sidenote: there are other sketches for "long tail of user needs" but I was making a specific point about the app paradigm of software.
10.03.2026 13:50
👍 3
🔁 0
💬 0
📌 0
sidenote: there are other sketches for "long tail of user needs" but I was making a specific point about the app paradigm of software.
Yep, I made it :)
It comes from this memo I wrote (originally internal to @blockscience.bsky.social)
www.orionreed.com/artifact/int...
Great q! Work needs to happen at the level of the web, OSs, apps, protocols, and policy.
The tech side is not post-length but I think the forcing function might need to be “data unbundling” laws like with IBM in the 60s for large companies + new filesystems, protocols, and software architectures.
Software should be fun, actually
So even a threat to business as mundane as open file format usage within government institutions in one state, was met with overwhelming counter-mobilisation from the tech industry, and the policy institutions can't even handle something that minor :|
one mundane example of this:
In 2005, Massachusetts mandated open document formats. Microsoft responded with lobbyists, campaign cash, and hounded the state CIO into resigning. Then made a 6,000-page 'open' standard that was practically useless to anyone but Microsoft. By 2007 the mandate was dead.
Yep! Though portability is a lesser demand than what I’d like to see here. It’s also something we *had* in the past, though inconsistently, through local files
Yep! Though ‘users’ is accurate in the sense of being a subject which was produced *by* a particular form of software. The computational passivity of users and inability of the subject (users) to articulate structural changes — users can only express consumer choices via product switching, etc…
In the late 60s, IBM was forced to unbundle software from hardware. It's time to do the same for data and applications.
We need to structurally separate user data from applications so that applications become *users* of data rather than *containers* for it.
This computer is the reason you can't download all software for free.
The Franklin Computer Corp was a computer manufacturer founded in the early 1980s. Their flagship product was a clone of the Apple II, one of the most popular personal computers of the day.
1/4
I agree
yes sometimes
Read “retardant” in a French accent as if it wasn’t a word I knew, almost googled it…
but yes,
who should I be following on Bsky? need more food for the algo feed…
love this
Lots of great phrases in here by @orionreed.com as he traces the portable file separate from apps, and describes the path to proprietary formats, to internalization, and finally how cloud affordances can't be exported and represented as a file.
Wrote a mini-essay, "Digital Topology & Economic Power", on how the file went from a site of user agency to one of enclosure — through proprietary formats, data internalization, then the cloud. Each step bundling real gains with a quiet transfer of power.
www.orionreed.com/posts/app-fi...
"The 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 inherited the organisational form of the 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞: self-contained, manufactured at a distance from its users, designed for a general market."
Software is not soft. It arrives rigid, opaque, and brittle. The most malleable medium we have produced is, in practice, among the least malleable materials we encounter in daily life.
We live under a capitalist mode of computing. The tools, languages, techniques, and assumptions of digital systems are structured by economic forces that shape not just what we can do, but what we can imagine doing. By separating production from use, producing inflexible software, and slicing up computing into siloed apps, your agency is held back by a tech industry that profits from a population rendered computationally passive.
Still one of the paragraphs I'm proud to have had a part in writing. From the ever-nascent libcomp.org
(the great phrase "rendered computationally passive" is from Melanie Hoff's "Always Already Programming")
code goofy but go regular if I’m feeling spicy (or if things have gone terribly wrong and I’m limping my way through the code)
say more..
Nothing for general media AFAIK, only for text.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVTT
Then there’s the Web Animations API developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...
See also @maggieappleton.com’s post/talk where I first saw the link to that first one maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-...
And if you haven’t read diSessa’s book I highly recommend it! I think to this day it’s one of the most radically emancipatory visions of computing.
First is hard to trace an origin to, but here is a well-known one: newsletter.getprimitive.ai/p/when-to-de...
Second is from diSessa’s great book, “Changing Minds” direct.mit.edu/books/monogr...
and third from @todepond.com’s twitter feed somewhere (Lu may be able to find it)
I.e. this is the ‘interop’ seen in the Adobe Suite, Microsoft Office, and in a different sense Notion or similar apps/platforms. There is *always* an outside, so without firms intentionally reducing control over data and coordinating efforts/investments to do so, we will always see this same pattern
Almost! Same kinda vibe but I like it because it’s more specific, @todepond.com’s one points out a specific structural limitation of interop-by-absorption (unless we had literally one emperor-like software vendor lol)
I know, @todepond.com has a banger there. If could be an @xkcd.com
@tantacrul.bsky.social (whose software design videos everyone should watch) has a nice talk on this
www.youtube.com/watch?v=12TJ...