I feel that a lot of software these days operates under the idea that 'you can have any colour you want, as long as its brown'.*
But would Henry Ford be proud ?

I remember when software was limited by the hardware itself. Even doing things like readable fonts was hard. So why does software now seem mostly limited by the programmers themselves?
Maybe you only can build as big as you can dream, but--holy smokes!--we need some better dreamers.
Looking at what the previous generations accomplished with the equivalent of sharpened sticks and chipped rocks, can you even begin to imagine what they could have made with access to the tools we have today? Today, for almost every situation, software is only limited by its designers.

Can you look at the world we have built, and feel that its improved by hammering every user into the same die, insisting on one mode of use, one code of concept, one expectation of utility?

We are not all running on the same hardware.
We are not all using software for the same reasons, the same purposes or to the same ends.

Its been thirty-six years of software, folks. But somehow we became 1984 after all.



*yeah, I know Ford said 'black'. But he wasn't really addressing this issue at all.

Only 10 kinds of people...

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” 

― Robert A. Heinlein

This defines my interaction with the Internet these days., and I can't be alone. Its funny how Big Data has tailored its interfaces to keep us pawing at their interfaces so they can scrape as much information from our interactions as possible; but that very modification has made our interactions that less meaningful. 

If in 2002 someone visited ten websites in a day, and one of them was a stuffed animal fan-site, that's a significant marketing datum. If today that person clicks on sixty Youtube videos and one of them is Meg Myer's Curbstomp and another is Radioactive Dragons Imagine, stuffed animals are not significant. 

Stop filling my 'Recommended Feed' with this sort of gibberish.

(And if you auto-playlist feed my Katy Perry and I don't notice, it does not mean that I want to listen to more Katy Perry. Absence of protest is not presence of approval*)

There is a similar problem in attributing authorial ideation: if a writer writes a character with certain mindsets, does this mean the author approves of these mindsets? The better the writer, the better the writer's ability to adopt foreign mindsets, and the less this should tell about the writer's beliefs. Not to mention that writing has masturbatory overtones, and what someone gets off on may not be the same as what they believe is proper behavior.

Am I still talking about stuffed animals here? **

 No, but I may be thinking of Stephanie Meyer. 

..Here too is a interesting test of authorial complexity. A one dimensional writer -- Meyer, Spillane, Fisher, to pick a random few -- has nearly identical ideation between books, and it would be hard to quote their works to support cross-purpose ideas. A good writer displays ideational depth; quotes can be taken out of context with relative ease.

When you add the subtlety of sarcasm or irony to the mix, deriving good information becomes extremely difficult: practically the same as the Translation Accuracy Problem.

Exercise for the reader: quote Gunga Din to support and then to deride racism.

Consider that Heinlein has become the go-too SF author for the right-wing; compare it to his books that support public nudity, free sex, atheism, trans-sexuality, mate-swapping, incest, and anarchy.*** 

Heinlein wrote to sell; the algorithms write to maximize their own inhuman returns.

Where Heinlein got direct and complex feedback from his fan base and his editors that modified what he wanted to actually write, complex feedbacks, leading to complex results, the algorithms that 'Recommend' for us get  a simplified 'file streamed/link clicked' feedback for their actions. Its not surprising that the Facebook News Trending bot serves so many crap stories...but it may be surprising that it can find so much crap in the first place.

People like crap. Simple, direct bullshit: its easy to argue about and easy to enjoy. If the broad strokes of your opinions can be crayoned in, than your personal color of crap can be served in steaming handfuls.  And if all you see is grass, you start to think you're on a lawn...

 

So here's the vicious cycle: we provide trivial actions in feedback to the trivial pleasures they supply to provoke more trivial feedback. Our complexity is much greater than the algorithms...our interactions with them simplify the interaction but the simplifications are readily observable. Our internal simplifications must be subtler, and harder to notice...

Would it be worthwhile to point out that this software is written and designed by young people, who have largely led sheltered lives characterized by lack of complex interaction with other people and the universe?

 (As opposed to old people with fossilized mindsets and outdated ways of thinking, I suppose.)

*An endlessly difficult problem covering all ranges of human expression from sex to music.

** See what I did there?

***Just read Stranger in a Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough For Love, Number of the Beast, or pretty much any story with Lazarus Long in it.