Program Or Be Programmed - Ten Commands For A Digital Age Douglas Rushkoff

Links

• bootleg
• notes from XPUB3

   R. Galloway, A., 2010. Program Or Be Programmed - Ten Commands For A Digital Age Douglas Rushkoff. 1st ed. Minneapolis, USA: OR Books.

Notes

"Instead of learning about our technology, we opt for a world in which our technology learns about us"

"With each upgrade in technology, our experience of the world is further reduced in complexity. The more advanced and predictive the smart-phone interface, the less a person needs to know to use it—or how it even makes its decisions. Instead of learning about our technology, we opt for a world in which our technology learns about us."

Programmed by the interfaces

"Who ends up exploited most, of course, is the person who has been convinced to behave this way. And that’s where some awareness of how particular interfaces, tools, and programs influence our behavior is so valuable."

Both physical exhibition spaces and interface are spaces in which our actions and behaviour are sort of predefined, either by curators or by programmers.

"Digital technology doesn’t merely convey our bodies, but ourselves. Our screens are the windows through which we are experiencing, organizing, and interpreting the world in which we live. They are also the interfaces through which we express who we are and what we believe to everyone else. They are fast becoming the boundaries of our perceptual and conceptual apparatus; the edge between our nervous systems and everyone else’s, our understanding of the world and the world itself."

From a transparent to opaque medium

"So the people investing in soft ware and hardware development sought to discourage this hacker’s bias by making interfaces more complex. The idea was to turn the highly transparent medium of computing into a more opaque one, like television. Interfaces got thicker and more supposedly “user friendly” while the real workings of the machine got buried further in the background. The easy command-line interface (where you just type a word telling the machine what you want it to do) was replaced with clicking and dragging and pointing and watching. It’s no coincidence that installing a program in Windows required us to summon “The Wizard”—not the helper, the puppy, or even that "Paper Clip Man." No, we needed the Wizard to re-mystify the simple task of dragging an application into the applications folder, and maybe a database fi le somewhere else."