A Major Change In Society That Needs To Happen

Sooner, Rather Than Later, If Possible, If You Please Sir

Did you guys watch the keynote where Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone? Macworld, January 2007. He makes a big deal out of the fact that you use your finger, not a stylus. He shows off pinch to zoom. The crowd oohs. He shows off inertial scrolling. Everyone freaks out. It’s a pretty funny moment, knowing where things went—that everything we did all the time, all the ways we consumed and communicated—would be mediated through these tiny windows into another world.

When the phone first came out, it was widely derided for its lack of a physical keyboard. Blackberries had a keyboard; so did Palm pilots. How could people get used to a touchscreen? But the software was good enough, adaptive enough, responsive enough—small typing mistakes were forgiven, obvious errors quickly and silently corrected. And in the end, our internal drive for the abstraction of a large, infinitely changeable surface overcame our reliance on predicable tactility. It seemed to open up the entire world to the power and wonder of capacitive touch technology.

If you’re not aware, the way that capacitive touch technology works is pretty cool. Basically, your finger has a different permittivity than the air around it—it responds differently to an electric charge, and polarizes a different amount, and your screen can measure the slight changes in its own electric field that happen when your skin touches it. It’s pretty amazing that the technology has come as far as it has, so it makes sense that it’s now ubiquitous.

Actually, it fucking sucks that it’s now ubiquitous. Look at this awesome instant pot that I have:

Wow. Hell yes. Tactile buttons. Respond to a press. Clear indicator of their interaction. Amazing design. These buttons have allowed me to become a member of the thriving online instant pot community, and have enabled me to enjoy my well-constructed kitchen appliance for years to come.

But look at the new buttons.

Why? Why do this? A little bit of water gets on this thing (normal kitchen thing to happen) and it’s completely useless. There has to be a better way. We’ve all felt it. Touch screens on vending machines, touch screens on various kiosks meant to dispense a finite series of items. Why? What was so important that you had to design a UI for this? You have to deploy software updates to your water cooler?

Every place I’ve worked has had a Bevi (this is not a brag; this is an indicator that you’ll get laid off). Look how fucking ugly that screen is, just slapped in the middle of that object. There’s no way to make it look nice, and anyone who’s used one of these can tell you that the animations and interface are actually worryingly slow and imprecise. So what was the point? Just to have different rotating flavors each month? It almost feels like they started with the idea of the screen, and then worked backwards to justify this. We need to STOP THIS.

Imagine the following—a beautiful, large button. You press it. It presses back. You apply ever-increasing force, calibrated just so to give you the frisson of communication with an inanimate object without ever feeling like any form of effort, until—boom. It gives way. A satisfying click, a snap. The button has been depressed, and will remain so until you push it again, unlatching it from its new home and springing it back to attention, ready for the next user.

I’ve seen induction stoves, and they’re really exciting. Water boils fast. Making custard would be a snap with this thing. But I haven’t seen any with physical dials or tactile buttons, and it makes me not want to use them. I find myself confused by this choice. If the controls here break or there’s a software malfunction, it could potentially cause an actual fire. If there’s a knob, a physical mechanism, you can repair it yourself. Isn’t that supposedly better?

It all leads me to the core question at the heart of all of this stuff, the question that begs an answer: Why is everything being this way all of the time, and when will it stop?

It’s time to accept that the answer is just never, fuck off, stop complaining, go home, your life is fine, and you forgot to make this post funny at all.

Nabeel’s Footnote

I push buttons every damn week with this Substack