December 1, 2023 ☼ Tech ☼ Culture
The story is that Gen Z isn’t as good with technology as millenials. They don’t need to - UX Is too good, touch interfaces, etc — they don’t know how to fix a laptop, install a driver, etc.
Gen AI - Casey Newton just said on hard fork that the internet is just going to get worse and People aren’t going to care because chat interfaces will be better than google search
my employer in the design ladder page, has this thing where if you hover over an element in a dropdown, the 4 letter contents wraps to another row..it’s janky.
We’re post-flat design, but no one talks about the type of design we have today in any sort of coherent aesthetic, and I keep seeing nostalgia for 90s UI skeuomorphic styles on Reddit. It makes me think that we aren’t in a new technological aesthetic. Rather that the current aesthetic is just falling apart.
Similarly, Gen AI aesthetic is both hyper real and fake, a weird combo that has come in quick sequence, as gen ai went from hard to grok and 9-fingered to much better and often hard to detect super rapidly (and people are trying to deal)
the word “aesthetic” is in trend (well I hear it so it’s probably post-trend now), but like….why? Aesthetic is an adjective, seen as synonymous for like “beautiful.” But it doesn’t mean that, or is more of a tertiary meaning. It means “concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty.” Says google. So does that mean today that if you’re concerned w/ beauty you’re necessarily beautiful?
Inflation has been high. Now people are broke as hell in a systematic way (their 70k salary no longer pays the bills, and their boss isn’t giving raises at a rate higher than inflation.) I wonder if concern at all w aesthetics seems like a luxury. One is ‘aesthetic’ because they have time to care about looking.
Looking good. Design was seen as a differentiator, but now products are all kinda crumbling. Interaction design isn’t really patentable, and now it all kinda feels like brand. We’ve hit the limit of screens — they’re all refesh at a 120 mhz rate faster than what the eye really feels is real, and are super sensitive, and exceptionally bright like halogen headlights, and it’s all just the same Internet. And it’s peaked.
It’s peaked, and we all kinda know it, and it’s all kinda ok that things and services are all more expensive, that to care about how something looks is to care about beauty because there’s no time for anything but that dopamine rush, and
that there are bugs in all of our UIs because we’ve all been using the UIs so long that we all know how they work so the cost of a bug is lower because we see them over and over in the things and services that we use, which are all more expensive, and they don’t look as good because there’s no time for beauty because no one can afford that type of dopamine rush and
the internet as we know it is on a deprecated branch and it’s all growing bit rot and technology as we know it is falling apart