Dehumanizing the User Experience

By Paul Bille, March 15, 2021

Talking about the aesthetics of big-tech is tricky. The ubiquity of flat, geometric sans-serifs, cutesy illustrations and their compulsively positive kindergarten appeal seems to be too easy of a target. How do you criticize something that is already so blatantly parodying itself? It seems like, everything that has been automated, A/B tested, and put into [...]

Mystery Person

By Paul Bille, March 1, 2021

Below are some questions that came to my mind when I discovered that the default user avatar of this WordPress site is a “Mystery Person”. Who is Mystery Person? Is Mystery Person unknown? Is Mystery Person the one who stays unacknowledged? Is Mystery Person just an anthropomorphized hash value? Is Mystery Person actually anonymous? Is [...]

Welcome to the Club: Do Your Research

By Paul Bille, February 18, 2021

I found the image above some time ago while browsing Are.na. Are.na is a social-bookmarking network. LOT2046 is a subscription-based service for black turtlenecks and ‚personal care items’ like floss, tattoo guns, or autonomous homesteading vehicles. Urbit is a peer-to-peer network and operating system originally conceived by a racist. (Francis Tseng wrote an elaborate piece [...]

Flagging The Change

By Paul Bille, February 15, 2021

In my previous posts, I have laid out how my computer socialization and my aspiration to become a graphic designer have successfully trapped me inside Apple’s and Adobe’s ecosystem. I already mentioned that becoming a General Purpose User might present a way out. With this post I would like to dwell a bit more on [...]

36°07’37.2″N 111°14’18.2″W

By Paul Bille, February 1, 2021

An effort must be made to educate the users about themselves. There should be an understanding of what it means to be a user of an “all-purpose automatic digital computing system”. In her essay from 2012, Olia Lialina describes how the disappearance of the computer as a visible device was accompanied by the simultaneous [...]

Experiences From My Personal Computing History

By Paul Bille, January 21, 2021

I grew up in an Apple household. My mother is a graphic designer. My father is a photographer. My sister is both. I still remember sitting in the cabin we had in our garden, taking very important notes on my father’s retired Newton and PowerBook 100 Series neither knowing how to write nor how to [...]