the Fediverse yesterday, I came across this toot that perfectly describes how a lot of us are feeling these days:

I loved computers.

I loved what technology promised.

This wasn't that long ago!

Now it just makes me sad and angry.

I do know why.

—@ajroach42@retro.social

I recall hearing an interview with Steve Jobs where he mentions seeing a graph of the locomotive efficiency of several animals, and human beings aren't near the top, but about a third of the way down. But once you put a human on a bicycle, it becomes the most efficient animal in motion: more so than the cheetah or condor.

This inspired Steve Jobs to come up with the catchphrase, "a bicycle for the mind." That's what a computing represented during the home computing revolution: raw empowerment. The human being had his hands on the handlebars, his feet on the pedals, and the bicycle becomes a part of him, going wherever he wants to go. It is instantly obedient (if not always intuitive), and has no voice or agency of its own. It is purely a tool, and a magnificently capable one.

What are computers today? First of all, do people even own or use traditional computers (other than serious gamers)? Someone who is serious about computing might own a laptop, but I can't recall seeing too many desktop computers in people's homes (not counting home office setups or gaming rigs) in the past decade. The computer is no longer a stationary device commanding attention in someone's living room or bedroom, but rather a device to be carried around or on one's person. And honestly, that's really not a bad thing.

Laptops are incredibly liberating. I remember sitting down with my cousin in 1996 and watching tv: she had her Apple Powerbook and I had my little Dell 486. It felt like such an amazing moment in time that I remember it distinctly: we were now able to bring computers into our context (chilling with family in the TV room), rather than being holed away in separate rooms working on stationary devices. I confess I haven't used a desktop computer on a daily basis since 2020 when my old iMac SSD bought the farm (digging into those machines is not a fun task ;), and I have no less than four laptops that I use regularly (laptop article coming soon!).

But even the venerable laptop is slowly giving way to the tablet and phone. I still remember the infamous "What's a Computer?" iPad ad of November 2017: It shows a girl going everywhere with her iPad, doing all kinds of cool things, and then when an adult comments on her computer (iPad), she responds, "What's a Computer?" A couple years later, I was chatting with a young friend on reddit about getting into Linux, and when I asked him about his prior computer experience (whether it was Windows or MacOS), he just sheepishly admitted that he had only ever used an iPhone before that point.

So, what is a computer, and why isn't an iPad one? Well, an iPad obviously is a kind of computer, and arguably so is a smartwatch, a microwave oven (even a fairly old one), and a car. These all either are or contain computational devices.

The thing that I see missing from our varied computational experiences in the modern era is what I'd like to call "Digital Agency": a person's unhindered ability and authority to make decisions about and affect change in their digital world. If you think about voxel and/or sandbox games like Minecraft, a huge part of the appeal is the nearly unlimited agency a user is given within their digital world, especially in singleplayer/creative mode, or when the user has administrator rights to the server.

That kind of heady digital freedom is how computers used to feel at large. It was a completely open* world that we had ultimate authority to explore and re-make according to our imagination.

* While retro systems like the Commodore 64, DOS machines, and Classic Macintosh weren't "open" in the modern sense, the operating systems and hardware of the era were relatively simple and "hackable" (in the sense that the user could modify how the system ran/behave without too much trouble)

If computers/computing devices of the 80s-2000s were like like a digital playground, what are modern computing devices like?

Well, let me ask you some questions:

1. What can you do with a tablet or phone once the manufacturer no longer supports it?
2. Is running custom software (that you either develop yourself or download from a trusted source) getting easier or harder on MacOS of late?
3. What are the obtrusive icons and messages that are being pushed on Windows computers lately?

Think about these questions for a minute and go on to read how I answer them:

1. Either use it as a paperweight, or try to keep using it, knowing that it will get increasingly less functional and secure over time. This should be a crime. I still use my laptop from 2010 (I'm typing on it now!) with totally up-to-date software, but my iPad from 2012 is sitting unused on a bookshelf, not having received a major update since 2016, nor a security patch since 2019.
2. It is getting increasingly difficult. It used to be that if you held down a key on the keyboard while opening an unsigned app for the first time, it was exempted, but now you must disable an important security feature to run any unsigned apps. This is not ok, as getting your app signed requires an expensive developer account, and users should be able to exempt software from Apple's signature verification.
3. They're ads. They're just ads. In your "professional" desktop operating system. This simply cannot stand.

The central issue here is that humans are no longer the central authority for the behavior of the computer. The massively wealthy and powerful corporations that create the hardware and software are pulling the strings, and Windows especially is increasingly resembling a horrid infomercial with tons of ads being pushed in front of the users faces, and the user's choices being countermanded by the myopic and self-interested priorities of Redmond.

Category: Ethics, Philosophy, Tech Tagged: Computing Ethics Non-religious post Non-technical post Retrocomputing WritingMonth