Humanity: Handcuffed to the Desktop

The personal computer was designed like an office. A desktop, files in folders, a trash can in the corner. This metaphor was born in the predominantly white male spaces of California, and has constrained humanity's relationship with computers and digital space.

In the desktop era, work lived in local applications installed on the machine. Then it shifted to the browser, which came from the next generation of the same office-dwelling, efficiency-optimizing minds, and it was built to move fast and switch between contexts rapidly. The rest of the world came online, and the internet scaled exponentially in both users and use cases. However, the core mental constructs and metaphors guiding the interaction remained relatively static.

A metaphor makes it easier to assimilate our minds into a given space of information. There are countless, yet the desktop is still the only one. Designed for the average user, yet the average user does not and I argue should not exist. The rationale was logical: software could only be built by the few who could write it, so a handful of teams built for hundreds of millions, optimized for the median, and shipped one interface to all of them.

However, I know that with the continued trajectory of AI software creation experiences, the barriers to shaping the digital spaces which our minds reside in will be eliminated. I wish that the result will be the emergence of new interfaces and metaphors from the bottom up.

The average user was always a useful fiction, the only figure you could design for when you could afford to design just once. My grandmother and I were never the same user. We were the same only because the machine could not yet afford to tell us apart.

None of this is an argument against the office. The desktop is a good place to work, and it should stay. Many incredible teams are making truly incredible improvements to it regularly. I just believe that it was only ever meant to be one place among many. There are no more excuses to be made. Today, the handcuffs are self-imposed. And we can choose to take them off.