Rose-tinted glare

I hopped on the bus for work this morning running on 2 and a half hours of sleep and most of a (hastily, badly made) cup of coffee. It was in this state that I found myself gazing blankly at the electronic ticker which told me the current time (10 minutes late already) and the upcoming stop. I know where I get off by the street view, and I was well aware of when I was supposed to clock in, so I didn't need any information it displayed, but everything around it was swimming in my view, so my eyes fixed themselves to its red glare like a tether to keep me conscious. "This is the only thing that's real right now. This is the only thing I can rely on," I remember auto-thinking. Like a sleeper agent, this thought activated the rest of my brain, or at least the sentimentality cortex.

"What the fuck am I talking about? That's the least real thing here—a light projected by a computer. The guy right next to me who let me sit in the adjacent seat, he's real. That thing is a façade, an enemy, a piece of the Internet of Things." (I might have invented some of those descriptions just now. I'm not certain.)

"Useful, though. Is it true you hate the Internet, anyway? After all, you're very happy about this blog that you're starting, and you're already drafting this entry in your head."

"Yes and no. It's an appreciated tool in a lot of ways, and it allows someone like me to have a creative outlet with very little effort or skill. But in the background of that, at all times, is a low spark of resentment for what it's done to us as a society. The hand holding the stick doesn't disappear when the other hand offers a carrot, it just hides behind the back."

How do we navigate that contradiction? I think my strategy at this moment in time is to embrace a self-imposed nostalgia for the older eras of the Internet, the ones that weren't quite as bad (or even showed real promise, if you go back far enough).

I have an extension that simulates an earlier version of the Youtube UI, complete with an obsolete logo. I fill my webpage with non-responsive design elements in protest. I despise the standardization of social media design both across different platforms and across different kinds of devices, in spite of the obvious logistical advantages of this. Are these genuine aesthetic preferences, or is this a (not dishonest but) put-upon expression of countercultural values? It's true that to some degree my opposition is towards the methodology of this modern school of design rather than directly towards its form. But can those two things really be divorced? There's a reason that UX/UI are adjacent concepts. ~∓~

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