(Original: GOS, 1/29/15) We've spent forty years boiling our critical thinking skills to mush. Some people blame the content providers: TV/ tabloid TV/ reality TV; violent video games; all the voyeuristic, solipsistic crapola on the Internet. Me, I blame the humble interface - that is, the buttons you push (or, lately, the hand gestures you make) to control access to the "content". These interfaces have proliferated faster than Star Trek tribbles; and they are driving everyone nuts. They are driving people nuts because there is no consistency across devices, across websites, across anything. The interface design is random, and it makes people's use of those interfaces "palsied", the same way cerebral palsy makes its victims' fine motor control skills palsied. Hence the name for the condition: Random Interface Palsy (RIP).

America's RIP moments began with setting the clock on the VCR.

The "blinking twelve problem" is a term used in Software Design. It usually refers to features in software which are unusable due to the complexity of the user interface to use them.

The usage emanates from the 'clock' feature provided on many VCR's manufactured in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The clock could be set by using a combination of buttons provided on the VCR in a specific sequence which was found complicated by most users. As a result, VCR users were seldom known to set the time on the VCR clock. This resulted in the default time '12:00' blinking on the VCR display at all times - which is the origin of this term.

- Wikipedia, The Blinking Twelve Problem

Since that beginning, RIP expanded into the frustration of trying to get two or three remotes to cooperate so that you can watch a TV program and have the sound play over your stereo. Then they took away real switches, so you were never sure if you turned off the device.

That stuff was all passive confusion. We now have active confusion: roll-over adds, phishes, rogue QR codes, rootkits, ransomware. A Nigerian scam artist looks like a third-grader compared to what is lurking but a button-click away. Its beyond aggravating; it is dangerous.

You can have your identity stolen or your computer turned into a brick or into a zombie for a DDOS attack. You can have your reputation ruined, or your bank account drained. In parallel with all of these disasters, every keystroke you make is logged by several entities, public and private, to be monetized or weaponized at a later date.

So, in addition to the paralysis of never knowing how the interface is going to react, we add the paralysis that comes from knowing one keystroke can ruin your day, or maybe your life. That requires cautious people to spend more of their precious intellectual resources searching for clues as to whether a site or an email address is dangerous. Welcome to the Wild West.

At the same time, it has never been truer that "ignorance is bliss". Legions of clueless people embrace this RIP chaos. They waste inordinate amounts of time trying to navigate and fill in forms on completely inconsistent webpages. They lay out the details of their lives for everyone in the world to pick over - including house thieves, con artists, stalkers, and just plain nutcases. They blast useless trivia and links to their "friends". They use total strangers they call "friends" as a "social network". P.T. Barnum would have been an Internet billionaire in five minutes.

IMHO, RIP is a feature, not a bug. It is a feature for corporations. (Remember, if you don't see what they're selling, you are the product.) The whole internet has evolved to such chaos that people give their control away to "walled gardens" like Apple or Amazon. They sell their birthright for a bowl of "consistent interface"/known-safe links porridge. Because, dog help us that there ever be any rules at all on the great, libertarian internet. (How's that working out for you, Bitcoin suckers? What's that you say, "it's not a Ponzi scheme"? Right. Mr. Barnum wants to talk to you.)

A Digression on Luddism

To be clear here, I am not a Luddite.  I have written computer code for over forty years, and I'm still coding for a living. I have lost count of how many languages, IDEs, and operating systems I have had to learn. So it sort of hurts me to say how low the programming endeavor has fallen.

I remember going to a graphics conference in the 1990s, where an engineer showed a demo clip of a violent video game, where robots with machine guns for hands ran around shooting each other. The engineer apologized for the violence, and remarked that he used to design software for rocket scientists, but now he designed software for testosterone-addled teenage boys. And that was the state of play twenty years ago.

Programming itself has its own version of RIP.  They invent a new language every week. Each one plays different games with the same dozen or so symbols - most aggravatingly, with parentheses, square brackets, and curly brackets. They all have scope rules for variables, but the rules are subtly different. They all shamelessly rip off parts of each others' syntax and rules, which contributes to RIP among programmers.

Supposedly, each language is "optimized" to some particular coding niche. But the niches have been created by the fact that all languages that have come before have simply not thought things through, and they have left holes that need to be fixed later.

Do you know how most coders solve problems these days? They type the error message into Google and read all the crap that comes back (e.g., a lot of insulting the questioner for badly posed questions), trying various suggestions until something works. Then, if you are lucky, they might put the link where they found the fix into the code as a comment. Do you have any idea how brittle and self-referential this whole endeavor is becoming? It's as if 1880 railroads had all their engineers designing the tickets and the schedule boards instead of the locomotives, tracks, and cars. The number of people in the world who know how to write a compiler, a debugger, a development environment is vanishingly small; and yet the whole edifice of internet software would crash in a minute without these essential, but mundane, tools. Of course no one ever got to a billionaire by writing these tools. Maybe, a long time ago, they got to be a millionaire.

Transferring data between programs that are written in different languages, via net interfaces like SOAP or REST, is a major programming activity. I know of a software interface company which is snarkily named after a suburb where tradesmen (plumbers) congregate to be near a super-rich neighborhood. Interface programming  is a welfare program for interface coders.

Objecting to this kind of coding kudzu is not being a Luddite, it's simply asking not to be strangled by an out-of-control weed with no natural predators.

The Death of Democracy

RIP creates chaos for individuals; but it creates profits for corporations. As I mentioned above, individuals flee to walled gardens for safety and usability. Except for Ubuntu, and a few other free software products, you have to be a competent programmer to keep your freeware running in your environment, what with the constant updates and bug fixes. Thanks, Bill Gates. (People have good reasons for calling M$ Windows "the Redmond Virus".)

By now, in a sane world, a few basic "rules of the road" should have begun to simplify things. When the printing press was invented, there were no page numbers, chapters, indexes, and tables of contents. But those developed rapidly and were implemented consistently.

Instead, thirty years on in the computer revolution, they can't even agree about where to put the {maximize, minimize, close} button constellation in a windowing GUI. Vendors fight for control of the platform; so that, on one of my PCs, Intel wants to control the wireless connection, Nvidia wants to control the display screen, the computer maker wants to control debugging, and Windows still wants to control the universe. Needless to say, it does not make for a "seamless" operating environment.

Smart phones are even worse. The telcos load the phone with un-removable bloatware. Small screens mean more clicks, which mean more chances to screw up; and the touch sensors can send you to the wrong place with a micro-newton of misdirected force.

Smart phones aren't computers, they are a vending machine with a very complicated interface; and the telcos own what goes into the machine and what they charge you for it. We are very far away from the Homebrew Hackers club's vision of the computer as something you control. Now the computer and all the vendors and ISPs control us.

Finally, we have gotten to the death of democracy.

In case you hadn't noticed, clicking on weblinks is what is known as "random reinforcment" - the same phenomenon that makes gambling addictive. You keep clicking because you never know what interesting thing might be at the next URL, besides clicks are free. You don't count the fact that your time is going down the drain and your critical thinking skills have been reduced to click/don't click.

If you are on a political board, what links do you click? When it comes to world affairs or even national political affairs, it doesn't really make a difference anymore. After media consolidation, there are only six media conglomerates in charge of funding all the news reporting. The last count I had, a few years ago, there were less than 500 reporters from outside the US providing regular stories to the corporate media.  So, its the CM's editorial policies that set the ceiling on the flea circus that is the blogosphere. Because any true story reported by a nobody can be ignored, counter-spun, or demonized by the stable of tame CM reporters. Be honest, how many here would admit to reading Russia Times as a source of facts?

Vis-a-vis international and national news, what do we do on these blogs? We discuss the info that has already been filtered by the CM. Even when the news is local, and we have actual eyeballs on the scene, we still lose. Look at what happened with Michael Brown and all the other black victims of police violence, the cops never even got charged. The victims were blamed, and the protests were demonized. And that is a story we all completely understood. Imagine the kind of BS we are being fed about stories that we cannot easily be reported by non-CM eyeballs.

Here is an analogy about our situation. Imagine it is World War 2, when newsreels were the major source of information about how the war was going for everyone who wasn't a flag officer or a high-level politician or industrialist.

Imagine that very private in every fox hole, every pilot in every plane, every seaman on every ship spends all his time watching newsreels instead of "fighting their front". Imagine they all think they are on General Eisenhower's staff, making deeply insightful comments that will influence world history. How do you think WW2 would have turned out if we did that and the Germans and Japanese did what they did historically?

Just as people first thought of cars as "horseless carraiges", we are thinking of the internet as a giant, realtime newspaper. It is the wrong analogy. People do not have the bandwidth to filter all that is coming at them. Honest journalists working for real newspapers used to do that. The internet's everything-is-free model killed that.

The false reality of the internet has made us believe that commentary is meaningful action. The addictive nature of link-clicking keeps rewarding our reptilian brains while our higher functions devolve to fighting over the hysterical nonsense that passes for news: what some dumbass said about the climate, war, the economy, the Democrats. Our ability to organize goes out the window as one or two vociferous assholes/trolls can derail the formation of a consensus for action on any topic.

So, please, go do something useful in the real world. (Self included.)

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Having said that, I really need to only write about stuff that actually informs other people about something important that the CM is either ignoring or distorting. And, I need to do that in such a way as to create movement, action, organization.

In case you hadn't figured it out, THIS WAS A RANT!