Christopher Butler is a designer who writes about design, the internet, technology and digital life.
HN commenters praise his writing as a fine distillation of the times and include him on lists of favorite personal sites.
This is a great article & accurate in so many ways. We are lucky to have such great writing & distillation of the times as this; a fine treasure. This pairs very well & adds a lot of context to "What I want from the Internet"[1], which was submitted yesterday & which I am also very aglow over.
Both the rise of platforms & the smartphone are tightly interwoven around a new connected axis of computing emerging & being useful. McThrow somewhat generously includes the web in his "personal computing" vision but alas, even as a huge web fan, it's pretty clear that the brief "intertwingularizing" moment (which was extremely pro user) was giving way to Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), to a de-personalized experience. The relevance of desktop faded, and relevance faded because users were well served by new connected services. Software effervescing, sublimating up into the cloud made it easier to share, made it easier to access to demand, freed us from worrying about backups.
I think this is one of the critical junctures that Linux and the rest of the Desktops has failed to internalize, as a new need: the need to be connected. The need to be more than just isolated personal, the need to be available, the need to be connectable. I don't know quite what this future looks like or what it implies, but the "Linux on the desktop" spoke of competition with an outmoded, fading mode of computing. What was really needed was a further push onward, was a backbone for inter-app systems…
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edit [snipped re guidelines]
i also love wood, and appreciate the craft, craftsmanship, and aesthitics.
heres to hoping you get good traction.
i just enjoyed this too:
object — A 20 Year-Old Sketchbook
https://www.chrbutler.com/2023-04-22
Hmm, there is an RSS feed.
https://www.chrbutler.com/feed.rss