It's not anti-technology - it's anti-bad design

That is to say, it's pro-good design. I love my iPod. I love the Ambient Orb device. I love the little forms in TurboTax that automatically fill in the slashes when I type in a date. I especially love that, if I type a slash in those fields, it just takes it and lets me continue - no error messages, just anticipation and understanding of "what I meant, not what I said".

So, the point is, if technology is here to help us, let's spend our money on that which is helpful, not on that which sucks. If you find yourself having to log in to every newspaper site you find, use bugmenot.

I suffered from MLS this weekend. I was trying to hook up my VCR. You heard me. I wanted to record part of the Rose Bowl from my Time Warner TiVO to a tape, so I could then give the tape to my parents, who want to burn a DVD of it. I must have spend 300 hours of my life back in the 80s trying to figure out exactly how to do this kind of stuff. Now that information is all gone, and I have to relearn it. It was bad enough the first time.

Don't even get me started on PowerPoint.
MM

Finally, someone said it

It's a short, but there's a good article about the kinds of things we all put up with every day. More than anything it goes along with the whole premise of MLS: that the problems I hate most in this modern world are not the fault of technology, but the fault of lazy and misguided design.

Here it is

MM

MLS

No, it's not the MLS you use to proofread your research papers. It's the thing that affects us from the moment our Blackberries wake us up in the morning until we set our RSS-enabled alarm clock to wake us when the Morning Zoo podcast has finished downloading. Within every interaction we have with the digital world around us, we have to put up with a lot of crap. An awful lot of crap.

People used to collect their refuse in chamber pots, then throw it out the front windows of their house, shouting "Guardy Loo!!" as the brown water spashed the street and the peasants pasted themselves to the brick walls. The gentry didn't walk the streets.

This was normal life. People expected it like they expected rain and death. It's nice that it's over, isn't it?

Not so fast. There's a digital shitstorm that splashes us every day, and we don't even look for a wall to brace us against it. We stand out in it, let it rain all over us, and then we ask for more.

What am I talking about?

All software sucks. Why is this a big deal? Because half of what the average person does all day is, in some way, interact with software. Phones, CD players, video games, and, of course, our beloved computers. Think about the last time you used a piece of software and it did exactly what you wanted it to do quickly, quietly, and without adding your name to a SPAM list. When was that? About 1994? Earlier? If you don't remember, it's a shame. If you haven't ever had that experience, I'm going to try to help you imagine it, and together we can see what we can do to fix it. If you think the interfaces you use every day are great, I want to ask you to delve deeper into what you think should really happen when you use it. Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about:

• My cable box takes at least 1 second to change a channel, but that's only on a good day. Usually I have to wait 2-3 seconds. God help me if I press buttons quickly, because it remembers every stinkin' one of them and replays them out at a tortoise's pace
• There are actually advertisement for digital cameras now where the key feature is the camera's ability to click the shutter "right when you press the button!". Funny, when I was a kid cameras just did this and we didn't give it a thought. Now they wait 4 seconds to snap, and we're supposed to pay more to shorten that to 1/2 seconds
• If you copy a line of text from a web site, then try to paste it into MS Word, it takes a second or two before is pastes, and then it puts on a SHOW, patting itself on the back for having preserved the exact typeface, size, and color of the text you copied. Here's the thing: I ALREADY CHOSE ALL THAT STUFF!! I actually have to open Notepad, paste it in there so it gets encoded as "plain text", then paste it into Word, where it then adopts the setting I had already chosen.

Nitpicky? Sure. These things only cost me seconds, right? Of course. I live my life in seconds, folks, and you do too. I don't want to put up with these little things anymore. I want to reduce the aggravation in my life by simplifying it. I want the little annoyances to go away, so that the technology can once again serve me, rather than the reverse. If you give me crap products, I'm just not going to use them anymore. I'm going to save every blessed second I can so I don't go through life with gritted teeth, cursing the digital world I helped to create.

MLS isn't just about bad interfaces and saving seconds. It's about everything we have to put up with. Credit card solicitation, bad TV shows, bad food, the fact that nobody reads anymore, horrible education, and all the rest of it.

STOP

Go sit somewhere for an hour and read a book. Don't use the Internet for a whole day (yes, I'm aware of the irony of using this medium to convey this). Get rid of anything in your house you haven't used in a year. Live below your means. Don't let people toss their chamber pots on you anymore. My God, I'm stressed, and there's no good reason for it. I'm going to stop. Who's with me?