The rumours of my (feature’s) death have been greatly exaggerated
There’s nothing quite like the spectacle of people jumping on a bandwagon. When they get religion, they say all kinds of stupid shit.
The religion of the moment in the computing industry is called “User Experience”. The name is a misnomer. Like countless religions which came before it, this new one is a pretty straightforward re-packaging of an old one. In this case, we’re talking about crass consumerism.
The UX pope is none other than Steve Jobs. Jobs has been shilling religion since the moment he first set eyes on the prototype Apple I computer in the late Nineteen Seventies. Jobs is a salesman, but he’s also a designer. But the focus of his religion has always been a certain kind of person with expensive tastes and unsophisticated thoughts. In short, Jobs, and Apple along with him, has always chased beer and potato chip snobs. Those people with more money than they know what to do with. (You know who I mean; they used to be called the “Bourgeoisie”.) Not to get into bed with them. To make a buck off them.
When Jobs left Apple, both he and Apple lost their way. At NeXT, Jobs pursued one heresy, while Apple pursued another. NeXT ignored consumers in favour of academics and scientists, while Apple focussed their attention on writers, artists and designers. These sojourns proved temporary. Re-united, they recanted, and renewed their vows to the old orthodoxy. Not long after, they gave birth to the first of many children: the iMac. Spiritual successor to the original Macintosh, it dispensed with any pretence of artistic or scientific usefulness. This was the new computer for the Internet age: the age of digital content delivery. A whole new world of products to sell, both material and virtual.
Jobs+Apple have a lot of followers. In some ways, I count myself amongst them. However, I’m a member of one of the heretic branches. I subscribe to the belief that the creative people matter. The irony, however, is that creative people are amongst Jobs’s most serious orthodox adherents. In fact, they make up the bulk of the consumerist clergy. Because they have also done so. In fact, while they invariably present themselves as the missionaries of the Jobs+Apple religion, their true master is the devil of corporate media.
Few groups are as quick to whore themselves to corporate domination as failed artists. They who make up the bulk of the ranks of designers. Limited artistic skill, virtually no mathematical or scientific ability, but very good at following and enforcing rules, and moving with the herd, these people do not tend to think for themselves. They do not like to challenge authority or the status quo, nor do they see any value in challenging the mental models of the simple-minded majority. They distinguish themselves primarily by feeding on one another. The only dogs more readily heeled to corporate power, and more viciously cannibalistic, are business majors and lawyers.
The purpose of good software, or any tool, is not to wrap you in a blanket of satisfied expectation. Tools are not made to protect you from a harsh and confusing world. That’s why we have religion, entertainment and drugs. Real software, and real tools, are for intelligent, creative and productive people who are interested in re-making the world, not in waving shiny objects in the faces of a delirious crowd.
It’s not to say that tools don’t need to be useable. But they don’t need a special class of nitwit to design them. The tools’ users are their most significant designers. The best tools are invented and refined by the same people that use them. User Experience is for appliances, not tools. Tools are used byâ??and therefore made byâ??artists, scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, engineers and technicians. Granted, many tools created for artisans and thinkers get re-purposed for your run-of-the-mill schmuck. At which point, a team of designers is deployed to dumb them down, simplify them, smooth them down, and make them beautiful. The end result of this is that some douche bag spends his bonus check to buy one, promptly mounts it on the wall over his designer workbench, and then proceeds to leave it to gather dust while he watches golf all weekend. Golf, by the way, is a sport that could have been invented by UX people. Comfortable pants, precision-sculpted ball whackers and of course, the pinnacle of that sport of loafers: the personal fairway transport (aka “golf cart”).
But then, the call of the User Experience faith is not to create tools. It is to deliver content, and lots of it. Of course features don’t matter when your sole purpose is to act as a conduit for pictures and stories that “entertain” and “delight”, and when your target customer is one step above a drooling imbecile. Of course productive features are “complicated” and “confusing” to the half-wits who make up the bulk of the human population.
Computers are too good for these people. They are not to be educated, enlightened, empowered or awakened from their slumber, they are to be more fully and completely hypnotized by fairy tales and power fantasies, seduced by movie stars, and serenaded by pop music idols. They are, after all, children, not adults. They want to play with toys, not solve problems or promote the causes of equality, justice and egalitarianism. They don’t want to participate in life. They want to watch it from the sidelines. And that is just how the corporations and their foot soldiers like it.
Unfortunately for everyone, these state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely. Empires that absorb themselves in spectacle at home, and military adventures abroad, inevitably find themselves invaded and taken over. Of course, this time around, the invaders won’t come bearing swords or guns, but consumer products of their own. Technically, the invasion started thirty years ago. And of course the takeover won’t be absolute. It never is. Foreign masters always work through local puppets. The puppets in this case are the media and consumer corporations that sell us the toys and entertainment products which we so dearly love.
The dirty little secret of the last fifty years of the “American” dream, and the underly cause of the major debt-driven bubbles of the late ‘Nineties and ‘Aughts, is that these people, these consumers, don’t even have any money to spend on all the toys and rich media content. The entire capitalist system, and the consumerist economy that it drives, is built on smoke and mirrors. But the fantasia which the User Experience crowd is selling (alongside the media and consumer products shills) is the same one they purchased themselves. Consumer economics is the biggest multi-level marketing scam ever invented. And like all such Ponzi schemes, it is destined to implode.
Of course, it’s been a wildly successful scam for a certain percentage of people. Namely, the designers, businessmen, bankers and lawyers. So it’s no surprise that they’re still selling it as hard as they can. Not that the artists, engineers, technicians and scientists have whored themselves any less, but they’re more complicit than active promoters. Unfortunately, when the debt loads of the major Western industrial (or should I say, media) powers eventuallyâ??inevitablyâ??exceeds their ability to service it, the consumer economy will get flushed into the ocean along with all the lead, mercury, disposable toiletries and technocrats who depend on it.