Flutterby™! : The Slow Death of the Power User

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The Slow Death of the Power User

2026-03-13 16:57:41.811219+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

On a Slack channel I'm on, someone today described a horrorshow of a nightmare of Juju, Charms, Kubernetes, and ... to host some static sites, and it was another harsh reminder of how we've added layers of wankery and egoboo and abstraction over bullshit that doesn't need to be abstracted. So I'm super primed to stand up and cheer for this:

The Slow Death of the Power User

This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.

And this isn't about computing and development so much as it is the use of the system, and I think we can go back further than phones and tablets for computing, right to Steve Jobs' desire that the Mac be a "toaster" level of computing, but, yes, all of this.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Language Apple Computer Humor Weblogs Consumerism and advertising Macintosh ]

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