Paul Graham in 2005: "Near my house there is a car with a bumper sticker that reads "death before inconvenience." Most people, most of the time, will take whatever choice requires least work. If Web-based software wins, it will be because it's more convenient. And it looks as if it will be, for users and developers both." http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

atm "The User Condition" magnum opus (which obviously will never see the light) has the following chapters:

- User/Agent
- Multidimensional Agencies
- Hyperlinearity
- Interface Proletarization
- Vita Administrativa

God bless the Wayback machine, which salvaged my 2015 thoughts on hyperlinearity https://web.archive.org/web/20151114093433/http://silviolorusso.com:80/a-couple-of-thoughts-on-hyperlinearity/

subchapter title: Infinite Scroll and the Paginated Mind

ok, I tried to put together a tentative chronology of this idea of Interface Industrialization, connecting the emergence of web apps, the invention of the infinite scroll, the appearance of syndication and aggregation, the introduction of smartphones and thus the swipe gesture. Spoiler: it ends with a US Senator wanting to ban infinite scroll
https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/chronology-industrialization-web-interfaces/

gesture producing a single meaningful action, i.e. *being* the action (fully manual) : Angry Birds

VS

gesture modulating an external autonomous flow (full automation): Flappy Bird

Convenience, seamlessness and straightforwardness are other names the backgrounding of low-level agencies.

action != behavior

action = disruption of behavior

behavior = absence of action

greeting someone with "howdy" = behavior

greeting someone with "the end is near" = action

agency = the capacity to disrupt behavior

p.s. action movies should be called behavior movies

<<Nguyen [creator of Flappy Bird] wanted to make games for people like himself: busy, harried, always on the move. “I pictured how people play,” he says, as he taps his iPhone and reaches his other hand in the air. “One hand holding the train strap.” He’d make a game for them.>> https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-flight-of-the-birdman-flappy-bird-creator-dong-nguyen-speaks-out-112457/

"There is no variation or evolution in gameplay throughout the game, as the pipes always have the same gap between them and there is no end to the running track, having only the flap and ding sounds and the rising score as rewards." again Flappy Bird

"We could have games for anything. Games for attending classes, co-working, and making art. Games for work. Games for just hanging out. We're going to make these kinds of games. But at this point, it's time we stop thinking about them as games and start considering them part of a broader field: spatial interfaces." https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialinterfaces/

"The accumulation of gadgets hides these meanings Those who use these devices do not understand them; those who invent them do not understand much else. That is why we may *not*, without great ambiguity, use technological abundance as the index of human quality and cultural progress." Wright Mills (1959)

interface proletarization: disappearance of navigation, the user doesn't go anywhere, things come to them

a good interface: one that, despite its complexity, you can understand so well that you can forget about it

e.g. the theremin

"I realized that we can't have a single good term to describe what we do with digital media for a reason.

In the 1960s-1970s digital media pioneers like Alan Kay systematically simulated most existing mediums in a computer. Computers, and various computing devices which followed (such as "smart" phones)came to support reading, viewing, participating, playing, remixing, collaborating.. and also many new functions.

This is why 20th century term s- reader, viewer, participant, publisher, player, user - all apply."

Lev Manovich in 2011

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/07/how-do-you-call-person-who-is.html

currently in the rabbit hole of ppl programming on their mobile

manipulation vs customization

@entreprecariat affirmative saboteurs

@entreprecariat oh please make this a thing.

@air_pump thanks for the encouragement! at best, it will consists of some textual debris scattered around the web, like the notes I have on the blog; or i will just go with this giant thread :-)

@entreprecariat [about the banner of your post] this image reinforce the idea that apple "invented" the touchscreen... but it has been around since the 90's at least: https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/a14764511/a-crt-touchscreen-from-the-90s-shows-how-far-weve-come/
i'm aware it is not the topic of your essay, just that maybe using this image as a banner is not the best choice :)
thanks for building an history of web interface by the way!

@frankiezafe hey thanks I'm aware that Apple didn't invent the touchscreen, as it didn't even the mouse either. I chose it because it's a synthetic rendition of the idea of the chronology!

@entreprecariat sorry, my anti-apple condition is stronger that my common sense

@frankiezafe i feel you :)

@entreprecariat that last sentence convinced me to read it

@joop clickbait ;)

@entreprecariat well it worked. I think it's interesting that the concept of pages still exists though, in an infinite scroll setting. Like DDG showing results and adding more but putting a little 'page 2' somewhere inbetween. Makes me wonder why they do that

@joop what's DDG?

@entreprecariat duckduckgo

@joop based on what i read, people don't paginate much when it comes to web search, so it's not a big deal to click a couple of times on the "more" button, which in image search people would have to click that button a lot