#lhs witters

For home machines, it's now one of the first things I uninstall; I do not trust it, and that's putting it lightly. It's kind of amazing how bad Windows and Windows applications have got. And this is just how things are on my home machines, where I still have some control and can tame the worst excesses of Microsoft et al.

Probably, I suspect, for most "generic" users out there, the desktop experience is probably closer to the daily hell that is interacting with my work laptop. (This one is completely locked down and I have no administrator privileges at all.)

The other day, on my work box, I needed to open a locally-saved document in Word, and just trying to even find the directory-browser took some serious digging. And this was a thing that worked reliably in the literal 1990s, for goodness sake!

I've seen some discussion here and there about how today's youth are apparently surprisingly not-computer-literate (things like university CS depts having to put stuff like file formats back on the curriculum as it's no longer just "assumed knowledge", etc). A point I don't think I've seen made is just how bad the user experience has got even for desktop computing, and how this might be feeding into the lack of IT literacy. If it's basically impossible to interact with a system beyond a very-curated and very-nipped-and-tucked surface-level (bad) experience, how can you learn?

Even as recently as six months ago, I could still relatively-easily get to the file menus on my work box. As of yesterday? Nope, it took work, and I was only able to find it because I knew it was there, somewhere.

For most "generic" users, this is probably what the "normal" computing experience is like. Given that, is it any wonder there's a basic computer literacy crisis? They've become near-impossible to interact with in any useful way, and they're getting visibly-worse. How can you be computer-literate when the computer hides everything from you and does its best to stop you interacting with it in the way you want to? You can't learn from a book if the librarian's hidden it in a locked cellar on another continent.

Even in just half a year, I feel like my user-experience with Windows has got noticeably-worse. (And the experience was already bad circa June 2024, and worse than it felt in, say, June 2019. And I wouldn't have called the experience "good" back in 2019.)

It's hard to remember now, but in the 2000s, people actually non-ironically liked Google. Even as late as 2014, you could still see pro-Google takes even in Leftist and semi-Left spaces. In 2014-19, for all its flaws you could still say Google services were useful, so they had that very-practical point in their favour.

Then the 2020s began and search became increasingly-useless.

(These days, I bookmark anything I need on the web, because goodness knows if I'll be able to find it twice).

YouTube's slide appears to be well under way. It's not new, certainly they've had problems for a while - crap moderation, reams of problematic content, an algorithm that pushes far-Right influencers apparently over all other videos, and then there is the sheer propensity of YT content-creators for scandal. (Just to think of a few recent examples of the latter, let's see ... there's the 8Passengers case, there's the ongoing illuminaughtii situation, and now there's the Sssniperwolf [just how many "S"'s does she need?] debacle. And they're not the only examples I can think of, just off the top of my head. If you dug, you could certainly find many, many more. Youtuber implosions aren't rare.)

Now the platform iself is going to war with its users.

That ... rarely ends well for platforms. (*cough* LiveJournal *cough*)

As to what's going on in the background, obviously I don't know for a fact, but we can take some guesses. They may involve the words "money", "managers" and possibly "venture capital". The venture capital model that supported many internet endeavours in the 2010s seems to have gone pop, likely as a side-effect of the pandemic-rebound inflation surge. Previously, with interest rates sat up against the zero lower bound for an entire decade, VC types could borrow huge amounts of money at little-to-no cost, and they would only need a handful of investments to pay off to recoup their costs elsewhere. Now, that's no longer true. Suddenly, the VC types can quickly find themselves dangerously overextended on debt, hence some of the desperation to claw back any pennies they can.

Though, it should be noted, this point perhaps doesn't fit YouTube so well. Google/Doubleclick have no shortage of money, and were apparently quite happy to run YT as a loss-leader throughout the late 2000s and all of the 2010s. Why did they suddenly panic this year?

I have a suspicion that the answer may lie in the word "management".

As for managers, both platform and business, one thing I've noticed is that managerial culture seems to have fallen off a cliff during and "after" (insofar as there is an "after") the pandemic. Lockdown seems to have messed them up; it does appear that a lot of them fear and resent the loss of minute-to-minute control over their staf that they had when everything was default-in-the-office-full-time. (One thing I've wondered about is what is the true ratio between people who go into management for the money and people who do it because actually, they don't care about the cash and are just a control freak acting out?) The authoritarian, hierarchical nature of the modern corporate internal structure means these people are incentivised to kick down at every opportunity.

Certainly, purely from personal experience, my own workplace has got a lot worse during and after the pandemic, and most of that seems to be coming down from the top.

Viewed in the light of this model, YouTube's platform dictats make slightly more sense - basically, managers seeing users doing something they don't like, and said managers then having a tantrum. Probably they're using the VC business model issue as their justification for their behaviour, and who knows, maybe some of them even believe it.

I got an email the other day, confirming that my old LiveJournal is now both deleted and purged from their system - well, at least insofar as they say. Given the migration of the servers to Russia a few years ago, who knows if they’re telling the truth? And at the risk of sounding paranoiac, I wouldn’t be totally surprised if all of English-speaking LJ was quietly archived somewhere on some FSB server or something.

(I’ve heard some rumours, to the effect that the Russian government’s troll farms, you know at places like the infamous Internet Research Agency and probably others we haven’t heard of, may have been trained using data gleaned from LJ and other places. Hard to know if any of this is true, obviously, but it does get you to wondering, doesn’t it? And a lot of their interventions in the past were suspiciously well-targeted at various wedge issues and social ruptures - almost like how you might decide to do things after spectating on various repeated drama-events on particularly-volatile online communities, you know what I mean?)

Anyway I belatedly hit the delete button on my LJ late in February last year, after You-Know-What started happening. Honestly I probably should have deleted it long ago, but there was the usual problem of the two or three people who just wouldn’t move to Dreamwidth or Twitter, and one or two old communities that I didn’t really want to leave. There’s also the issue that I didn’t really want to - honestly, too much of our post-2008 cringe-dystopia budget-hellscape lives have consisted of “I don’t want to do this thing, but I’m being forced into it by things that should be nothing to do with me and are completely beyond my ability to control”.

It turns out deleting an LJ is a slow process; they wait for a year before finally purging it. But anyway, it’s now gone, or as “gone” as I’m personally able to make it.

It feels weird. It was a big part of my life from 2003 onwards. Lots of things happened there, both good, bad and somewhere in the middle. And now there’s not even a ghost of it left, except what I have archived on Dreamwidth and what I carry around inside my own meatware.

(Also hi. Not dead, just seem to have zero posting energy at the moment. Not sure why.)

Anyway I’m no fan of the monarchy as an institution - if there somehow ever was a referendum, I’d vote for a republic without a second thought. A) republics are objectively a better system and b) it would be funny as hell to do a Brexit back to Tories. Also I’m not a fan of having to do things like my emergency run to the shops earlier today, just in case the Tories go with some of the nuttier “Operation London Bridge” plans and decide to shut the entire country down for a week or two - not to protect public health or anything like that, but instead to enforce Grief Fest 2022.