What are some good resources around the power imbalance in the interaction of software and users? For example, the disregard for consent in a dialog box where the option “No” is replaced with “Not now”.

Thanks. Dark patterns are a good collection of examples of violations, but I’m looking for more of an idea-based or philosophical perspective on these issues. I’m imagining the free software movement might have ideas, but I’m not sure they are always so concerned with the user-experience angle

For a philosophical perspective on power imbalance in technology, you could look at Ivan Illich's book "Tools for Conviviality". Here are some quotes I took from my reading of the book: 1. I use the term “tool” broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce “education,” “health,” “knowledge,” or “decisions.” I use this term because it allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks. 2. A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. 3. Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.

Jaron Lanier's writings might be relevant. I think he's talked about AI being on one side of this divide and IA on the other. I don't have a citation off-hand, sadly. I've never heard mainstream software compared explicitly to Fascism, though. Also curious if any one else has.

besides "dark pattern", "user hostile" is another good term to google for

If we're talking about agency and ownership on data, Local-first software may be relevant: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html

Unfortunately, the greed and stupidity of users has brought us to the current situation, where companies have been forced by the communists/fascists amongst us, who insist that all software be free. But companies are a kind of living thing, they need to obtain energy in the form of money to keep their staffs going, and so inevitably you then see ruthless firms like Facebook who intensely data mine so as to generate an income stream. If people would pay a fair price for the services they use, the companies wouldn't need to resort to tricks to find revenue on the back end. You don't see Adobe Creative Cloud users getting mined like this, because they are paying a subscription fee, and Adobe thus doesn't need to do this kind of thing. But the minute you make a service that actually costs hundreds of millions to run free to users, then you are going to have some invisible revenue generating mechanism, that might be highly detrimental to your privacy or have other non-obvious negative effects. Asking something for nothing is my definition of a jerk. Yet people now have been trained by savage firms to expect this, and it is quite unfortunate.

Adobe are a great example of this sort of power imbalance. They introduce undocumented breaking changes into CC apps, but don't let you stay on old versions past a certain point — this one has repeatedly hurt our art team. They only let businesses adjust licensing on a fixed schedule, so you can't easily downsize your plan if (say) half of your art team switches entirely to non-Adobe tools. They use all the bundling tactics we hate from cable companies. They're increasingly requiring reliance on their cloud features instead of local, user-ownable data. They continue to use pseudo-proprietary file formats for said local data. They are a vendor of various adtech integrations (sup, TypeKit). Adobe are a land of contrasts, to borrow a meme. We often look at their products as exemplars of direct manipulation and iterative evolution across decades, but as a business they're every bit as hostile as FAANG.

More so, from the sound of it. More like Oracle or IBM levels of evil.

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project err.. that graph contains roundtrip numbers for packets, and they are entirely achievable

A few years ago I wrote https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/09/geopolitics-for-individuals, which seems relevant here. Every new technology creates a space for a more geopolitical way of thinking to come to the fore. (Not everyone does it, but those who do find surprising opportunities.) The original age of diplomacy was about the implications of oil. The age of Fascism was about mass media. We're currently exploring the implications of software infrastructure. Firefox and Adobe don't have a fixed pecking order when it comes to virtue. Each can do things that align more with one group or another. Our periodic angst about Slack is also a sign of relying on something whose provider isn't aligned perfectly with us. In that situation it's easy for alliance to slip into exploitation. (And I use both words without any connotation of good or bad. It's worth thinking of them as just different parts of a single state space.)

Thanks everybody for insights. Speaking of the types of business practices @Ivan Reese mentioned, it strikes me that maybe this is not really a problem of our relationship with the software itself, but of business behind it. The software is a similar proxy as a traditional service rep; both are employed to help customers when helping them is in the interest of the business, politely refusing to help using specific sanctioned language when it’s not, and just empathizing without really helping in the gray area between.

Adobe in the post Warnock era, has shifted from a purchase model to a rental model, and this has its attendant drawbacks. As a long time user of Adobe's Creative Suite, one cannot lay all of the problems with breaking changes on Adobe. Apple has deliberately broken with each successive version of OSX the super important CS series. OSX 10.14 breaks many of the apps, and OSX 10.15 kills off all 32 bit apps for no good reason other than to force you to buy new stuff. When you pay over $1000 for software, you plan to keep it working, and i personally hate subscription model software when it is a program i use perhaps once a month. Most of us are not practicing artists, and Adobe is creating the competition that may eventually damage them severely. But i also have to point out that other big companies in the software field have always been envious of Adobe, and have at times gone to war against them, spending resources to hinder or destroy them. They have also been massive victims of piracy in the past, and the OS vendors did nothing to help them. The iTunes App Store is the first piracy free ecosystem for the PC, and it has flourished. Cheating ruins the game of capitalism, and there is so much cheating today that people are souring on the concept of capitalism. Mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services is the foundation of modern civilization, but many entities figure out it is cheaper to rig the game than to do more for less, which is the promise of ever higher technology.

It’s all about the business models. If you want to have people voluntarily give you large amounts of money preferably on a regular basis, you can either deliver value that one decision maker in a company can justify (B2B) or you deliver value that consumers want to pay for (B2C), which is a lot easier if you sell bits together with atoms. If that’s not your thing, or you want “everyone to be able to use it”, you make it free and find other ways to get paid for the value you create. That can start with harmless ads, but then often spirals into selling data about your users to advertisers because targeted ads make so much more money. If you build something customers pay you for directly, you need to keep pleasing them by adding value; you need to keep innovating. Then everything that holds you back is in your way. If your users aren’t your customers, you optimize for other things. Then your software just needs to run and you care a lot less about what it runs on, as long as it’s still functional and users are still using it. Better yet, you might even optimize for staying around on older platforms for longer to maximize reach. I do believe that it’s ultimately good that we have these very different approaches, as they somewhat keep each other in check. I also think that free (as in beer) software has done a lot more harm than good to our software ecosystems. What I find particularly interesting is that a lot of people in our industry who supposedly understand software very well, want things to be stable for eternity but at the same time always use the latest technology and don’t seem to see any problems with that.

@Tor The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander might have the philosophy you’re searching for. It’s a book about buildings(but so much more), and one theme is his rejection of architecture as this highly professionalized, prescriptive, and paternalistic practice, instead advocating for the users of the building to be fully involved in its creation and ongoing maintenance. And to echo Doug’s quotes from Ilich, part of that is rejecting industrial methods that diminish the individual. I feel strongly it has many deep parallels to the current situation we’re in with software, and it has inspired me to create software that truly empowers people and makes them feel alive.

This post feels really timely: https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/the-next-experiments-in-elitism