The Slow Death of the Power User

A wide-ranging rant on what’s been lost as computing shifted from instruments to appliances. I’m with it on the open web’s collapse into consumption platforms: algorithmic curation, the end of view-source culture, the atrophy of any adversarial capacity to push back on lock-in. I’m less exercised about things like iOS hiding the filesystem. A pleasurable appliance I don’t have to think about beats a computer I have to fight, and I say that as someone who has spent plenty of evenings fighting one.