While automatic bathroom fixtures are a bit touchy, I think the author hasn't really considered how much they improve the worst case.<p>I used to <i>regularly</i> walk into public bathrooms in which someone had used the toilet and simply not flushed it. That doesn't happen much any more. I'm willing to deal with a lot of phantom flushes to <i>not</i> deal with someone else's literal shit.<p>I used to <i>regularly</i> find public bathrooms where someone (I'm assuming a vandal, although it could just be a distracted or careless person) has left the water running. A fully open faucet can erase the gains of more judicious human usage pretty quickly.<p>The author waxes nostalgic about those cloth towel roll dispensers. His experience does not match mine. I generally see those things in old gas stations where the cleanliness of the towel is <i>deeply</i> suspect.
In most of these cases technology seems to have replaced something that was fairly precarious and imperfect before.<p>Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all. Unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers replaced... unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers. Amazon's tyranny of choice replaced being price gouged because the thing you wanted was only stocked by one retailer in town.<p>This folksy techno-luddism is quick to point out the foibles of what we have now, but almost never points out how shit things used to be.<p>At least it doesn't end in the same place as most of these pieces, with a vacuuous assertion that we all need to start living 'in the moment.'
This is one reason I have almost no interest in IoT / home automation. It just replaces extremely mild annoyances (turning on the lights) with something complicated and fragile.
This reminds me of the "everything is awesome and nobody is happy" essay.<p>We are most of the way to the wonderful goal of being able to use the bathroom without touching anything anyone else has touched, and all this person can do is complain that it isn't quite perfect.<p>Do you remember the 80s solution for public faucets? They used springs to turn off the water after five seconds. You had to press a button really hard, then wash really fast. The electric things aren't perfect, but they are a big improvement.<p>The complaints about auto correct are especially funny. I had a palm 5 and a wonderful folding keyboard and a cdpd modem. But only one serial port on the palm, so it was connectivity or keyboard, not both. Graffiti was terrible compared to any modern input system. The smartphone in my pocket is amazing. Swype is what it took to make me abandon thumb boards, and Swype is amazing.
I'm a software engineer, and I work with technology all day long, and am mostly thankful for it - it pays the bills, after all. But I dearly love going back home to Hicksville a couple weekends a month. Most of the stuff my parents have and use on a daily basis is older than I am, and it just works, because it is all mechanical and built to a much higher standard than you can get without spending an exorbitant amount of money now, if indeed you can get that kind of quality at all. It's not like it was high-end stuff at the time they bought it, either - I'm talking about a 1930s John Deere farm tractor, a couple 1980s Ford pickups, kitchen appliances from the 1970s, hand tools that could collect Social Security. Stuff that just works, and if it breaks, any idiot with some basic tools can fix.<p>Even mundane objects that nobody (I hope) is ever going to try to put a WiFi card in are not-so-subtly more terrible than they used to be. My favorite example is the five-gallon gasoline can[1].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.gad.net/Blog/2012/11/22/one-mans-quest-for-gas-cans-that-dont-suck/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gad.net/Blog/2012/11/22/one-mans-quest-for-gas-ca...</a>
> devices like automatic-flush toilets acclimate their users to apparatuses that don’t serve users well in order that they might serve other actors, among them corporations and the sphere of technology itself<p>This nails it. It's not that things couldn't be implemented in a way that serves the users, it's that they're optimized to serve the interests of other parties first.
> The iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard works, in part, by trying to predict what the user is going to type next. It does this invisibly, by increasing and decreasing the tappable area of certain keys based on the previous keys pressed.<p>I've had an iPhone since iOS 2 and I never realized the key's touch area could change size. If you ask me the iPhone keyboard works perfectly.
I tend to think that this is a product of the "newness" of technologies. Old technologies - such as paper, pens, flush toilets, etc. - lasted in part because they were robust and not-precarious. We don't remember the technologies that fell by the wayside along the way - they simply didn't last.
I find it extremely funny that loading the website shows me a message asking me to turn off my ad blocker. Seems that some things don't work anymore because we break them intentionally...<p>BTW I'd be fine looking at some ads, turning off my blocker is not an option though as the third party ads always track your behavior and often store personally identifiable data without user consent.
It reminds me of the bathrooms at the conference center at the Union Square Hilton where a sensor will ejaculate some white creamy foam soap on your cuffs if you aren't careful.
You can see this in websites too.
Each year they get bigger and slower while offering nothing (of value) new to the user.<p><a href="http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/" rel="nofollow">http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/</a>
I think it's interesting how PC technology has changed in the past 30 years. I remember when PC's first were everywhere in the late 80's. They generally worked, but when they went down (like a virus), they were down for a long time and sometimes never came back.<p>This is all subjective, but I feel like the end of the 90's and early 2000's was the low point for PC's and computers in general.<p>Viruses were everywhere it seemed. Things would break all the time. Shit was never compatible. You had to have detailed knowledge of how software worked in order to fix it.<p>I remember the day I was trying to fix my PC when I finally looked some of the more under the hood files and programs, and was blow away at the complexity. It was very humbling.<p>Then, somewhere in the late 2000's, something changed and I feel like computers have been working better.<p>I don't have to fix my computer nearly as much. It just sort of works.<p>Sure, there are issues, but the frequency and intensity are much less (knock on wood).
Ok this seems like a good time to get something that's been bothering me off my chest. Can we please start using pressure sensors on toilet seats instead? It kind of feels like it always should have been that way.
> Digital distribution has also made media access more precarious. Try explaining to a toddler that the episodes of “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” that were freely available to watch yesterday via subscription are suddenly available only via on-demand purchase.<p>It was a pain trying to explain to a toddler why they couldn't watch Sesames Street right now because it wasn't currently airing.<p>Generally, explaining anything to a toddler is a pain.
I think autocorrect provably does not provide any value. When you make a typo, then the autocorrect mechanism is making an inference on your input that the receiver of that message would be able to make better, since they have way more context, and humans are still much better at this kind of problem than computers.
I think we're in the dark ages of user interface currently. It feels like we've mastered skeuomorphism and moving away is fine, but we're in the infancy of whatever's next.