The World Is Not A Desktop (1994)
11 points by josephjnk
11 points by josephjnk
What is the metaphor for the computer of the future? The intelligent agent? The television (multimedia)? The 3-D graphics world (virtual reality)? The Star Trek ubiquitous voice computer? The GUI desktop, honed and refined? The machine that magically grants our wishes? The right answer is "none of the above," because all of these concepts share a basic flaw—they make the computer visible.
To be honest, the idea of things being invisible doesn't seem especially valuable. I think it'd be good if they were reliable, and predictable, and well constructed, and ergonomically sound, and relatively easy to use, and they did what you actually need and want them to do without ever losing your data. It'd be good if they weren't essentially a beachhead in your home for companies to use for surveillance and advertising.
But in the same way that a nice pen and notebook is in fact quite visible, it seems fine for computing technology that has all these other properties to be visible as a distinct object as well. If anything, I think things were probably healthier back when the computer was more specifically a venue you would visit rather than something that's with us in our pocket literally all the time.
I think that visibility is only one part of the equation when it comes to the quality of software, but the software that I find the most useful is the software that is the least visible while I’m using it: Zoom, Slack, and writing plain markdown in a bare-bones editor. I think the idea isn’t that you can’t perceive the software, it’s that the software is unobtrusive when supporting your attempts to reach a goal.
I have a coworker who loves zoom emojis and pushes us to use them all the time. I find it annoying as hell. I think the reason why is that it moves me out of the mindset of looking at and communicating with coworkers, and into manipulating zoom as a piece of software. Same thing when I use a WYSIWYG editor that can never paste text or indent bullet points correctly; I’m no longer thinking about what I’m editing, and instead I’m thinking about the software itself.
I don’t think every kind of software can be invisible in this way, but I do think it’s usually beneficial when possible.
As someone who is not super happy about LLMs, I like some of these takes. Leave it to someone at Xerox PARC to have interesting and relevant things to say about technologies that wouldn’t exist until 30 years later.
I know where the faucet is in my house, but I only think about how magical it is when I need a plumber because it doesn't work. I don't think something needs to be "invisible" to fade out of consciousness.