It's not you. The computing industry is actively trying to
hide the computer. Naturally, people who love computers are left out.
I found this article on Stallman's website and it was enlightening for me:
http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/
> This approach leads to some great products on screen and IRL, but alienates as well.
> Robotics doesn’t give us a chance to fall in love with the computer if it is not anthropomorphic. Experience design prevents from thinking and valuing computers as computers, and interfaces as interfaces.
> It makes us helpless. We lose an ability to narrate ourselves and — going to a more pragmatic level — we are not able to use personal computers anymore.
> For government agencies, the destruction of hardware is a routine procedure. From their perspective, the case of deletion is thoroughly dealt with when the media holding the data is physically gone. They are smart enough to not trust the “empty trash” function.
> Of course the destruction made no sense in this case, since copies of the files in question were located elsewhere, but it is a great symbol for what is left for users to do, what is the last power users have over their systems: They can only access them on the hardware level, destroy them.
> Since there is less and less certainty of what you are doing with your computer on the level of software, you’ll tend to destroy your hard drive voluntarily every time you want to really delete something.
> Every victory of experience design: a new product “telling the story,” or an interface meeting the “exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother” widens the gap in between a person and a personal computer.
> The morning after “experience design:” interface-less, desposible hardware, personal hard disc shredders, primitive customization via mechanical means, rewiring, reassembling, making holes into hard disks, in order to to delete, to logout, to “view offline.”