I'd never heard that Nabakov quote, but it's terrifically cynical and, I hope, false but, in my experience, not entirely untrue. Designers' unnecessary desire

I'd never heard that Nabakov quote, but it's terrifically cynical and, I hope, false but, in my experience, not entirely untrue. Designers' unnecessary desire to delight users staves off the more Kafkaesque user experiences, and we all live in the gap of cops' unnecessary (occasional) sympathy for (some) nominal outlaws (we're all nominal outlaws).[0] When you mentioned curiosity I thought of a firm where colleagues scoffed at me as I rummaged through conference room drawers, saying, "you're not going to find anything interesting in there." I'm curious about cupboards as well as log traces -- an almost ubiquitously "eyes-glaze-over" boring artifact of modernity that, alongside popularly mind-numbing "code", I am equipped to find interesting. Is it any wonder, then, in this workplace where such innocent, cheap, curiosity were scoffed at, I was not too long after threatened with the extraordinarily archaic (in our at-will state, at least) legal notion of "insubordination"? It's a shame, because insofar as "all ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system,"[1] the liberated curiosity of individual contributors is often the only "crack in everything" that's "how the light gets in."[2] 0. "With two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent." (Françoise Bertaut de Motteville) 1. https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/ 2. "Anthem" - Leonard Cohen