Notice anything about the Google Image Search results for 'frustrating'?
google.com
google.com
definitely agreed. these are infernal machines, unnatural & bad. they have their own invisible means of operation. more and more the operations are not even local, are part of some far off world we are not privy too. it's such a sad fate for computing, for something that could and should be revealing & malleable[1].
from "The Ecology of Freedom" thread came an interesting reference i haven't gone through yet, "Towards a Liberatory Technology"[2]. i'm very excited to check this out. there's a lot of personal hopes i have- i believe strongly in re-de-mainframing computing, in making it personal again, in revealing the thing & letting humans back into the loop. I also think we need better safeguards as we go- ideas like software transactional memory & checkpoint/restore, not just for programmers, but as user tools. to help us better be able to safely experiment & toy with systems. our options are so limited when things are not going well. the frustration is real.
it's also worth pointing out that probably some % of these frustrations are blaming the messenger for the message. we do get bad news, frustrating work emails, & other drags via computers. or we hear bad news. the computer connects us to so much, is a foci, but it's only some of the time it's actually computing itself that we are responding to during our interactions with it.
[1] https://malleable.systems/
[2] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30017267