Humanist IT: getting unstuck

The short version: IT is broken. It’s not working, to the point where people are ready to give it up, just like they would a mangled hammer. I think the brokenness is rooted in a lack of humanism: it doesn’t work for people; it uses people towards the builders’ ends. It’s also more complicated than that, which I parse through while also giving a clue about how to get out of being stuck.

At the end of this piece, there are intros to two concepts and a book. Truth is, I’m on the edge; I shouldn’t be publishing it like this in the usurious world we now live in. Any business person would tell me to build it and sell it if I am so certain it’s useful (and I am). But I freaking love information. If we don’t pull this back — if we don’t start offering nodes where it works again, showing through juxtaposition that the brokenness is a product of decisions rather than fundamentally bad tools — we lose IT. It is an act of hope.

Information technology — internet, genAI, software, all of it — is stuck. I’ve heard more people in the past month want to walk away from using what they consider irredeemably broken tools than I had the three years previously. The first time I heard it was from a developer, complaining around seven years ago about all the ‘move fast and break things’ brokenness. In other words, this isn’t a sudden awareness of an idea, but an escalated spreading of a stance.

It’s supported by the recent upswing in people deciding to return to analog media, concerns about how to fix the infrastructure AI is breaking, so much fuckupedness in what AI is enabling, deeper usury of platforms, degrading previous workhorse products…and so much more. Really, the shift is that it’s so bad non-technologists think its broken.

People get stuck, not knowing how to break a cycle, a routine; sometimes not even able to pin down this sense of disquiet and frustration to, “oh, I’m stuck.” Enough of it happens, and cultures get stuck. Get enough cultures stuck, and society gets stuck.

The thing about getting stuck is that it’s predicated on information. We’re doing the same thing over and over again because this is how we problem-solved an information set. Various pressures — all constructed. Really. — keep the problem set static, so there seems to be no other way.

Anything that has information can get stuck. Our internet, software, IT infrastructure, etc., is information before it’s technology. Our businesses are information before they’re profit centers. People are information beings; information is invested in everything we do.

There’s always another way. There’s ALWAYS a choice. The choice might not be something warm and fuzzy, but there’s a choice. If someone tells you there is no choice, or there is only one way, they have an agenda and it needs your complacency (at least) or physical/mental/emotional energy (preferred).

Information technology was stumbling along for so long, and then: stuck. Quality and service issues, creating frustration, locking us in, locking us away from possibility, requiring very specific pathways to make things work, only in the way the builders want it to work. Cory Doctorow focused on the how of enshitification. Ed Zitron focused on the why of rot economy. This isn’t new, it’s not unique.

Big tech built for stuckness.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The way out of being stuck is to expand the problem set — to understand the domain of where the stuckness lives — and then realign within it.

It sometimes means giving up one of those “intractable” pressure points that became more prioritized than it’s actual worth, once it’s seen against the larger domain. Sometimes it means seeing a wonky decision for its real value, changing your mind, and reworking the problem. Sometimes it’s as simple as seeing a workaround that was previously unseen.

To see the possibilities, we need diversity. It’s really that simple: don’t assume everyone is the same, and don’t keep them stuck. Honor humanity for our totality, and people for their specificity; and then build dynamic information around everything — everything — we can think of. Since our perceptions are a limited subset of reality, we will iterate. Maintenance and recasting need to be built in as standard work lines.

Getting stuck

Getting stuck is actually really easy. It comes from a belief that choice is governed. It can have a thousand options within it, like all the potato chip flavors you’re hit with as you walk down the snack aisle. It can feel like you’re dealing with TMI, when actually you’re dealing with a governed data set that is exorbitantly expansive, exhausting to peruse, sensing that if you just kept at it another minute you’d see exactly what would hit the spot, and still requires compromising your goals.

Governance goes beyond data sets. Governance is also in our user pathways, our processes, and how well or poorly our digital information structures mesh with real-world information structures. And once we see that the structures are also in real-world, it’s easier to see that governance can also be behavioral. Human.

Monopolies love stuckness. What they are doing informationally is curtailing a governed information set, forming or leveraging some kind of requirement, and then working to get as close to a single option as they can.

They saw a problem and offered a solution. Other people saw the same, offered a different solution, and the solution set became shared — no one had 100% of the potential market base. But in the process, more people liked the full set of available pathways, decided this was a problem worth solving, and bought in. That creates a governed data set.

If enough people buy in, and what was once a solution now becomes an expectation, that sets a requirement. That’s governed processes.

Maybe the business is befuddled by humanity being a part of their information set — which they are, always, because humanity and information are inextricably intertwingled. Humanity can be enough of shift that the designed infrastructure doesn’t work to business wishstates. The only option the befuddled business sees to increase market share is to buy other outfits that seem to have figured something out. It might even be to try to cross-pollinate whatever the purchased company figured out. But in subsuming instead of mixing in, they lost the humanist spark that made the whole shebang work; to them, it looked…extraneous. They are bigger, but still not understanding the key ingredient. They try again. All along, they are governing human behavior through lack of supporting information structure.

Maybe they were urged to it through social and financial pressures. Maybe they were provided a blueprint in their education that they never questioned.

Maybe they are assholes.

There are hundreds of behaviors that could get the ball rolling, and keep it going. The endstate is still the same: anti-competitive behavior until it’s an non-competitive market.

A monopoly is imposed stuckness. If it becomes required, even better. Situations like losing cellphone communications leading to a lack of work, which is needed to survive, makes cellphones a necessity. The stuckness isn’t just about a company’s monopolistic behaviors. It’s about the cultures and social expectations that surround the product’s use. Expectations too deeply and unquestionably grasped are a social governance.

Most regulations (not all), including those around monopolies, are put in place because some asshole decided it was ok to cause wider harm as long as they could make some money doing it. Those regulations are necessary for society to function. For whatever reason, we have a bunch of people who seem unable to understand that money is an abstracted construct that goes away if people go away. Poison water, people die, they no longer produce what could be sold, no money. Pollute the air, people die, they no longer produce what could be sold, no money. Nuclear war, people die, no money. Climate change, food can’t be grown, people die, no money. Control the production base of a necessity, charge too much, people can’t afford to eat, people die, no money. It’s not the next step, but it’s setting up the dominos in a way that gets harder and harder to shift in a direction of people-not-dying and money continuing to have the conceptual foundation of exchange between people.

We are hitting the ceiling of yes-and that just heightens what is already in the mix — that adds to the governed data set, thinking we just need shrimp-and-pickle-flavored chips.

We need the yes-and that transforms, that adds a whole other facet which in turn adds complexity and possibility. It is going to the network and saying, “and now we’ll include this node, too; and to do that we need to balance with this node, and…” That’s how we find our choices.

And someone is going to not like what those choices are. The trick is to find that pathway that is broadly humanist.

Choice

Underlying the baseline function of a governed data set is a thread of controlling behavior. The same playbooks are used in egregious monopolistic behavior, 1:1 abusers, cults, and authoritarian regimes. It’s primary tool is simplifying information down to a false choice. When that doesn’t work, start lying. When lying doesn’t work, start hitting, or killing off the competition, or policing the streets over-armed. In other words, forcefully curtail choice. Moat the information. Lock them in. Scare them.

To get an effective list of the behaviors involved in controlling others is as simple as studying dark triad. Those behaviors — like siloing, gaslighting, love bombing — are all behaviorally informed levers to manipulate information into a false choice. Not everyone using these behaviors are dark triad; but they are probably within a few degrees of one.

If all the choices boil down to one option, like “use genAI or get left behind”; it’s not a choice. That phrase, in context of our economic model, is a threat. “Getting left behind” is just an exchange for “or else”. In this case, it means no longer making money. It’s really just one option: use genAI. This should be making people incredible suspect as a starting point.

When we oversimplify a user path, we’re removing information, which also changes the flavor of the choice/non-choice being made. When we hide the ability to cancel, we’re gaslighting. All the patterns of deceptive design are rooted in manipulating information to manipulate people into a false choice.

Curtailed choices are everywhere in our IT. They have become the norm. In the push to simplify — to make a flow so easy people could do it while barely paying attention — we often scoped too finitely. We called all the things we didn’t really want people to do or be ‘edge cases’, vowed to circle back someday, and then started a new MVP.

If those edge cases were 60% of our users, we didn’t know because we were focused on the positive-form metric of what we were tracking. We didn’t track what we didn’t want to see. We tracked what made our company feel good, what gave us a sense of job security, or stroked the ego of someone with too much power.

As more companies did this, it sent out everyday waves of frustration. Little curtailments, scattered everywhere. It is the status quo, so it’s hard to see. But little by little, the frustration grew. Little by little, stuckness coalesced.

People get stuck because information gets stuck.

Information, usually, that has been simplified without allowing for easily found, increased density and/or alternative, functioning pathways. I am positive that some of this is because our industry was following best practices; following where others had “proven” the least pain-inducing (but still painful for some, even sometimes most because of how best practice is calculated) experience.

Some of it is because information technology is constructed and documented information. When you build information to spec, manipulating it at the source is incredibly tempting for some of our individuals. They developed metrics of success that often implicated the deceptive behavior they built in the information, and were copied.

We got stuck.

How to get unstuck

The way out of this is both incredible simple and incredibly complex, and it is almost the same phrase.

Understand the domain. In other words, understand the context; reach for the yes-and that adds nodes to transform, not just a heightened expression of what’s already there. Make a bet, experiment, and see what finds traction without resorting to pressure, hype, and false choices.

The hard part is understanding domains. When we scope a problem to solve, we are trying to wrap our heads around a finite set within a perceptually infinity. We do that by picking out a border, restructuring the information — with bets — and seeing if, how, and how-well it works. That’s information structure, and it can be a complex beast.

Information is also entirely human. All the human behaviors that so many of us have decided need to be shamed, or denigrated, or dismissed, or non-existent to perception still affects our information. All the manipulation that some of us do so well, and others of us are copying in hopes to increase some facet of sensed success, still affects our information. All the points of dissonance, some real and debilitating and some sensed and used as reason for a manipulative power play and an excuse for aggression, still affects our information. All of our ability to love, find connection, and to work together, fix and build — it’s all in our information.

And all of that — all of the complex structure, all of the humanity — are in time. What we “know” now is not what we’ll always understand as meaningful. What we have understood can follow us for ages, when there is some delightfully prescient nugget of encapsulated meaning. We work together for a sensed future, fix what doesn’t work, build more, and keep the food growing and the lights on. Especially if the things we depend on aren’t functioning well in the overall system, we need to understand them and shift — not go hungry or make electricity a luxury. None of these are throw-away functions; all of the people focused on any of our continued existence should be honored. Right now we don’t, and it’s pervasive.

All of this functions more fluidly, with less pain, when we understand the information as close to reality as we can currently conceptualize.

We bring it all back in closer alignment with reality by reformulating information to be humanist; in our policies, in our laws, in our information, and in our tools.

I have two forms to help people more easily see it is possible, as well as how I understand information. Both forms are based on work done in my own time, outside of NDA, and were not a financial zero-sum situation; they came at a cost to me. Using it, or springboarding from it in the same general form? Pay me. Business or invested startup, pay me like you would your best experts. Start or continue your humanist streak by treating me as a real person with living expenses. Bootstrapper or non-profit, buy me a coffee. Links for payments and all three documents are on https://www.lenthic.com/humanist-it.

In my grandest dreams, I hope that many will use them. A single point of entry, while capitalistic and keeping me fed maybe at some point in the future, is too small a ripple for how broken it is now.

No AI was used to research, create, write, or build any of this.

Prioritized search

Search right now is returns based on all kinds of information being smudged for us in the background, not by us as the immediate problem solvers. It’s a bit of a mental twist, but not a huge one. Look at it. Exists already, right? Look at it again. It’s not that it exists already (at least as of this writing, that I or my longest-standing IT cohort are aware of). It’s that it’s very closely aligned with how people think outside of the binary. And yet, it smudges the binary — making the returns slightly imprecise — by using multiple binaries and a precise data set. If someone had seen it, we could have done it ten years ago.

The presentation goes through the cognitive function, interface, logic, and potential expansions after the big push of the initial data cleanup and coding is complete.

What this concept also does:

• conceptualized to honor people’s data privacy: no need to pay data brokers; not relying on user data reduces temptation for hacking your systems, so it might reduce security events;
• honors peoples’ ability to troubleshoot their own problem solving, capturing unknown/unanticipated long tail conversions;
• helps to level the playing field for small business, creating more competition and more options in a dynamic marketplace;
• long-term reduces metadata maintenance by not having to think of and manage adjacencies.

Riffpoints architecture

It started by trying to fix my own annoyance at having to spend so much time just churning through design files. There have been limited designer-time savings pushed through to the design functions since Adobe first cracked how to get all the elements of design encoded. More effort went into genAI design software, which doesn’t live up the to precision that is expected from and by designers.

There are solutions available by leveraging well-architected design tokens. On the development side, there is opportunity to be able to open up the site to be accessible by any sightedness.

The presentation goes through the architecture, what drove each subset, and what can be enabled by the architecture.

What this concept also does:

• Reduce design churn time while improving consistency and maintaining precision; how effective that is depends on business stakeholders’ willingness to work with designers, and potential updates to existing design software or development of new design software;
• Potentially optimize for any-sighted accessibility, making it so there are no ‘invisible inks’;
• Offers an alternative to the environmentally wasteful imprecision of genAI with sustainable precise fluidity.

Movements

What I do isn’t magic. It’s complex — the below image is the traced connections in the book — but it is explicable. I’ve been working on it for a lifetime; it took five years to write what I currently understand. The copyright remains mine.

Humanist IT: getting unstuck was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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