Watching the videos before reading the text, was a series of baffling surprises
> The heresy implicit within is the premise that the user, not the system, gets to define what is most important at any given moment
Calling that a heresy is about the most arrogantly flawed statement you can make in the field of user experience design, which is saying a lot.
In that sense, it is "heresy" -- not the current norm -- to put the user in charge of constructing the view of information in a system. It might be true.
Anyways, it took me a bit to understand what the author was saying, and the articles would be a lot easier to read if they used plain English. The articles are quite contextual and people with a different frame of view might interpret them differently, which is not good communication.
But it's still stupid. The system is still deciding.
I agree with the overall idea that users should have a lot of control over what they see and how, but just presenting this idea as the only good one (as implied by contrarian or heresy or whatever) is not the way to go. This could work for specialized creative workflows, and there may be a version of this that you could use for a window system, but I think as shown it would need to be targeted at very engaged and specialized users who can put in the work.
Is there a version of this idea that could work for general computing for a typical user? Maybe! But it would make a lot of decisions for the user at the end of the day; it would just need to feel like it didn’t.