Random Interface Palsy and the Death of Democracy

(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.)

-----

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!

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mimi's picture

.. I think you need to rant some more. It's gotten so bad that it will crash our sanity and livelihood.

I never learned to code, although I wanted once, because I felt how ridiculously dependent one is on the folks who write the code. That dependency was first thing I learned back in 1994. I was and still am a low-knowledge user without a goal. There is rarely something I am not annoyed about it using a webpage. Basically we have given up control of every aspect of our lives and do it willingly, consciously, and often even happily.

It's mental slavery and real slavery is the one, you like to be enslaved to.

I wait for the technology going mad and kill itself. I remember how stupid I thought it was to click on little graphic buttons, whose meaning you had to guess. If you didn't know what the button is meant for you to do, you had to roll over it and wait til a little bottome pop-up box gave you an explanation in text format. What a waste of time for a user. We still know how to read, we don't necessarily think it's funny to click on a button, which is not clear from its graphic what it is supposed to do.

The worst thing is those ads who roll over the page you wanted to read. I wished it all would go to hell.

I like among others the simplicity of the C99p website design. Thank God, no distractions and very clear. Can only say thanks to JtC for it. I read the comments on the original post on TOP for this essay. You said in a comment:

arendt James Wells Jan 29 · 08:13:14 AM
Yes. At the end, I said I should stop...
behaving this way. So, your comment is spot on.

I wrote a web diary about why web diaries are bad.

Self-contradictory. But, at least I recognize that it is; and I'm trying to figure out how to break out of the loop.

Did you ever break out of the internet's loops? If so, tell me how? I want to know.

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arendt's picture

@mimi

No one is resisting. Instead, they are all chasing the Bitcoin bubble - a Ponzi scheme that will devour and destroy the value of all legitimate currency unless it is derailed. What with major Wall St. banks jumping onboard, Bitcoin is on the way to a hostile takeover of the world's currencies.

On other fronts, they want to move to a cashless society - so they can charge a fee for every stupid transaction (and surveil you in the process). So that they can confiscate your money at the click of a mouse.

It is documented that the telcos are letting copper land lines rot so that you are forced into the less-reliable (fail in power outage), more expensive world of internet telephony. The telcos stated policy is to abandon copper lines.

How does one stop corporate schemes that arrive on the scene up-and-running, backed by massive advertising and tie-ins to entice the suckers? Congress is owned by the corporations. They are not going to get in the way of further corporate domination with common-sense regulations.

90% of the public isn't even aware there is a problem. 20-somethings have never known what a sane, privacy-respecting world looked like.

No. I have no solution. I am old and in a few years might be able to just retire (unless they destroy the SocSec system). All I can do is comment to the few people who will listen.

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Wink's picture

@arendt
of the Under 40 Crowd has no clue of the America that came before them, the under 20 crowd totally clueless. That's NOT to say that they're dumb. Hardly. My 16 yr. old nephews know more than I'll ever know. They just don't believe old uncle Wink when I talk about "the good ol' days," think I've dropped some '60s acid.
One of the many "challenges" "we" geezers face, in attempting to take on and beat the Oligarchy, is communicating with two generations behind us that have not experienced our experience. Maybe that's always been the case, but the divide seems wider these days.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

arendt's picture

@Wink

More and more I feel the truth of that statement.

To explain the 1960s to today's 20-something is like explaining classical music to a deaf person. They will never have the experience, and they resent you wasting their time about it.

After 100 years of witch hunts, the right has succeeded in killing the vocabulary of the left. They have an Orwellian control of the past that lets them rewrite history. I did the play by play commentary for one instance of that in my series on Ken Burns' whitewash of Viet Nam.

Keep up the fight, Uncle Wink.

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Alligator Ed's picture

@arendt Bitcoin and other cypercurrencies may be Ponzi schemes as you say. But printed currency no longer bears any credibility other than the hope that the issuing government will back it.

However the dangers of the cashless society are well-described by you.

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studentofearth's picture

New Hampshire physician loses medical license partially to not knowing how to run a computer. Not following treatment protocols suggested by computer, drug interaction screening and not entering pain prescriptions for law enforcement to monitor.

Doctors at hospitals look at computers all the time, Konopka said, and rely on them, instead of their intellect, for diagnoses and guidelines to prescribing medications. She called that system expensive and harmful to patients. The doctors have no contact with the patients, she said.
"They practice electronic medicine, I practice medical art," she said. "I treat the patient. And I'm not going to compromise the patient's health or life for the system."

What will happen when if electrical grid or internet go down for a significant time? Our medical delivery system relies on dispensing software for meds, electronic medical records and electronic diagnostic tools for the healthcare practitioners to use.

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Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.

arendt's picture

@studentofearth

The internet is becoming a prison, an open-air panopticon in your pocket. Play by rules that you never voted on or agreed to. The government's hands off policy to the internet - no taxes, no regulations (now, not even Neutrality) - has hastened the demise of democratic government and the rise of corporate "government".

The day they opened that Homeland Security computer site in Utah - the one that vacuums up literally every single bit of data generated in the US - was the day that we all got put in jail.

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snoopydawg's picture

@studentofearth

I saw a new doctor who told me 5 minutes after he met me that he didn't think I had the problem that I've been being treated for 20 years. He then pulled out his phone, brought up an app and asked me 20 questions about my Mental health not about my physical problems.

His actions during the visit was just like a computer simulation that he had downloaded.

The experience left me shaken and I told the clinic that I refuse to let him have anything to do with me. Unfortunately, my regular doctor left the clinic because of their new arcane rules and that other doctor is the only one there. You betcha I'm looking for someone else.

This country better hope that another one doesn't use an EMP on us. Our whole country will just stop in its tracks.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

arendt's picture

@snoopydawg

I will say that he does listen to me and respect my wishes about medications (because I spent ten years in drug discovery at pharmaceutical companies). But he is constantly on the phone tracking down symptoms or treatments.

I had a knee surgeon who brought in a "medical transcriptionist", that is, a person who writes down the doctor's notes for him - so the doctor doesn't spend his valuable time typing or speaking into computer dictation software (end para, new para, capital, erase that...). With or without the transcriber, the whole doctor/patient relationship has changed - for the worse.

They are using computers to try to reduce everything to a commodity that they can extract the profit from while leaving both businessmen and customers with slave wages. The computer has become a thieving middleman instead of a helpful assistant.

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snoopydawg's picture

@arendt

has new management and they took every satellite clinic and put them behind locked doors in their hospitals. So instead of walking into a friendly office where I knew everyone, I now go down one hallway that is devoid of people into an exam room. The staff is on the other side of a locked door and I only see one med assistance and the doctor. The whole visit is so sterile and devoid of humanity. Plus the administration is cutting staff and making others pick up the slack. The tension in the clinic is palpable.

I experienced this same type of appointment when I broke my ankle. The surgeon came in with a computer device and everything he said went through it. Eye contact with me was very limited. You're right that everything has been reduced to a commodity, even the staff has been treated this way. People used to say that the medical field was the safest career for the future. Now that computers have been implemented all through it, the staffers are being reduced and this career field is all about profits. Not that this is new. I worked for a Catholic hospital in 1977 that was run by sisters from the Order of St. Benedict and the whole hospital staff were friends until they sold it and it became a for profit hospital. The change was immediate.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Alligator Ed's picture

@arendt

Doctors at hospitals look at computers all the time, Konopka said, and rely on them, instead of their intellect, for diagnoses and guidelines to prescribing medications. She called that system expensive and harmful to patients. The doctors have no contact with the patients, she said.
"They practice electronic medicine, I practice medical art," she said. "I treat the patient. And I'm not going to compromise the patient's health or life for the system."

Before I retired (note I am now unretired) there were so many patients who told me their physicians spent all the patient-interface time with their noses stuck in a computer, not once looking at the patient. Very often, the patient is just handed the "prescription of the month" and blown off in a most unconcerned manner: "I don't care about your symptoms, take these".

So "physician extenders" were supposed to alleviate the problem, such as RNs, physicians assistants, etc., but many of them emulate their bosses dispassionate approach to patients and their problems. Cookbook medicine is being forced down the patients' throats without considering the many variations which makes each individual unique.

You might consider my earlier essay: https://caucus99percent.com/content/two-more-things-medicare-all-wont-cure-robbie-robot-and-insider-wallet-raiding.

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arendt's picture

@Alligator Ed

I will fly it by some professionals I know.

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Wink's picture

@snoopydawg
doctor. If it wasn't for the laptop he lugs around I'm not sure he could diagnose a wart. I just love how he buries his face in his laptop as he asks basic questions.
Why bother with 3, 4 years of med school when you can just buy a laptop and DL some software?!

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

mimi's picture

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Bisbonian's picture

I am an airline pilot. For 30 years, I have been sitting in a Boeing cockpit, knowing exactly how to operate the thing, and how to fix things, or bypass them, if they break.

In the last few years, everything has become button pushing nonsense. The interface has changed several times. The input methods have changed radically, and the output is gibberish. I have no real good idea any more of how I am to proceed to get a clearance, input a route of flight into the computer, and perform delicate weight and balance and takeoff calculations. I rely on my younger copilot. If he is out looking for lunch, I proceed by hunt and peck.

Now, sit back and enjoy the flight.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

@Bisbonian
Hopefully the plane will make it.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

thanatokephaloides's picture

@Bisbonian

Can I scare the crap out of you for a moment?

I am an airline pilot. For 30 years, I have been sitting in a Boeing cockpit, knowing exactly how to operate the thing, and how to fix things, or bypass them, if they break.

In the last few years, everything has become button pushing nonsense. The interface has changed several times. The input methods have changed radically, and the output is gibberish. I have no real good idea any more of how I am to proceed to get a clearance, input a route of flight into the computer, and perform delicate weight and balance and takeoff calculations. I rely on my younger copilot. If he is out looking for lunch, I proceed by hunt and peck.

Now, sit back and enjoy the flight.

I strongly suspect that your "button pushing nonsense" has taken over on the bridges of American warships, too -- with the result of the spectacular collisions we've seen in recent days.

Cat forbid we should require skilled humans to do anything! We might actually have to treat them like humans!

Diablo

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

Alligator Ed's picture

@thanatokephaloides Collisions of 6 DDG-51 class (Arleigh Burke) destroyers in the past 3 years are probably examples. The Fitzgerald, McCain, Porter collisions. The Antietam ran aground on clearly marked shallow shoals.

Navy hubris: Aircraft carrier vs lighthouse.

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thanatokephaloides's picture

@Alligator Ed

So I found you a couple re-enactments:

[video:https://youtu.be/KvRYd8U7qGY]

[video:https://youtu.be/T9WMSxV6lMs]

Wink

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

Alligator Ed's picture

@thanatokephaloides Those pesky lighthouses don't maneuver well--design flaw, I guess.

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Alligator Ed's picture

@thanatokephaloides Those pesky lighthouses don't maneuver well--design flaw, I guess.

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mimi's picture

@Bisbonian @Bisbonian
are the wisest so far. We will all be happily cave men and women and won't fly anymore. That separates us in tribes, who will just be busy to defend each other from each other.

Ok, your comment gave me the rest. Now I am desperate. Tell your co-pilots to rather pee into their pants than go to the restroom and eat their lunch or dinner in the cockpit.

WTF. Do you know a freight shipping company, who takes desperate 'fly-o-phobes' with them in a container, which can swim in case their vessel explodes or sinks and then send out 'SOS' signals to be rescued by those wonderful airplanes detecting them in the middle of the oceans?

My dear father (RIP for 20 years) for some reason I never understood always donated to German Society for the Salvation of Shipwrecked.

So, would you please continue to fly and watch out for us 'ship-wrecked'? Thank You. I knew I could count on you. Smile

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Mark from Queens's picture

Don't have much time to comment, but do read lots.

Excellent, sobering piece. You cogently tied together a lot of things I think about but haven't been able to quantify. Thanks for your contributions here, arendt.

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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut