> Technology's default mode is to constantly call for my attention. "Technology" has no need for your attention. Developers do. Right from it's origins in the

> Technology's default mode is to constantly call for my attention. "Technology" has no need for your attention. Developers do. Right from it's origins in the 60's and 70's, driven by early science fiction, programmers wrote anthropomorphic code to act as a proxy between users and their vicarious ego interactions. > Hi! I'm OMNICOGNITRON-ZX1, ENTER YOUR NAME... > fuck off > I do not understand "fuck off". YOU MUST ENTER YOUR NAME! Weizenbaum, irritated that his secretary found this more engaging than a conversation with him, forged "The Computer" typecast as some sort of laconic, overbearing and demanding "Rogerian" nurk. > Say more about why you'd like to smash me to a thousand pieces Douglas Adams captured it best in his lampoon of the (fictitious) Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's marketing drive for GPP (Genuine People Personalities). Marvin the Paranoid Android properly describes the whole project (which today includes Siri, Alexa and suchlike) as "Ghastly and depressing" [2]. Computers as "demanding" objects is firmly wired into our culture, and developers play along to it as if it were entirely natural. [1] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Genuine_People_Personalities https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Genuine_People_Personali... [2] Marvin was himself a GPP