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Cory Doctorow

Then there was the law: how could you impose license terms on a gift? How could someone be bound by license terms on a CD that they simply threw away without ever opening it, much less putting it in their computer?

slashdot.org/story/00/09/18/11

In the end, Cuecat folded and sold off its remaining inventory. The early 2000s were not a good time to be a tech company, much less a tech company whose business model required millions of people to meekly accept a bad bargain.

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:52 | Open on mamot.fr
10 comments
Cory Doctorow

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*.

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:52 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

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."

twitter.com/ShannonVallor/stat

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:52 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

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."

twitter.com/ShannonVallor/stat

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:52 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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.'"

wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/698

Wil finished with, "Cory Doctorow, if you see this and have thoughts, I would LOVE to hear them."

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:52 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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.

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:52 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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:

pluralistic.net/2022/05/19/the

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:53 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

(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.)

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:53 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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:

pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/ban

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:53 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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.

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:53 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

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.

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20 Oct 2022 at 15:53 | Open on mamot.fr
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