 Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco's Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn't have to pay a cent. 1/ 17 comments
To get the Cuecat into widespread use, the company raised millions in the capital markets, then mass-manufactured these things and gave them away for free at Radio Shacks around the country. Every *Wired* and *Forbes* subscriber got one in the mail! 3/ That was the good idea (it's basically a prototype for today's QR-codes). The terrible idea was that this gadget would spy on you. Also, it would only work with special barcodes that had to be licensed from the manufacturer. Also, it would only work on Windows. 4/ But the manufacturer didn't have the last word! Not at all. A couple of enterprising hardware hackers - Pierre-Philippe Coupard and Michael Rothwell - tore down a Cuecat, dumped its ROM, and produced their own driver for it - a surveillance-free driver that worked with *any* barcode. 5/ You could use it to scan the UPCs on your books or CDs or DVDs to create a catalog of your media; you could use it to scan UPCs on your groceries to make a shopping list. You could do any and every one of these things, because the Cuecat was yours. Cuecat's manufacturer, Digital Convergence, did *not* like this *at all*. They sent out legal demand letters and even shut down some of the repositories that were hosting alternative Cuecat firmware. 6/ They changed the license agreement that came with the Cuecat software CD to prohibit reverse-engineering. http://www.cexx.org/cuecat.htm It didn't matter, both as a practical matter and as a matter of law. As a practical matter, the (ahem) cat was out of the bag: there were so many web-hosting companies back then, and people mirrored the code to so many of them, the company would have its hands full chasing them all down and intimidating them into removing the code. 7/ Back then, tech users didn't feel any obligation to please tech companies' shareholders: if they backed a stupid business, that was their problem, not ours. Venture capitalists were *capitalists* - if they wanted us give to them according to their need and take from them according to their ability, they should be venture *communists*. 9/ Last August, philosopher and Centre for Technomoral Futures director Shannon Vallor tweeted, "The saddest thing for me about modern tech’s long spiral into user manipulation and surveillance is how it has just slowly killed off the joy that people like me used to feel about new tech. Every product Meta or Amazon announces makes the future seem bleaker and grayer." https://twitter.com/ShannonVallor/status/1559659655097376768 10/ She went on: "I don’t think it’s just my nostalgia, is it? There’s no longer anything being promised to us by tech companies that we actually need or asked for. Just more monitoring, more nudging, more draining of our data, our time, our joy." https://twitter.com/ShannonVallor/status/1559663985821106177 11/ Today on Tumblr, Wil Wheaton responded: "[T]here is very much no longer a feeling of 'How can this change/improve my life?' and a constant dread of 'How will this complicate things as I try to maintain privacy and sanity in a world that demands I have this thing to operate.'" Wil finished with, "Cory Doctorow, if you see this and have thoughts, I would LOVE to hear them." 12/ I've got thoughts. I think this all comes back to the Cuecat. When the Cuecat launched, it was a mixed bag. That's generally true of technology - or, indeed, any product or service. No matter how many variations a corporation offers, they can never anticipate all the ways that you will want or need to use their technology. This is especially true for the users the company values the least - poor people, people in the global south, women, sex workers, etc. 13/ That's what makes the phrase "So easy your mom can use it" particularly awful "Moms" are the kinds of people whose priorities and difficulties are absent from the room when tech designers gather to plan their next product. The needs of "moms" are mostly met by *mastering*, *configuring* and *adapting* technology, because tech doesn't work out of the box for them: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/19/the-weakest-link/#moms-are-ninjas 14/ (As an alternative, I advocate for "so easy your boss can use it," because your boss gets to call up the IT department and shout, "I don't care what it takes, just make it work!" Your boss can solve problems through raw exercise of authority, without recourse to ingenuity.) 15/ Technology can't be understood separately from technology *users*. This is the key insight in Donald Norman's 2004 book *Emotional Design*, which argued that the ground state of all technology is broken, and the overarching task of tech users is to troubleshoot the things they use: https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#cuckoos-egg 16/ Troubleshooting is both an art and a science: it requires both a methodical approach and creative leaps. The great crisis of troubleshooting is that the more frustrated and angry you are, the harder it is to be methodical *or* creative. Anger turns attention into a narrow tunnel of brittle movements and thinking. 17/ In *Emotional Design*, Norman argues that technology should be *beautiful* and *charming*, because when you *like* a technology that has stopped working, you are able to troubleshoot it in an expansive, creative, way. *Emotional Design* was not merely remarkable for what it said, but for who said it. 18/ |
Gregory's Server
The Cuecat was a good idea and a terrible idea. The good idea was to widely distribute barcode scanners to computer owners, along with software that could read and decode barcodes; the company's marketing plan called for magazines and newspapers to print barcodes alongside ads and articles, so readers could scan them and be taken to the digital edition.
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