SJ has undeniably championed great progress at the technology design front. But I think it’s important to acknowledge the bad parts, or rather, the things we lo

SJ has undeniably championed great progress at the technology design front. But I think it’s important to acknowledge the bad parts, or rather, the things we lost along the way. Mainly, I think, the push for too much abstractions, needed to introduce the disruptive new medium of PCs to everyday people, holds no “truth to material”. This in turn has made ignorance almost a prerequisite to use computers as they come. There’s a tremendous distance between the way of computers and the way of users, so much so that, specially in software engineering, it feels like a huge portion of the job is just making very long and fragile bridges to connect the reality of machines to these unsound models of “humanized” interfaces. It makes the machine less efficient and the users less powerful than they could be if the mechanical truth wasn’t considered an aberration. In a sense, we’re now trapped within the tyranny of a very particular semiological viewpoint.