If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Freedom or safety: choose one. This is the false bargain we were offered after 9/11, the ideology underpinning the PATRIOT Act and the (permanent) suspension of human rights. This ideology has metastasized out of the realm of airport security theater and mass surveillance, ossifying into a bedrock axiom about technology design itself.
Ironically, it's not just conservative bed-wetters who've rejected the idea that freedom isn't free, and we all have to trade away our autonomy for a safe and secure online experience. There were plenty of techno-progressives who insisted that the problems with Twitter and Facebook could be solved by forcing their zuckermuskian overlords to invest sufficient resources in their Trust and Safety teams.
There's nothing wrong with asking people who host social spaces to invest in moderation, but the idea that we improve the lives of people stuck in these obviously irreparable corporate spaces is by making their owners care about our welfare is just bankrupt. Far better to make it easy for us to leave these platforms:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
Mandating interoperability – federation – for these legacy social media services means that if somehow it turns out that neither Zuck, nor Musk (nor anyone who succeeds them) is fit to preside over the social lives of hundreds of millions or billions of people, then those users can leave, without losing touch with the people they currently stay on these platforms to be in community with.
We don't have to choose between safety and freedom. We can have both. Franklin had it wrong when he wrote, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
It's not that you don't deserve these things, it's that you won't get them. Give Apple control over which apps you can install and who can fix your device and which accessories you can use with your devices, and Apple will spy on you and they'll let other people spy on you and rip you off:
Apple's security model works well. To the extent that Apple is both benevolent and competent, it makes products that are safe and reliable. But this model fails horribly, because any time Apple decides to trade off its customers' privacy, safety, or utility for its own priorities, those customers are rendered defenseless by Apple's total control:
Being an Apple customer is like being in a 24/7 BDSM relationship…without a safe-word. Maybe you like the control Apple exerts over your life most of the time, but if they ever start to hurt you, there's no way to make them stop:
Apple's story – the story of all centralized, authoritarian technology – is that you have to trade freedom for security. If you want technology that Just Works(TM), you need to give up on the idea of being able to override the manufacturer's decisions. It's always prix-fixe, never a la carte.
This is a kind of vulgar Thatcherism, a high-tech version of her maxim that "there is no alternative." Decomposing the iPhone into its constituent parts – thoughtful, well-tested technology; total control by a single vendor – is posed as a logical impossibility, like a demand for water that's not wet:
Today, much of the world is trying to figure out what life looks like after US Big Tech. Outside of the USA, there's a growing consensus that Big Tech is an arm of the US state, a way to project soft (and even hard) American power around the globe:
Europe in particular is investing in free/open source alternatives to American Big Tech (the "Eurostack"). A big question is whether software built and maintained as a commons can ever match the slick user-friendliness of the tech companies – in other words, are we going to have to sacrifice the convenience of a Just Works(TM) platform for freedom from Big Tech?
I think this is a lazy conclusion. It's true that it takes more steps to sign up for Mastodon than it does to get onboard with Instagram, and that Instagram has a recommendation system that can help you bootstrap your network and start to populate your feed. But it's also true that Instagram has thousands of engineers and UX/UI people working on it, while Mastodon operates on a skeleton crew.
The idea that Mastodon's rough edges are due to the fact that it's open and federated – and not because it operates with a fraction of a percent of the resources as Instagram – is pretty implausible to my mind.
Indeed, there's a long history of tools designed by and for developers being picked up by commercial teams and polished into mass consumer products, which suggests that the tools' usability problems stemmed from resource constraints, not the openness or the flexibility of the tool. Think of how Slack transformed irc, or how Android packaged up GNU/Linux.
Another way to think about investment in improving free/open tools that suffer from being overly technical is that there is tons of room for improvement. There are so many easy wins to be scored when it comes to Libreoffice, Mastodon, The Gimp, ffmpeg, etc. Under the hood, these tools are stunning, but their front-ends have lagged.
By contrast, Big Tech has done so much fine-tuning of its user interfaces and workflows that there's very little room to maneuver. Every new product release for a dominant Big Tech tool is as much a regression as it is an improvement, and often these releases are expensive catastrophes:
People are often baffled at how a company with all these experts can produce "improvements" that are actually massive steps backwards, but that's what happens when you try to add more polish to something you've already been polishing for a decade or more:
There's plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack). It's hard to overstate just how under-resourced some free/open projects are, how many millions of people rely on the work of just one dedicated maintainer. Snowden coordinated his disclosures to journalists using GPG, the free/open version of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a way to secure email conversations. After the Snowden revelations, many people tried to use GPG – and failed. It was just too complicated.
But is GPG too complicated to use because it's impossible to make it easier to use? Maybe. But maybe it was the fact that one part-time volunteer was doing all the work on GPG/email integration:
Likewise, there are millions of people who rely on Pidgin, a tool that lets you use multiple chat systems from a single interface. Those millions of users are supported by one part-time developer who funds the work out of his dayjob:
If the EU were to fund even a small team to improve the usability of these systems, they could plausibly make them ten or twenty times easier to use (that is, put them within the technical understanding of ten to twenty times more users). What a growth opportunity! Does anyone think Apple can make iOS twenty times more legible?
Getting these free/open tools over a threshold for everyday usage puts them on a glide path to sustainability. As more users – and more kinds of users – pile into them, this improves the business-case for different kinds of organizations (co-ops, tinkerers, government agencies, startups) investing in improving them. And because these tools are free/open, those improvements go back into the commons, and benefit all the users. This is the kind of network effect we love to see.
And these tools won't just work better – they'll also fail better. For years now, I've been using Framework laptops, designed to be upgraded, repaired and maintained by their users:
For years, I relied on Apple hardware, and had to buy my Powerbooks in pairs, because one of them was always broken and had to be sent back to Applecare for repair. After I switched to Thinkpads, I was able to buy IBM (then Lenovo's) global, onsite, next-day hardware replacement warranty, and so I was able to just have one laptop at a time, and use an old one for 24-36 hours while I waited for a technician to travel to my home or hotel room to fix my machine.
But with the Framework, I just fix whatever breaks myself. When I dropped my laptop during a UK tour, I was able to get a replacement screen Fedexed to my hotel. I did the screen swap in 15 minutes, at midnight, after getting off a late train from Edinburgh. It worked the first time, and the next day I turned in two columns and did a livecast.
Last week, I discovered that my laptop battery had overheated and swollen so much I could barely keep the case screwed shut – something that happens to all kind of hardware. It's really dangerous, presenting a serious risk of fire. If that had happened to a Mac or a Thinkpad, I would have been screwed, unable to safely board my airplane on Friday morning.
But I was able to remove the battery before checking out of my hotel in Ithaca (the desk clerk accepted it to be given to facilities people for safe disposal), and Framework sent a replacement battery to my next hotel in NYC, so after I got off my plane and checked in there, I was able to swap my new battery in and pick right up again.
The other day, my wife said that she thought that between my operating system (Ubuntu, a flavor of GNU/Linux) and hardware (the Framework), I was having more technical problems than I used to have with my Macs. I was shocked – but after we talked it over, I realized she got that impression because when something goes wrong with my laptop, I can fix it, so I spend a bunch of time tinkering with things, rather than bringing it to an Apple Store and switching to a backup computer.
Another example: while I was in Ithaca, I decided to upgrade my 2TB solid state drive to a 4TB one. The reliable way to do this is to install the OS and all my apps on the new drive, and then copy over my user files, but that requires a lot of manual attending. I wanted a process that I could start before bed and then pick up in the morning. So I used "dd," a command that duplicates whole disks, to copy the 2TB disk to the 4TB one.
Then I used a bunch of arcane utilities to resize the partition to fill the disk (a task that was made much more complex because I have full-disk encryption turned on). It worked – but then the disk wouldn't boot. Turned out this operation had messed up GRUB, a key part of the Linux boot system.
I had many choices at that juncture. I could have scrapped the project and started over, wiping the disk, installing the OS and apps, and re-copying my data. I could have parked the whole project until I was back home in LA. Instead, I worked with some great tech support people at Canonical (who make Ubuntu) to fix GRUB, and an hour or two later, I was up and running.
The point here is that I had all options open to me. I could do this The Mac Way (bringing my machine to a technician and asking them to do it). I could do it the labor-intensive but reliable way (install OS and apps, move data). I could do it the risky, high-tech way (dd, resize partition, fix GRUB). If I'd been at home with a light work week, I might have done the middle option. If I was advising a friend without a lot of technical chops on how to do this, I might have recommended the first option. But the fact that I was on the road with limited time didn't place this upgrade out of reach. I got to decide which tradeoffs I wanted to make.
What's more, the only reason my method was so damned tricky is that no one's bothered to automate it. The process involved cutting and pasting a lot of long, machine-readable, alphanumeric identifiers into config files, and I screwed up a step. There's nothing about this process that's intrinsically hard, it's just hard because I was doing it manually. If lots of people had the ability to swap their hard drives (a process that takes less than five minutes with a Framework), it would absolutely be worth someone's time to turn all that fiddly work into an app with one big button labeled "MAKE BOOTABLE COPY GO NOW."
I love it when a system works well, but I really hate it when a system fails badly. It doesn't matter how much you can get done with your technology when it works properly if it's broken and you can't get it to work.
We've had decades of massive investment in systems that work well, but fail badly. With US Big Tech off the menu for more and more of us, it's time to think about making our resilient, gracefully failing tools easier to use – and stop hoping that someday, somehow, companies with an investment in selling us something new when their products break decide to make them easier to fix.
Tumblr loves to claim its U.I. Updates are for “accessibility,” but I’ve never made so many mis-taps in my life, on this website. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people with fine motor issues.
Das Wort Anmelden in Apps bitte verbieten! (Es wird aber wahrscheinlich das Problem nicht lösen.)
Stolz berichtet sie mir am Telefon, dass sie es selbst hinbekommen hat, die Rossmann-App auf ihrem Handy zu installieren. Das hat geklappt! Sie muss nämlich im Moment recht viel bei Rossmann kaufen, und mit der App gibt es kräftige Rabatte - das würde sich wirklich lohnen.
Aber nun möchte sie die App benutzen, und dafür muss sie sich anmelden. Und das klappt nicht.
„Ich weiß auch nicht, ich gebe da meine Mailadresse ein und mein Passwort, aber da wird immer gesagt, das Passwort sei falsch. Und nun weiß ich auch nicht, ob ich mein Passwort schon wieder vergessen habe.“
Ihr - und vielen anderen, gerade älteren - Menschen fällt es offenbar sehr schwer, zwischen „sich anmelden“ (wenn man bereits registriert ist, also: einloggen / sign in) und „sich registrieren“ (also: ein neues Konto anlegen / sign up) zu unterscheiden. Und dabei hilft es nicht, dass das Wort anmelden in der einen App den einen und in der anderen App den anderen Vorgang bezeichnen kann.
Sie versucht also immer wieder, ihr Googlemail-Passwort in der Rossmann-App einzugeben, und verzweifelt fast daran, dass das nicht klappt:
👵: „Ich hab mir hier doch mein Passwort aufgeschrieben und ich benutze doch die Googlemail-Adresse - warum geht das denn nicht???“
👨: „Du benutzt die Rossmann-App ja jetzt das erste Mal. Da musst du dich erst mal registrieren. Dafür gibt es bestimmt weiter unten einen Punkt wie ‚Registrieren‘ oder ‚Neues Konto anlegen‘ oder so. Guck bitte noch mal!“
Vielleicht würde es etwas helfen, das Wort Anmelden in Apps ganz zu verbieten. Nur noch zwischen Einloggen und neu registrieren unterscheiden. Aber wahrscheinlich sagt irgendein UX-Handbuch, dass Anglizismen wie Einloggen vermieden werden sollten.
Außerdem, nein: Das würde das Problem wohl auch nicht lösen. Denn eingegeben werden soll die Googlemail-Adresse - und dafür gibt es ja bereits ein Passwort, das Google-Passwort. Vielleicht ist es auch das ganze Konzept mit verschiedenen Anbietern und Passwörtern… ach je.
Der zweite Anlauf: Ich versuche, sie am Telefon durch diese Registrierung zu führen. Ich installiere mir die App auch auf meinem Handy und versuche, genau zu sagen, was sie wo antippen muss.
Aber auch hier ist die Wortwahl nicht selbsterklärend. Mal heißt es Registrieren, mal Neues Konto anlegen. In der Rossmann-App heißt es: Erstelle dein Konto.
Ihre Reaktion: „Nein, ein neues Konto will ich nicht, ich hab doch schon eins!“, und meint damit ihr Girokonto.
So kommen wir immerhin bis zur Eingabe des Geburtstags, aber dann erscheint ein Popup-Kalender. Daran scheitert sie dann: „Ich tipp da drauf aber da passiert nichts!“ Das kann ich auch nicht mehr am Telefon lösen.
Dritter Anlauf: Ich versuche jetzt, den Rossmann-Account für sie anzulegen. Da sind wir gerade. Aber für die Bestätigung der Registrierung bräuchte ich Zugriff auf ihre Mails. Ich hoffe, das bekommen wir hin.
Dann braucht sie sich nur noch anzumelden… im Sinne von: einloggen.
Wenn ich ihr Googlemail-Passwort kennen würde, wäre ich versucht, dasselbe Passwort zu verwenden, grundlegende Sicherheitsvorschriften missachtend; einfach, um wenigstens eine Verwirrung weniger zu haben.
Some features I actually would wanna see implemented by Tumblr:
1. ability to delete someone's bad-faith reblog of/reply to your post, and make it so that individual can no longer interact with said post while keeping the option available for others. If you're someone who's ok with surrendering control of the narrative to random derailment bits you could just not press that button, but this would at least mean that those of us who'd rather not can have some say in the matter.
2. Being able to search in the replies/reblog tags of a post for a specific user, just in case you encounter that post again and want to read through your faves. Could possibly also have a search tab of a blog's replies like we we do with likes, and similarly with the option to have it hidden from view.
3. having usernames of blocked tumblrs still visible (at least on the replies that you blocked them for). Sometimes I change my mind about a block later, but by then I've forgotten who that person was so I've no way of knowing which of the long list of names to fish out of my garbage pile.
4. (something which this update could've done if it was actually good) the ability to mute notifications on reblogs/replies you made to someone else's post. Right now it's still entirely possible to get trapped in notification hell because I made the mistake of being funny somewhere.
5. Muting a specific post when it's reblogged from a particular user, even if they haven't included any text or tags to block and without needing to block the whole user. Sometimes Beloved Mutual reblogs a gifset 80 billion times in a row and I don't wanna have to wade through all of that.
6. Being able to send asks from sideblogs. You could argue that this makes it easier to harass people even when they've blocked you, but it's garbage enough to do that already when anon exists (not that I'd ever suggest being rid of that, mind) and I'm sure you could have it that blocking one's main automatically blocks all their sideblogs as well.
Lemme know if there are any other suggestions y'all can think of as well! I'm sure there's plenty of ideas I hadn't even considered
