William Blake: Dante and Virgil Among the Blasphemers (1824-27)

"We swallow hard and continue humiliating ourselves …"

I firmly believe that we remain in the first technology era, the same one that featured both steam power and plug-board computing. Our more modern user interfaces only appear more advanced, for they remain enmired within the most primitive possible mindset. We have not yet stumbled into more sophisticated orientations, even though we suffer daily under the yoke of our backward understanding. No better example exists than what I might call The State Of The App. My iPhone and my laptop run many different apps. However, they each feature the same shortcoming, that being that I, their primary user, do not in any way understand how to properly use them. That's okay, the apologists explain, because nobody understands the first thing about the least them, not even their designers.

I rest my case there. In a less primitive future world, the typical user of an application would quite naturally understand how to use the damned thing.

Tags: #Success , #PureSchmaltz