Those marketing campaigns where they have the magic of technology being easy (daggers at Apple in my eyes) are filthy lies.
They are also dangerous because they teach a lie as if it were truth: Complex things are easy!
Bullshit.
Complex things are complex, and the more complex they are, the easier they are to break. No, computers are not easy to use – any illusion that they are, whether it be an iPod wheel or a flashy GUI or a yellow smiley face are illusions in the true sense: it seems easy, so everybody can use it!
More like everyone can pay some company money for the illusion of an easy-to-use interface for a complex system.
This philosophy is dangerous because it creates a world of ease that masks reality: be it automatic transmission, a computer OS GUI, An investment strategy, pre-prepared food products, what have you. If you simplify a system, you run the danger of having that simplification BE the system for you and you forget (or never knew) that it was a simplification of something more complex.
What we make collectively as a group from these simplifications (more people on the internet, productivity “improvements”, self-empowerment) comes at too-great a price for our collective knowledge and perception of reality.
The Machine* is the devil:
We want things easy. The world isn’t easy, it is complex. Systems designed to make hard things easy are (even if they ‘work’) inherently filled with a spiritual lie. That masked complexity doesn’t just dissapear – it lives in the shadows like a debt that will need to be repaid, like a worn-out photocopy.
Stop trying to live easier, live deliberately.
It is never a problem with your machines or technology when they break or ‘go bad’ or malfunction. It is a problem with you.
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* A device (mechanical, systematic, model, etc) that attempts to make a difficult task easy, or replace man-hours of ‘work’ with automation, simplification, etc.