‘See you tonight? Seven-thirty outside the cinema?’ ‘Yes, fine, see you later!’ But if there’s more than one cinema, or I’m not certain how long it will take me to get there, I may need a pause to give me thinking time before I say, ‘I’m not sure I can be there by seven-thirty. What time does the film start?’ Now you need some thinking time, too: to remember the start time, or to calculate whether the advertisements before the film will allow us some leeway, or to remind yourself if there’s a later showing of the same film. The presence of silences during the conversation has the effect of slowing everything down. Slowing down allows us to focus better on what is being said, and for many people this slowing also reduces any anxiety they felt coming into a conversation that might be important, emotional or long-awaited. [...] Remain aware, though, that an ‘expectant silence’ can seem threatening to someone who does not feel ready to explore their uncomfortable thoughts:

Being able to write on floppies also opened the door to somebody else making a floppy disk, and then selling it to you. You could put this thing in your computer, and suddenly you're running a program that you didn't make, but that you bought.

And that's, again, kind of a peculiar thing. Buying a paint set doesn't really open the door to enjoying somebody else's art. They're very different things. Buying a piano doesn't help you play mp3s. These are, in most circumstances, very different things.

But in the computer, there's this kind of pun. And that led directly to a consumer software industry. That was kind of new thing. There had been commercial software for many decades, for banks and institutions and the military, but this was the first time that software was being sold to the mass market.

So it led to a consumer software industry, it led to a class of professional programmers, which led to the assumption that programming was a profession. That learning to program was vocational training, and what you did with your programming skill was, you made things to sell.

If you look at modern programming tools like Xcode and Visual Studio, they're much more polished than what we had on the Apple II, but they're all built with the assumption that you're making things to sell to other people, rather than making things for your own needs.

There's a kind of unspoken assumption in user interface design, maybe unacknowledged. Almost all software is designed with the assumption that the user is alone. That it's just the software and the user, and the two of them have to solve the world.

[...] If you go back to the original microcomputers like the Apple II, late 70s, early 80s, we're living in a lot of the design patterns that were established then.

Those computers were made by people who basically wanted to be alone in the basement, just them and the computer, mind-melding with the machine. And we live in the world that they created.

It's a computer designed specifically around a social context, where people are actually really together.

And it's designed for people to make their own things, not to take premade stuff off the shelf that was handed to you by benevolent corporate overlords.

And where you can use all of the thousands of capabilities and facilities of being a human being with a human body, as opposed to having all of your interaction reduced to poking at a piece of glass with a finger.

One of the great joys of working in this environment, which I'll get to more in a bit, is so much of what you're doing is affecting other things. So it's not like I have my own screen, I'm making cool stuff in my screen, but you have to come over to my screen to see it.

It's more like, I'm making something that affects what's in front of you. And you're making things that affect what's in front of me, or we affect the entire space.

These worlds that they're inhabiting right now were mass manufactured by an app developer somewhere. They're just taking them for granted. They don't even have the agency to modify or craft the world they live in.