In most of these cases technology seems to have replaced something that was fairly precarious and imperfect before.
Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all. Unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers replaced... unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers. Amazon's tyranny of choice replaced being price gouged because the thing you wanted was only stocked by one retailer in town.
This folksy techno-luddism is quick to point out the foibles of what we have now, but almost never points out how shit things used to be.
At least it doesn't end in the same place as most of these pieces, with a vacuuous assertion that we all need to start living 'in the moment.'
Is it that you think progress is a 1D line, where you're either "pushing forward" or a "folksy techno-luddite"? Because it's actually a tree, and any given moment we have a lot of options of how to go forward, where to and why. We can even go back and take other branches sometimes. It's kind of ironic to not see that and pretend you're some kind of expert on progress.
> Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination.
Seems like you don't remember email on your PC.
Or simply sms without autocorrect. OP has a point, but this indeed is a bad example. As far as I can see autocorrect for messaging being wrong didn't replace anything, it's something new which just doesn't always work properly. Which is exactly the point of the article.
I think there's a little more to it than that; I feel like the rise of autocorrect is pretty strongly correlated with the rise of glass keyboards, an intrinsically imprecise input method. I remember being pretty damn precise (and fast), typing blind, while pounding out sms on my Motorola Razr.
I could type faster using T9 on a 10-key flip phone than I can on an iPhone today. On Android I used SwiftKey for many years and would bet I'm fastest on that, but I decided to try an iPhone 6S and it seems like a huge step back regarding input. I still can't believe they don't have a swype-like input method.
iOS supports third-party keyboards since, like, 8th edition. Exactly what made iPhone acceptable to me.
Not that I'm too happy with it: for some reason my SwiftKey's gesture-recognizing algorithm seems to be getting worse over time, while next-word prediction becomes better.
Fine, point taken, I amend my example to: seems like the OP doesn't remember actual honest-to-God Red Book CDs, which it was both practical and (in the US) legal to rip (format-shift) for personal use.
Or, you know, physical books, which were a quite successful system for distributing text for literally hundreds of years. And which came not only with the right to make personal copies, but with right of first sale (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) so you could turn around and sell them to someone else when you grew tired of them.
"Unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers replaced..."
But this is very much an example of the author's point.
Without researching it yet, I bet you can find simpler, better designed bathtub and shower controls from the 1930s with better usability than what we find today.
We have an old oven in our basement, and our current upstairs oven broke recently. It was very pleasant to have a single, analog nob I just had to turn to "400" to start the oven heating to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The new oven has a numeric keypad, and requires finding the "bake" button in the matrix of identically shaped buttons.
If you imagine the modern version being invented first, the nob version could be marketed with a Johnny Ive style video talking about the relentless focus of simplicity and usability of this innovative new design!
Microwave ovens used to have a single analog knob that was a timer. They were a joy to use, but you can't buy them any more. Now all microwaves have dozens of buttons, only one of which I ever use: Popcorn. If I need less time than actual popcorn, I just have to watch the damn thing and open the door early. It's ridiculous.
My childhood shower was a simple two-axis device. In/out for pressure, left/right for temperature. It had enough travel distance to not scald or freeze, and was generally excellent despite being ~30 years old.
For some reason, the style fell out of favor. Not even to high-tech showers, just to single axis systems which blast water at high heat and trickle it for cold.
This sort of thing really is a usability failure, providing a slightly cheaper and simpler product for the median consumer while harming anyone with vaguely non-standard intentions.
There is book called "The Design of Everyday Things" that discusses such things. https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/...
I don't even know if it is a cheap product thing as many of the cheap products are very usable. For example, light switches are very cheap. People place them in strange places or in strange orders and it makes them hard to use.
Autocorrect replaced "having an actual keyboard on your phone where you could just type in exactly the letters you actually meant", which was the really nice way things worked before the iPhone came along and destroyed the market for BlackBerry-style devices. Alas.
Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all. Unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers replaced... unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers. Amazon's tyranny of choice replaced being price gouged because the thing you wanted was only stocked by one retailer in town.
This folksy techno-luddism is quick to point out the foibles of what we have now, but almost never points out how shit things used to be.
At least it doesn't end in the same place as most of these pieces, with a vacuuous assertion that we all need to start living 'in the moment.'