The inmates should run the asylum!

I have great respect for Alan Cooper. He developed what became Visual Basic.

The problem is that the very title of his book, and its core thesis, are offensive and wrong.

For decades, hard working programmers like Dan Read have drawn conclusions from their own experience as real Users about the human interface which make sense, only to be bitch-slapped by managers who won't be using the system but take it upon themselves to tell the programmers that "real" users need some feature, or some absence of some feature.

These recommendations are usually based on anti-intellectualism and impatience with substance treated as a methodology, and data entry clerks and other silenced people pay the price, because the object of the game is NOT to develop an effective system, it is to use the system development process (see Braverman) as one more tool to disempower and control people (nonmanagers) who don't matter.

The inmates should run the asylum. In fact, mental health reform of the 1970s, based in part on Michel Foucault's work on the construction of mental illness, is based on empowering patients to do just this. Ideally and if the very idea of rehabilitation or education makes any sense, prisoners should run prisons and students, schools.

The current warden of the fearsome Angola prison in Louisiana is under the cover of religion creating in fact a large number of trusties who in fact run well-run prisons. He has to encode his effort as a religious effort even as 19th century American prison reformers used religion, but the goal is to make the prison, insofar as is possible, self-sustaining without excessive needs for surveillance.

Likewise, "critical psychiatrists" like David Caute, following Foucault, have reasoned, in clinical practice, that if the goal of mental patient treatment is returning the patient to a productive life in society, with its need for goals and its expectations, one of the best ways to do this is to put the patients in charge of some of the running of the "asylum".

But note that Alan Cooper's arguments about GUIs are based on the return of "common sense", which is to say, the return of world-views, encoded in language, which the 1960s put in play. The book title speaks not to our full capabilities but to the cartoon-conceptual world of the average mid-century American for whom "crazy people" were to be "locked up" in "asylums" by men in white coats with butterfly nets.

In the 1960s, and especially after movies (such as The Snake Pit starring Olivia de Havilland) revealed a truth of suffering to which the cartoon-conceptual desensitizes us (just as cartoons get us to laugh at and accept our own suffering when the mouse throws the brick), some people actually encountered reality without the aid of the cartoon-conceptual and they asked whether or not the inmates might ideally and in fact run the asylum.

What's interesting is the way in which in GUI design, the notion of obedience-to-authority, based on thinking in terms of sound bytes and the cartoon-conceptual, re-enters because it is feared that the programmer, as a post-Sixties phenomenon, will impose some priestly vision on "the rest of us". It appears to make no never mind that programmers as a class never do this at all, but at the same time, computer companies have imposed far more severe constraints (such as the nonsensical design of the original IBM PC's input "ports" and the way in which this design guaranteed unnecessary wars over resources between devices, which it took years of successive waves of "plug and pray" technology to overcome, and which did not appear on the mac), but because computer companies paid public relations firms to ally themselves with a sort of racist white glamor, they were able to get away with this BS for years.

The greatest programmers in my view know instinctively how to make the greatest user interface because in terms of absolute lexical priority, the main issue of a user interface isn't "usability" it is TRUTH.

e=mc^2, f=ma, the Turing machine, and other scientific and mathematical theories don't have a user interface and need none because people are suckers for the truth.

Do keep in mind, o ye programmers of the world, that when a manager, or a self-styled User who is actually having her silent and terrorised underling actually use the system because She (who must be obeyed) is too busy diddling the CEO, tells you your GUI sux, she MAY be just saying this because it's the one part of the system she thinks she understands. She doesn't know anything about art but she knows what she likes.

The problem is that American elites since at least the assassination of JFK have made a habit of bullshitting the rest of us, with a vast industry of advertising and public relations, and computer professionals are foot-soldiers in this Manufacture of Consent.