Twenty five years ago, Prince was attending the Yahoo! Internet Life Online Music Awards Show to receive the award for Best Internet Only Single which he won with his 1998 track, The War. While on stage, he made an interesting comment which seems to be the most (and possibly only) memorable event of the show. "Don't be fooled by the internet. It's cool to use the computer, but don't let the computer use you. Y'all saw the Matrix." This is a really funny statement when you consider that his distaste for computers stemmed in large part from their use in the piracy of his music. Prince's animosity towards computers and the internet was well known, and it almost always came back to copyright infringement- he repeatedly sued or threatened to sue video hosting sites, online marketplaces, and even individuals who had simply shared links to illegally hosted copies of his music.
At one point he even said that the internet was "over," which he later clarified meant that it would soon become a cultural void because of piracy. His incorrect take on the ultimate fate of the internet aside, there's something deeper at work in that quote than his indignation over copyright violation. The reference to the Matrix and the possibility that computers might eventually use us rather than the other way around hints at genuine paranoia, and that's why I find what he said so interesting. Are computers literally using us like Prince might have feared? Of course not, but I think it's fair to say that in the time since he voiced that opinion most subsequent software has been designed with a single streamlined experience in mind. As such, present day computer users are treated less like active participants and more like passive subjects by the software they use.
It's my position that the role of learning the ins and outs of computers and software through trial and error has been diminished in the pursuit of user friendliness. Before I go any further though, I need to clarify that I do *not* think that accessibility is bad. It's great that computers have a much lower skill floor than they used to, and I think that everybody in the world should ideally be able to use a computer if they want to. I am *not* here to argue in favor of making computers more challenging to use, because that's antisocial thinking. I personaly enjoy being challenged by my computer occasionally which is why I use an unconventional desktop OS, but I recognize that I'm an outlier and that most people don't want what I want out of computers. Instead, I'm just going to point out an instance where software has strangely had some elements obscured from users to the detriment of the ones who *do* want to learn through trial and error.
Consider the Blue Screen of Death, a screen displayed on Windows computers when they simply cannot operate safely, i.e, shit's fucked! The BSoD has gone through many iterations, and the usefulness of each version varies. In my opinion, the most useful BSoD was the version which was used from Windows XP to Windows 7, while the least useful BSoD is the current version which has been in use since Windows 8 with some unremarkable alterations since its introduction. What a person considers useful is fairly subjective, so I need to explain my reasoning. The most promiment element of the BSoD in Windows 11 is a frowning emoticon. It's the largest thing on the screen, and that irks me because it comes off as infantilizing when combined with the actual problem inherent to this version. That problem is the scarcity of information provided to people who have the misfortune of encountering the Windows 11 BSoD.
Below the large frowning face is a QR code which links to a Microsoft support website. Anybody who has attempted to use this site knows that it hardly ever helps in practice. To the right of the QR code in the smallest text size used on the screen is a vague error code that you're meant to read off to somebody who supposedly knows better than you. What exactly is somebody meant to do with the scant information provided on this screen if they don't want to waste their time asking questions on a frankly shitty website? There's very little here in the way of advice for troubleshooting on your own, and the only suggestion from Microsoft is pretty much worthless. You're better off googling the error code and clicking a result from just about any other site than the one this BSoD directs you to.
Now contrast that with the BSoD used in Windows XP for example. It's a jarring sight- the dark blue background and stark white text conveying a verbose error message is a clear sign that Something Is Fucked. Note the following: it points out a file that could be causing the issue, lists an error code, and even provides some tips for beginning the troubleshooting process. This gives you a possible failure point to start examining with an error code made useful by the presence of that info, plus some advice about booting into Safe Mode for diagnostic purposes among other things. While it's undoubtedly scarier looking and maybe even a little overwhelming to those unfamiliar with it, it's safe to say that this iteration of the BSoD is more useful than its modern counterpart if you want to try your hand at fixing a fatal error.
Why did Microsoft elect to relegate this useful information to an awful support site? It's hard to say, but I think that it's possible that Microsoft believes that users of Windows without prior training or experience can't be trusted to fix their systems on their own. That's quite an accusation, but software developers have distrusted end users long before the advent of Windows 1.0. If I'm correct and Microsoft distrusts the users of its own products, it wouldn't be that shocking. They'd only be following industry standards. As a side note, if an operating system is so fragile and apparently difficult to handle that its developer subtly encourages inexperienced users to never tinker with it while unsupervised, it's probably not very good.
Distrust of end users has been a factor in computing for a very long time. Multics, an early and highly influential operating system, utilized a time sharing system which lowered overall runtime costs at the expense of users who had to pay for a finite time slot in which they could use a computer running it. Multics was developed by a handful of military-industrial complex aligned entities, and as such it was important to them to cut costs where possible and ensure that their operating system was not being used for purposes they considered frivolous. I think that's fucking stupid, and the programmers who made up the early hacker culture at MIT felt the same way. Displeased with the authoritarian ethos of the Multics project, they made a game out of cracking its security wherever possible so they could use it how they liked.
The authoritarian ethos of the Multics project and the wider computer industry, still in its infancy then, has unfortunately persisted in some form to this day. Though end users have considerably more control over their computers now, they're still clearly distrusted by software developers and the support network utilized by those developers. As an example, I have a work laptop on which I have a standard user account. Some permissions are restricted from me, including the ability to run certain installers without admin credentials. A program I use for work on a daily basis receives updates very often, and as soon as an update is published I'm locked out of using the now outdated version. Because the company that made this program is garbage and stuck in the last century, I have to go to their website and download the installer to patch the program.
This wouldn't be a problem if I could run the installer myself, but I can't- I have to call the contracted IT team and wait for a technician to remote into my laptop so *they* can run it for me with the credentials that are now being arbitrarily withheld from me when they weren't before. On a good day, this is just an annoying inconvenience. On a bad day, this can seriously mess up my workflow and potentially get me in trouble. I'm more than capable of recognizing a dangerous, false installer when I see one. I was more than capable of safely updating the program for myself and my coworkers before the company I work for contracted an IT team. I recognize the value in protecting the integrity of commercial networks from user error, but this policy is overbearing. Nobody I work with likes having to call IT for simple things like that.
Unfortunately, it seems likely that this sense of distrust is going to persist and get worse before it gets better. That's down to my generation and those younger than us being less well versed in the use of PCs than millennials on average. I'm not sure why computer literacy has backslid like this when the more logical outcome would be a progression, but it could be down to the cultural perception of PCs and a negative shift in how much society values them. Of course people still enjoy using PCs and they aren't obsolete by any means, but it seems like they're no longer seen as the revolutionary machines that they are. Their presence in our society been normalized, and smartphones kind of stole the limelight when they began to massively proliferate in the early twenty-tens- for fair reason of course, they're revolutionary devices in their own respect.
I was lucky enough to have grown up in a household which made computer use a possibility when they still possessed a good amount of cultural weight, and I also benefitted from being able to attend some form of computer literacy class in public school just about every year up until I was in high school. Computer literacy classes seem to have started to slowly vanish from public school curriculums around that time, and I don't think that's good in the long term. Software companies like Microsoft benefit from consumers failing to understand what makes a program good or bad, and if people are struggling to use a file manager can they really hope to judge more complex software effectively? If you draw nothing else from this post, I'd like to ask you to do a couple of things. First, keep Prince's words in mind. Use your computer, don't let it use you. Second, live up to those words. When you encounter a problem on the computer, try to learn from it.
