Skewered by skeuomorphs, smarting at smart

 

Like many averagely intelligent and moderately well-educated  people of my age I find the products of information technology to be among the principal causes of stress in my life, resulting in much bad language and wasted time. Touch wood, it isn’t malevolent hackers that cause me the problems. It’s not even that systems crash with alarming regularity, like Spotify did yesterday and much of Google did today, or even that Windows 10 needs to update for a couple of hours every day or two (you’d think after all this time they would have got it right). No, it isn’t that, not entirely. While these examples reveal how – even without the impacts of malicious intent – our crucial information infrastructures are absurdly, crazily vulnerable, unreliable and flaky, the issue I want to address here is subtly different. From the perspective of an everyday user of computerised systems it’s the intrinsic design – one might say the underlying ambient assumptions – that forms the subject of my concern today. Just to be clear, I refer to those systems without which it is scarcely possible to continue to lead a civilised life – to find things out, to write, to buy stuff, to communicate with people, to take photographs, to play or listen to music, and so on.  Important activities.

Design, in a word, is much to blame for this impoverishment of our collective quality of life. Simple activities never used to be complicated, and they don’t need to be. Being incomprehensible is not the same as being clever. “Smart” should never be a synonym for “stupid”, yet so often it is. Now, even attempting to switch on the telly or to answer the phone can be fraught, with no guarantee of success, without prior instruction. A lightbulb can take longer to fully illuminate than the time it takes to do whatever you needed it on for. Just lately I’ve noticed that some people on the other end of a phone line sound as though they are immersed in a polygonal steel tank full of soapy water while simultaneously inhaling helium. Since when was a flat piece of glass the ideal geometrical form connecting the mouth and the ear; has human anatomy really changed that much since the dawn of the telephone? Did a clever man with a clever algorithm work that one out? Yes, of course he did. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. QED. This is  progress, and if you don’t like it I’ll warm up the lecture about making omelettes – yes, the same one they use for promoting driverless cars.

Many of the difficulties technology inflicts upon its users result from a perverse desire to design counter-intuitively, and from a failure to align what has to be done in order to get some device or function to work, with what common sense and intuition suggest should be done. 

What ought to be user-friendliness so often appears as user hostility or user contempt. What should be the bleedin’ obvious is frequently baffling - and that is without the added strains imposed by age-related deficits concerning dexterity, hearing and eyesight. Just don’t get me started on the subject of packaging.

One needs to fight back. Recently, having had quite enough of G-mail altering the words I intended to use, and then telling me that my spelling and grammar were wrong, forcing me to go back through my message to unpick the consequences of this unwanted interference, I decided to do something about it. The crunch came on the day when it took me two attempts to get “Wombledon” to stick, in a silly piece I was writing about a trip to the alternative W villages of south Notts, including Wibberley, Wobberley, and Wallaby-with-the-Wind. That’s it, I thought, I’m not putting up with it any more. Actually, I was rather taken aback that Google knew of Wimbledon. Apparently there’s one (population 192) in North Dakota, so there’s your likely explanation. Mind you, Microsoft has never heard of Belsen, as you’ll discover, if you use their spellchecker. Enough’s enough, I fumed. I was determined to remove the unwanted idiotic “smart” intrusions, there solely – as far as I could see - to intimidate me into acknowledging the dumb omniscience of the onanistic oligarchs of Asperger Valley.

But how to go on the attack? Well, a resort to instinct and nebulous intuition is often a good idea. Over the preceding weeks I’d developed a sneaking suspicion that the symbol which I’d always taken to be a flower, or possibly the sun, or just an arbitrary piece of decoration, was in fact a cogwheel. I guessed – rightly as it turned out – that this tiny icon implied “settings”. It might, of course, have been a cue for the whirrings of considered mentation, for thought itself, but no, it was the sort of cog that could be vaguely symbolic of machinery as we used to picture it, in that dreamily long-ago era before nail parlours provided the principal contribution to our economy. Perhaps it was a nod in the direction of the clattering computations of Charles Babbage. Holding my breath, I clicked on this little symbol and then - refusing to be fobbed off with cosmetic, geek-pleasing banalities - I found a link where I could deal with the unasked for “preferences” responsible for screwing up my e-mails. Now I could disable all these irritating “smart” reflexes, and take charge of writing what I intended, not what some pre-set algorithm had decided was best for me. Best of all, I could be British again.

Oh yes, British, as in British government. We’ve heard quite a lot about algorithms this week, haven’t we. Algorithms are clearly bad news; they’re not designed for you or me, but for someone else, someone who wants to cut corners in the interests of making their own life easier and more profitable, but yours or mine more difficult and lowly. Algorithms work to the lowest common denominator; they democratise mediocrity. As we have seen, they are designed in their quasi-mathematical pseudo-objective faux-scientific thuggery to impress the likes of our esteemed heart-warming education secretary, William Gaviscon Jnr. While I tend to visualise young Gaviscon in short trousers, at this point I should emphasise strongly that he is not a major participant in my erotic fantasy life. Although I admit that when he bleated at the Russian leader to “shut up and go away”, at the time of the Salisbury poisonings, I felt a quiet thrill of submission-by-proxy, at the same time hoping that Vladimir Vladimirovich was able to enjoy a more direct and robust physiological response.

However, ugh, shudder, I digress. Following my sussing out of the cog symbol and my subsequent smug victory over Google - fooling it into writing the words of my choice, beating it down, one-nil to the human race - I realised that, as regards most of the symbols that are sprayed round the edge of the computer screen, on phones and tablets, and all over the place, I haven’t a clue what they mean. I wouldn’t dare touch them. Does anyone know what they all mean? I’ve just noticed one of them  which as far as I can tell, with the aid of a magnifying glass, features a man in a pale blue pullover with an unnaturally extended right arm. I’ve been hovering over this symbol, cautiously, with mouse in retracted pounce mode. A box has popped up, saying “Welcome Center”. Well, thanks but no thanks, for it has something of the aura of a touchy-feely religious cult, something best left in the bleak suburbs of middle America, in an endless desolate prairie of the soul, where everything from pecan pie to the clear night sky is omigod awesome. Pale blue pullovers, that’s the giveaway. I can visualise the plate glass, the A-frame in pale brick. [Can we please get back on track? We left Wimbledon, North Dakota, some time ago. - Ed].

Anyway, those few icons that I (sort of) understand, I do so because they operate metaphorically to suggest physical items from my past, like the dustbin symbol for getting rid of rubbish, and the floppy disc icon meaning ‘save’ or ‘store’. They remind me of real things and therefore they mean something to me, though not necessarily what is intended. The dustbin is quite like one that my grandmother had. I think bin day was on a Friday. Yes, I can relate to that, just the thought makes me feel happy, and I can imagine other rewarding possibilities for on-screen iconography. I so wish that computers had something like a bus conductor function. Or a chocolate application..

But then again, your average enthusiast is too young to remember floppy discs, or bus conductors, or decent non-greasy chocolate made in Birmingham in satisfyingly large chunks at half a crown a slab. His real-world bin, if he has one, is a wheelie bin, quite different in form and profile from the much beloved fluted variety with ill-fitting lid that would bang around cheerfully in a strong wind. If analogy is perception, as Douglas Hofstadter would have us believe, it will rattle and clang its way up the garden path, and leave you there, gripping a hovering mouse without a paddle. The use of skeuomorphic imagery – the fancy name for stylised bins, cogs, floppies and the like, inspired by associations now anachronistic or redundant - has to keep pace with the mental associations of users. Otherwise it merely confuses.

Thoughtfully employed, digitally or otherwise, skeumorphy can be useful, innovative and inspired. For instance, I like the reassurance of the soft scrunching sound made by some digital cameras to indicate that a picture has “taken” – referencing the shutter clicking on a photographic camera. However, for the young digerati, unused to “analogue”, I fear that all it tells them is that anyone nearby can hear them taking a photograph, and so they had better be careful, since their voyeurism or breach of performance copyright is audible. The archaic metaphor may be lost on them. Tough. Technology grinds on mercilessly.

Deliberating the Dangleberry

When I was younger I took a rather mocking approach to the activity reports of elderly relatives, who when asked about their day would cite as evident highlights putting out the bin, paying the milkman, or having a chat with the old boy across the road who has got to go in for a hernia. Now, being older myself, and retired, I can start to appreciate some of this, with the processes of expectation-minimisation and banality-elevation accelerated and exacerbated by the lockdown, as well as by age. Not going anywhere much, watching very little TV, not having any structure imposed upon my days, means not only that I’m unable to tell if it’s the weekend or a bank holiday, but that the formerly despised timetables of trivia have risen to the surface.

The basics of daily existence endure, and each one constitutes more of an event, as what formerly was background becomes foreground, as the infraordinary becomes the doorway to the potentially extraordinary, and as the mundane becomes mainstream. Each minor activity is transformed into something one can celebrate, is attended to more deliberately, nurtured more imaginatively, as though it was an artform, a happening, something to e-mail about at great length to someone half a world away, something to log as an achievement. In a crisis like this the overfamiliar comes to the fore. So if the weather’s fine, as it is at the moment, and speaking personally, breakfast will be taken outside. That’s a bit different from the norm, and represents a deliberate attempt at creating enjoyment and adding interest. Breakfast as an event, almost as a holiday  A feeling that one could be at the seaside even though that’s two hours or so away. Ah, maybe so, but see, the bananas are Boubas, from Cameroon. A Bouba can never be thin, ask any psychologist. Grow fat and happy. Chop one up and put it on your flakes. (No, not the psychologist). Black grapes from Brazil. The blueberries are … oh look, there’s a wasp.

The real fun sets in with elevenses, which advance ever earlier, currently starting at around 9.30, when rather than opting for a quick spoonful of the instant stuff, a “proper” coffee will be manufactured slowly and carefully, a decent mug will be selected, and one will feel that one is doing retirement properly. “Ah, this is the life”. “Sure beats being at the office”. “It’s Sunday, isn’t it?”. “Oh, oh, right”. Look, there’s another wasp. 

A proper coffee will be accompanied – according to whim  - by a pain au chocolat (a regular gift from a kind neighbour), a slice or two of only mildly burnt fruitloaf (toaster setting uncertain), or most frequently by white toast with butter and  an exotic marmalade, preferably one with rustic oo-arr credentials purchased pre-lockdown from an olde worlde garden centre with a coach park, space for 850 cars and a plastic tiger in reception. The jar we’re working through at the moment is labelled Mrs. Dangleberry’s Homemade Olde Englishe Stem Cell Ginger with Extra Dangleberries. It’s absolutely stunning. I could eat it till it came out of my orifices. By lunchtime, given the warm weather, something alcoholic will be calling.

You can see where this is going, can’t you. Yes. Cider. Given (a) the paucity of things to do and (b) the difficulty of finding anywhere interesting to exercise in, means that one’s diet suffers, at least in terms of being sensibly nutritious and under control, and one’s waistline expands. You may argue that these are small prices to pay for getting through this pandemic with a modicum of sanity, and I would have to agree with you. I mean, 14% extra dangleberries. 

Always, in this current situation,  one has to try and seek an upside, and preferably one actually available, one we can benefit from now, well before the dreaded lurgy is dreaded no more. Well, food, is an obvious upside, drink likewise. But seriously, the upside, as I see it, is that – regardless of, and because of, all the things one cannot do – one is forced to focus upon what one can do, and upon what is still accessible. Out of lack of alternatives one is compelled to look more closely and to appreciate more deeply. Much of what I’m referring to is yours anyway. It’s there, free of charge, always has been, no pre-booking necessary.

Rather like the prisoner who looks forward to the day when he’ll be allowed a shower and a change of clothes, we can concentrate on the everyday, the ordinary, the close by, and acquire pleasure and knowledge in the process. We just have to learn how to fiddle with the gestalt, how to twiddle the emphasis. We can explore places nearby which otherwise we’ve passed a thousand times and never thought to take a look at. We can take the time to observe properly, to examine, to stand and stare, to sniff and savour, even perhaps to learn properly (several of my friends are brushing up on their languages), to listen, to appreciate our loved ones, to practise – in the Frommian sense – being rather than having. When will we ever get a chance like this again? (Never, I hope).

At times like this you realise it’s not the fancy aspects of life that matter, not the expensive purchases or the air miles traversed in order to go on holiday or the exoticism of a complicated lifestyle. At times like this it’s things like “bin day is Tuesday” that matter, mid-morning marmalade that is important - like the one I referred to a moment or two ago. So let’s take up the advice and inspect more closely. Let’s have a look at the label on the back of the jar.  Mm, the print is rather small, but I can just make it out. “Dangleberry Genetic Technologies (UK), Swindon, Wilts., SN5 8VZ”. 

Quality of life. That’s what matters.

Dungeness

Dungeness is a place, and one with a very strong sense of place, but it should also be a term denoting a quality, a state of being – dungeness. Otherwise a raw, bleak, triangle of scruffy shingle sticking out into the English Channel on the western periphery of the delightful and scenically varied county of Kent. That part of the Garden of England where only sea kale grows.

When I visited Dungeness last Thursday – perhaps the fifth time in my life that I’ve been there - it confirmed itself for me as one of my favourite places in England, or indeed anywhere. It possesses a unique fusion (or arguably fission) of traces of human experimentation and habitation combined with wild barrenness, a powerful paradoxical enabler of life-affirming solitude. Here are to be experienced manifestations of pure energy – the ambient hum of the nuclear industry, the roar of the wind, the swooping and screeching of seabirds, the crashing of sea upon shingle, the visions of individual minds. Ways forward only discoverable amid emptiness. All kinds of vaguely scientific artefacts probe the vast sky (with towering friendly cumuli on the day I was there) – lighthouses, telegraph poles, electricity pylons (some of them disturbingly one-armed); and at a lower level the tiny trains of the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch, the concrete relics of wartime, and the random scattering of make-do dwellings of individuals seeking isolation and escape.

Thus there are constant visual reminders of and references to human society, while the elemental nature of the place provokes one into distancing oneself from “it all”, into world-rejection. In crowded, pressured, south-east England this is the last great wilderness, where one can retreat into pleasurable solitary contemplation, comforted by the wind howling in one’s ears. Here is an escape from all the cleverness and intellectualising of modern man, the endless wittering of “commentators” and people who know better (yes, and bloggers too), the antisocial meddlings of antisocial media, the snooping of the thought police, all the hatefulness and bickering of people with agendas; escape from that vast army of useless and otherwise unemployable people whose job it is to tell you how to live, how to think, what words you’re not allowed to use this week, what to believe, whose career to destroy today. Here one can practise misanthropy without harming anyone. In fact, one can conclude safely that misanthropy is a reasonable response to the present day world.

 
Dungeness is a place – a quality – which I imagine England used to possess, a land in which people could do more or less what they wanted to, inventing their lives as they went along. A land where imposed permissions and instructions were unknown, where control and monitoring were unimaginable, where busybodying bureaucracies had no place, a land devoid of jabbering electronics and moronic noise and … civilisation. Just the wind in one’s face. Desolation ecstasy. No, please don’t bother me with the downsides and please don’t tell anyone about it. 

Dungeness, a place, a quality, and a reminder of the freedoms we have lost.

Daylight Robbery

Saturday

We put the clocks on an hour, well before bedtime. We’re getting to that sort of age, and we wouldn’t want to miss it, or do it twice. Hence the cautious approach, although since we remember to do it at all we conclude that we must still be enjoying moderate mental health. 

Sunday

Evidence of moderate mental health is immediately confounded in my case by the onset of vernal affective disorder, which is the technical name for the sagging sensation one gets when realising that soon it will be time to mow the lawn, to do the watering, to eat lettuce, to not eat soup for six months, to have to go for long walks, to unplug things in case it thunders, to not be able to wear one’s favourite pullover, to eat more lettuce, and to say “the evenings are starting to pull out” - thus sounding worryingly like one’s parents.

Monday

A fine morning. If the weather forecast is to be believed (sad that meteorology is still a faith-based system rather than an exact science), this will be the best day of the week. So, a walk in the park. Alas, no daffodils, no blossom, just the scraggy remnants of flattened crocuses and women gabbing into their phones while their offspring squeal delightedly at the sight of alfresco free range dog emptying. Later on I start to degroove the patio. Yes, since you asked, with a de-groover, though not all night long, baby. Daylight de-grooving only, not the late lamented Dud and Pete bag-based technique. A proper wooden de-groover. Made in England. The best.

Tuesday

Microsoft Word is having a good day. I copy some text into a new document and - having spent half an hour chasing two thirds of a page of blank space that’s appeared out of nowhere but keeps popping up somewhere else every time I move it - I realise eventually (silly me) that Word wants to start the document at page 49. Like most new documents do, obviously. Once I fix this, things are much better. Google are having a good day too. I use the world’s most popular search engine to look for Nepalese restaurants in Staines, in what used to be Middlesex. Google finds me approximately 63,000 of them, in just 0.51 seconds. I notice that the second one listed is actually in Hounslow, and that according to the census the population of Staines was in 2011 a mere 18,484, but no matter, it’s a technologically impressive feat. Not just “about half a second” but 0.51 seconds. Wow, that is precise.

Wednesday

Microsoft Word is having an even better day. I run the spellchecker across the aforementioned document and it stumbles over the adjective “Hitlerian”, highlights it in red as a possible misspelling, and suggests an alternative. Hitler Ian. Of course, that’s what I meant. Ian Hitler, yes, I can believe he’s a Microsoft employee, best buddy with Hiram H. Himmler, Gary Goering and Wayne Doughballs. Though probably not Adolf Zuckerberg.

Thursday

I attempt to book a hotel – one of a well-known American-owned chain – near Liverpool. Before I can submit my requirements, up pops a screen suggesting that I might be interested in staying at a hotel in Hicksville, Missouri. I switch to another website. Oh, the power of advertising.

Good Friday

I continue de-grooving, with my lo-tech de-groover that does what I alone want it to do, as I push it purposefully along the moss-tinged grooves of my groovy patio. I’m so glad that my de-groover is so technologically advanced, indeed so smart, so intelligent, that it doesn’t ask me if I’d like to de-groove a patio in Zanesville, Ohio, instead. Or check on my serum potassium levels, or order me a pizza, or tell me that “de-groover” isn’t in its dictionary, or address me chummily by my first name and request some feedback on the quality of my experience today. 

Saturday

Well, here we are. It’s raining again. My faith in weather forecasting is restored – although since it’s a bank holiday weekend it’s not exactly difficult to get that one right, is it. I run the spellchecker across this blog piece, before posting it, and am once again reminded of the continued existence of Ian Hitler.

Quality of Life No. 2 – The Endless Upgrade

Just over a week ago came news of the “WannaCry” ransomware attack around the world, one of the victims being the cash-strapped NHS and – indirectly – a great many patients, some with very serious conditions, whose consultations had to be postponed. It would seem only fair that the perpetrators of this attack, if caught, should be donated to urology or proctology departments for novice medical students to sharpen their skills upon.

Much has been made of the NHS’s failure to upgrade its software, despite warnings. Funny how the victim is so often to blame, isn’t it. 

The blame for the consequences of this mindless criminal act lies not with the NHS. It lies solely with the hackers. However, much responsibility also lies with Microsoft and other arrogant corporations – primarily American - who over the years have bullied much of the world’s population into believing that they should have to waste valuable time and money on purchasing and installing endless “upgrades” to software and hardware. Some people apparently like to do this and boast that they have the latest whatever. I’m not one of those people; I just want to get on with what I’m doing, thank you very much. Yes, I know the arguments about increased speed, capacity and functionality, about the need to maintain security (ha !), but there is another way of looking at this.

Computer facilities are now an essential utility along with electricity and gas, water and sewerage. We expect to use these services without being personally responsible for their upkeep, and constantly inconvenienced into the bargain. No, you can’t go for a poo just now, the toilet needs to install an upgrade first, a pimply oik in California says so. The NHS, along with other organisations and ordinary people, are far too short of money and far too busy to have to bother with frequent upheavals to their work in order to accommodate the imperious demands of nerdy billionaires five thousand miles away. 

With a general election looming it would be nice to think that at least one of the political parties would propose a British initiative to render internet access stable, safe, protected from nuisances, and better designed. Yes, I know it’s easier said than done, but responsible government really ought to get a grip on such an essential service. Around a decade ago the internet was getting quite good, and one could see the fulfilment of Tim Berners-Lee’s dream; much of it has deteriorated steadily ever since, usability and familiarity for the many sacrificed to constant change, advertising, snooping, and ill-judged intrusion in the interests of the profits and dubious social engineering ambitions of the few. And incidentally, when I’m looking up a train to Sheffield on the National Rail Enquiries site it doesn’t mean that I want to install Google Chrome first. And when I’m looking for a hotel in Venice I don’t need flights to Dubrovnik. Do keep up; that was last year. 

Indeed, last year, for many months I was irritated by incessant demands from Microsoft that I should “upgrade” from Windows 7 to Windows 10 (we sometimes forget how imbecilic such names are), before – like so many – being trapped into doing so by their unethical trick of making the “go away” symbol suddenly mean “install”. Having had this inelegant piece of design-free rubbish thrust upon me against my better judgement, towards the end of the year I had my computer buggered up for the best part of a day by a Windows 10 upgrade that didn’t work. Fortunately, a software-savvy neighbour was able to rescue the situation, but the upgrade never installed properly. At approximately monthly intervals it tries again, but never succeeds, just going into terminal re-boot mode instead, an endless revolving symbol of despair. It happened again this morning. Last week someone told me that he left his computer running for 2½ days and this dollop of unwanted garbage actually installed. I had no idea he was such an optimist or that electricity could travel so slowly. Is this progress?

Like most people I have to use the internet, and I have to use a computer. But I no longer enjoy it like I used to; it does nothing for my quality of life and everything for elevating my stress levels. Thank you Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, et al – it’s all your doing.

Recently there was a cartoon in “Private Eye” showing a man at a screen on which three options were presented - in essence: “Install now”, “Remind me later”, and “Fuck off”. If only.