We've spent forty years boiling our critical thinking skills to mush. Some people blame the content providers: TV/ tabloid TV/ reality TV; violent video games; all the voyeuristic, solipsistic crapola on the Internet. Me, I blame the humble interface - that is, the buttons you push (or, lately, the hand gestures you make) to control access to the "content". These interfaces have proliferated faster than Star Trek tribbles; and they are driving everyone nuts. They are driving people nuts because there is no consistency across devices, across websites, across anything. The interface design is random, and it makes people's use of those interfaces "palsied", the same way cerebral palsy makes its victims' fine motor control skills palsied. Hence the name for the condition: Random Interface Palsy (RIP).
America's RIP moments began with setting the clock on the VCR.
The "blinking twelve problem" is a term used in Software Design. It usually refers to features in software which are unusable due to the complexity of the user interface to use them.
The usage emanates from the 'clock' feature provided on many VCR's manufactured in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The clock could be set by using a combination of buttons provided on the VCR in a specific sequence which was found complicated by most users. As a result, VCR users were seldom known to set the time on the VCR clock. This resulted in the default time '12:00' blinking on the VCR display at all times - which is the origin of this term.
- Wikipedia, The Blinking Twelve Problem
Since that beginning, RIP expanded into the frustration of trying to get two or three remotes to cooperate so that you can watch a TV program and have the sound play over your stereo. Then they took away real switches, so you were never sure if you turned off the device.
That stuff was all passive confusion. We now have active confusion: roll-over adds, phishes, rogue QR codes, rootkits, ransomware. A Nigerian scam artist looks like a third-grader compared to what is lurking but a button-click away. Its beyond aggravating; it is dangerous.
You can have your identity stolen or your computer turned into a brick or into a zombie for a DDOS attack. You can have your reputation ruined, or your bank account drained. In parallel with all of these disasters, every keystroke you make is logged by several entities, public and private, to be monetized or weaponized at a later date.
So, in addition to the paralysis of never knowing how the interface is going to react, we add the paralysis that comes from knowing one keystroke can ruin your day, or maybe your life. That requires cautious people to spend more of their precious intellectual resources searching for clues as to whether a site or an email address is dangerous. Welcome to the Wild West.
At the same time, it has never been truer that "ignorance is bliss". Legions of clueless people embrace this RIP chaos. They waste inordinate amounts of time trying to navigate and fill in forms on completely inconsistent webpages. They lay out the details of their lives for everyone in the world to pick over - including house thieves, con artists, stalkers, and just plain nutcases. They blast useless trivia and links to their "friends". They use total strangers they call "friends" as a "social network". P.T. Barnum would have been an Internet billionaire in five minutes.
IMHO, RIP is a feature, not a bug. It is a feature for corporations. (Remember, if you don't see what they're selling, you are the product.) The whole internet has evolved to such chaos that people give their control away to "walled gardens" like Apple or Amazon. They sell their birthright for a bowl of "consistent interface"/known-safe links porridge. Because, dog help us that there ever be any rules at all on the great, libertarian internet. (How's that working out for you, Bitcoin suckers? What's that you say, "it's not a Ponzi scheme"? Right. Mr. Barnum wants to talk to you.)
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