“Beta,” A Sinister Vision For Soul-Robbing Interfaces
Steve Jobs meets THX 1138.
Great user-interface design doesn't kill complexity, it clarifies it. But even so, there's a fine line between empowering users and infantilizing them. Last week, Bloom's president railed against "the urge to make everything into one giant likable button" -- an image of reptile-brain stimulus/response at its worst. Now an artist named Lukas Franciszkiewicz has created a "fictional prototype" called Beta which envisions a bizarro version of the world Bloom wants to create: sterile and sinister, where "simple" user interfaces lull us to accept happiness in slavery. (Paging Cory Doctorow!)
If UI's have become robotic anyway, why complicate matters?
In case you didn't make it through the whole film, here's the gist: Beta posits a laptop/tablet-like computer whose interface is nothing but a screen and three childlike blocks -- think iPad crossed with one of those "fit the shape in the hole" toys for babies. One block is marked "input," one "output," and one "process." Stick them in the slots and doinngggg, your favorite Internet sheep-tools get activated: Googling yourself, checking Facebook, tapping out status updates. Beta's point: If these activities have become robotic, rote, and mostly thoughtless anyway, why complicate matters? Just reduce "the interface" to something one step up from a Skinner box, and let the machines do the thinking for us.
Beta plays like a Steve Jobs keynote crossed with THX 1138 -- and gives skin-crawling oomph to some of the ideas that Douglas Rushkoff hints at in his book Program or Be Programmed. You don't need to make complex choices, it hums seductively. You don't want to make complex choices. We have it covered. But the climax of the film -- in which the human user tries to manipulate the babyish interface in a creative way and is met with sinister, HAL-like silence -- gives Beta's true game away. In other words: Resistance is futile.
Obviously there's a long way between the iPad and something like Beta. Or is there? It's not crazy to suggest that the exploding complexity of digital data, networked systems, and always-on "connectedness" is remaking our world into something that our homo sapiens wetware was not necessarily designed to grok. Like the classic viral video says: The Machine is Us/ing Us. Use or be used -- that's the choice our rapidly evolving technology presents us. Interface design is all about ensuring we stay on the former side of that line, not the latter. But Beta is a chilling vision of how interface design can coax us onto the wrong side of the line, too -- without our even knowing it.
