Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when it ... See more

the tools and infrastructure we use to deploy software treat users as passive recipients rather than active co-creators. Software is organized into monolithic applications rather than flexible remixable toolkits.