https://kindle.amazon.com/work/red-plenty-ebook/B0012X07OS/B0044DEFSC“Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead.”
Wonderful machines and ragged humans
In Cyprus, last week, I read 1.23 books. I know the decimal thanks to my Kindle, and I enjoyed 23% of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty thanks to Isaac’s recommendation. It’s a cleverly written book, blending fact and fiction about the Soviet Union’s quest to “gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching lands of capitalism could never match”.
Prosperity and convenience are fetishised from the outset, but counter-balanced with equally evocative, well-crafted warnings:
As my holiday ended and I re-connected to the web, the very first article I read was this, posted by my brother: ‘Kids can’t use computers... and this is why it should worry you’, by Marc Scott. It deserves a good read, but the gist is this:
Kids, and adults, are becoming used to technology that ‘just works’. Which, actually is often [the measure of something being user-friendly] But the ‘better’ the technology works, the less they understand it. The less they can ‘use’ it. You know, when it sometimes doesn’t just work. This has obvious consequences and less obvious ones.
For anyone that makes tools and products, it should be thought-provoking on even a basic, human level. Because we think of what we do as empowerment, but what if it is also the opposite.
A quote from Red Plenty captures this beautifully, describing the human sacrifice offered in return for human indulgence:
https://kindle.amazon.com/work/red-plenty-ebook/B0012X07OS/B0044DEFSC“It would be a world of wonderful machines and ragged humans.”
That’s a sentence, and a vision, worth dwelling on. Which is precisely what Marc Scott does, postulating some of the long-term effects of allowing children to grow up not understanding computers:
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/“Tomorrow’s politicians, civil servants, police officers, teachers, journalists and CEOs are being created today. These people don’t know how to use computers, yet they are going to be creating laws regarding computers, enforcing laws regarding computers, educating the youth about computers, reporting in the media about computers and lobbying politicians about computers.”
It’s worth really questioning what we mean when we talk about user-centric design. If it ‘just works’ is it more usable, or, as Scott insinuates, less ‘usable’? Does removing the need to explain how things work empower people, or disempower them?
Personally, I’d rather have a world of wonderful humans than wonderful machines. And perhaps a test for the latter should be whether they create the former.
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