Super Apps Are Terrible for People—and Great for Companies
wired.com
Super Apps Are Terrible for People—and Great for Companies
“Apps monitor you. They report on you. They shame you.” At the extreme, apps make somethings a little like a police state.
Grant McCracken • The Gravity Well Effect
Each app builds a moat and walls to protect the hoard of data its peasants produce. This is both for reasons of protection, and power. How did this condition emerge?Before the advent of the internet, apps ran on your computer and saved data to your computer. The internet flipped this around. Web software ran remotely on server computers, and saved ... See more
Subconscious • Weird web3 energy
Tanuj added
In my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last vestiges of creativity and agency from our products. I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know how to fight it. I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User .
Simply put, companies building apps hav... See more
Simply put, companies building apps hav... See more
Ivan Vendrov • The Tyranny of the Marginal User
sari added
Of course, things have not quite worked out this way. As the late nineteenth-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim perceived, the flipside of free-floating autonomy is anomie — a society without any authoritative norms. Pried from closed communities, many people suffer from pathologies of isolation and purposelessness. Family breakdown, drug ad
... See morenoemamag.com • Surveillance Capitalism vs. The Surveillance State - NOEMA
Andreas Vlach added
Yet the cultural dominance of the iPhone — and the transformation of the open internet into “walled gardens” and apps focused on simplifying the user experience — has taken the “triumph of seamless usability” to a new level. This “tyranny of convenience,” to borrow Tim Wu’s phrase , should sensitize us to what may be lost when democratization proc
... See moreROGERS BRUBAKER • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents
there is a common trend at play. And the trend is this: control over users' data and digital possessions and activity is rapidly moving from an asset to a liability. Before, every bit of control you have was good: it gives you more flexibility to earn revenue, if not now then in the future. Now, every bit of control you have is a liability: you mig... See more
Vitalik Buterin • Control as Liability
sari added
Up to a point, swapping autonomy for ease is a pretty good trade: who wants to run the math on their accounting books or call the restaurant to place a delivery order? But if taken too far, convenience becomes a Trojan Horse. We cede too much control and become dependent on something we can no longer steer. Platforms that promised to bring convenie... See more
Frank Chimero • Frank Chimero · The Web’s Grain
Sixian and added
If you assume that the pace of change in consumer-facing Internet stays high, and that it gets more compelling over time, then in the long run the only options are a) be careful what you use, or b) accept that you're outsourcing a growing share of your decisions to product managers and growth hackers who do not necessarily have your interests at he... See more
Byrne Hobart • The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization
sari added