The User-Unfriendliness of Our Information Technology

Aubrey Plaza recently gave an interesting interview to the Wall Street Journal in which she owned up to never having seen the season of The White Lotus for which she has been nominated for an Emmy because she could not work the password system for the relevant streaming service.

Some may be tempted to laugh at Ms. Plaza, but I applaud her for admitting something that more people should be frank about, namely the extent to which functional, not-yet-old people are being defeated by supposedly simple technological tasks, which seem less and less simple. Even as the general level of verbal and numerical literacy show every level of declining the standard of computer literacy expected of the user seems to be ever-increasing, reflected in how these days it seems that if you Google any problem you will find casual advice to go poking about in your registry editor to resolve the most minor-seeming issues--as if this were not a good way to brick your computer, especially if you are not an expert in such things, but have little alternative as the "easy" fixes seem to fix less and less all the time.

It is not what we expect--the conventional expectation that technologies grow more user-friendly, not less, with time, and it seems fair to discuss why this has not happened here the way it has with, for example, cars.

One plausible reason is the geometric increase in the performance and complexity of personal computers as against just about everything else, with the standardization of Internet connectivity, home networks and much else playing its part--and the ever-rising burden of cyber-security.

However, one can also argue for other less justifiable factors--as with that sign of decadence in product development, the creation of lots and lots of features that no user really wants or needs but which add to the complexity of the system so as to potentially cause additional problems, simply to justify selling a new thing rather than more of the old thing.

Less innocently there is operating system makers' obscene obsession with spying on everything computer users do in a manner George Orwell could not even begin to imagine, and locking them into "ecosystems" of their crappy products. (Thus is it the case that you can't just get the computer out of the box and turn it on and use it with the option of creating an account if you want to do so later on--rather you are required to create an account as part of a set-up process. In said process you are pressed to network with the computer all the company's other devices, never mind whether you actually own them or not. And you are barraged with advertising for their other wares before you can finish the set-up process--which, if you are canny, will include rooting around through their system's settings unchecking box after box after box to, as much as is possible, deny the company permission to take your information and lock it up in the clouds. And on and on it goes.)

It does not seem at all unreasonable to think all this has something to do with the notorious failure-proneness of our computers today--which leaves us devoting 10 to 20 percent of our computer time to just coping with problems according to a recent Danish study.

Put into automotive terms it is as if we were still in the days when idiots of the kind Booth Tarkington seems to have found so charming taunted motorists trying to repair their vehicles after they broke down by the side of the road with shouts of "Git a hoss!"--with the difference that where then cars were toys for the rich, today everyone is required to use a computer just to get through the day.