Before you can do bad things to people with a clear conscience, you must dehumanise them. In Big Tech designers and developers can build systems that track, profile, and exploit people then go home to hug their kids because they’re not people to them, they’re “users” and “data.”
@bob @aral in IT in general we need more humanising language use.
In reaction to an article pleading for HX (Human Experience) instead of #UX I added the non-manipulative term Behaviour Encouragement Design which must be entirely transparent to people using the software.
And I coined Real Life Experience design. Shouldn't software support us IRL first and foremost? As unobtrusive as possible?
https://community.humanetech.com/t/5165
Biggest sins are #DeceptionPatterns and #surveillancecapitalism of course.
@aral
#Heise really writes like this : "In future, the #information scientist will need three things if he wants to make a career: a Dr. title, a hunger for power and ruthlessness, says Dr. Reinhard Scharff". (sic!)
Such #people urgently need psychological help and not an #editor and.#pizzaflat!
@aral I am coming to realise they are not necessarily “bad” humans doing evil things. There are circumstances that blinds people into acting this way. We must focus on circumstances rather than people themselves.
> Before you can do bad things to people with a clear conscience
I can do bad things to people with all kinds of conscience. It's important to treat everyone equally. ☝️
not to flog a dead horse, but if there is one dehumanising term i loathe it's "consumer" in the place of "customer"
i most especially despise the term when i hear it in the mouth of tech reviewers who rather than stand alongside their audience - empowering them in purchasing decisions - refer to themselves as such, and thus join the ranks of gape-mawed automaton swallowing great buckets of unfit-for-purpose swill doled out by corporate
... and don't even get me started on 'product'
#ConsumeProduct #GetExcitedForNextProduct
🇳🇴🍺
@aral Software developers/designers at Big Tech: "I don't let my kids use their phones after 7pm."
@celia Oh, the hypocrisy, it hurts :)
@aral related, I was just going through some corporate anti-harassment training, where HR claiming to care about people's well-being still calls them "employees" and sets them being "productive" as the sole point of the exercise.
@aral I've been thinking about this a bit, it's a nice soundbite to say "only tech and drug dealers use the word users"... but then what do we call the people that use ethical services, like for example Mastodon?
@aral "there are now 2 million mastodon people"
I'm sorry, users are people who use something, it's a descriptive term and while I don't like the passive nature of the word we should have another descriptive word if we are to avoid using that one...
@Matter “there are now 2 million people who use Mastodon.” They’re not Mastodon people any more than they’re Mastodon users. Their use of Mastodon doesn’t define them. They’re human beings who use Mastodon.
"Member", "User", "Person" and "People" are all countable, but not in the same way. We usually only count a person once to know how many people are in the set. When we say "there are now 2 million people who use Mastodon", the set is unambiguous { Haakon, Aral, etc } are in there only once, their presence in the people-set is unique and there are 2 million unique persons in it.
"Member" and "User" are different.
If you say "there are now 2 million users", there is no way of telling if these users really are only the persons Haakon and Aral with a million user accounts each. Double accounts for the same person, or more sinister - fake accounts - are prolific on most online services.
I do not know Mastodon well enough to say the number of member or user accounts agree in number with the number of human beings on the service. My guess is you will find a difference between number of accounts and actual humans somewhere between 5% to 15%.
@aral Or "impressions" and "clicks".