0.0 Context Setting

It’s Wednesday, July 15th 2026 in Portland, Oregon, and the England football team have just finished being the archetypal England football team.

(Only it’s not. Now it’s Thursday.)

0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall

Short version: it’s your last call to register to attend How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall for Friday, 17 July, at 11am Pacific.

Following last week’s How People Work with Matt Jukes, I’m super excited to have the wonderful co-founder of Mule Design Erika Hall on to chat about how teams work together (or not) to build products and services. And, because it’s Erika, we will also probably talk about how design is your business model, and what you can do about it (if... anything?) In the meantime, do you have your copy of Just Enough Research? You should get one.

That’s How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall on Friday 17 July, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 7pm Manchester.

If you did miss last week’s show with Jukesie, well! You can catch it on Youtube, where this show will be uploaded too. How about that.

But, there’s more!

You can also register for:

• How People Work, Live! ... with Pavel Samsonov on Friday 24 July at 9am Pacific; and
• How People Work, Live! ... with Russell Davies on Friday 31 July at, well, the same time.

.. and there’s another one planned for August 14th. If you’d like to be a guest for How People Work, Live! then you should totally email me, it’ll be great.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Just one thing today.

1.1 Somebody Else’s Cloud

I think this one will meander a bit. There was a thread on Bluesky about how it feels like Americans (and people in general, I guess -- but I live here and am surrounded by it) are turning against datacenters, but against datacenters because of AI, while at the same time there’s this cognitive dissonance and lack of understanding that that’s also where the rest of the internet is?

Like, I quipped that this is a result of the cloud moniker doing a tremendous job of kind of atomizing the internet and just putting it gestures somewhere over there. This is not an original thought! People like Ingrid Burrington are/were stupendously ahead of the curve in trying to show what the internet looks like and how it physically manifests, also people like James Bridle who I remember trying to show people what Wikipedia was in a visceral sense. (In my head I treat Burrington & Bridle as the kind of friends I am in awe of because they have, like, actually finished writing books?)

Anyway. The internet became invisible? It was funny ha ha when it started being called the cloud because remember network diagrams? And, like, the cloud! Over there, but, also not? And that’s before you get to the manifestation of the internet in popular culture like that box with the internet in it in the show from disgraced TERF Graham Linehan. I mean, the show was kind of mean for making fun of Jen for thinking that the internet was in there but I think part of how the bit worked and why it was so successful was exactly because people wanted to know and felt stupid about it?

Anyway. I got an email from Kia that was hilarious: it was about the Spiderman theme which is uh I guess DLC for our car so you can have a themed infotainment system? This whole featureset on our car (part of the webOS-based ccNC infotainment stack that I believe is going to be replaced with Android Auto in the next HMG platform) feels to me to be a colossal waste of time money and effort. I assume it exists because car manufacturers are supposed to be chasing after services revenue and selling software-defined cars, which means you could pay, like, $40 or whatever to for ages choose an NBA team for the theme of your car? Like, that’s all there was for over a year. And then they added some Disney stuff.

There’s so much going on here -- the investment into the theming itself and presumably the testing and qualification to meet national safety standards. And then you’ve got to figure out your licensing deals. How much are they paying the NBA and in which territories? Are you making different theming content licensing deals in different countries? I don’t know, and I haven’t checked. And then the hilarious bit that I’m finally getting to: this email from Kia that’s all like yeah so it’s your last chance to buy and download the Spiderman theme but don’t worry if you already bought it, you’ll still be able to keep it, but after date d you won’t be able to buy it.

This is irritating and tiring and stupid and is there someone there with some objective and key result who’s going: yeah, this was totally worth it. A Spiderman theme as DLC for a car that costs over sixty thousand dollars or is financed, and you’re theming it because it’s a computer. Meanwhile, you can’t actually theme it like you’d expect a computer, like choose different accent colors or whatever in the infotainment UI. All I’d like to do is maybe make it blue? But no, my chances are: stock or NBA teams or some Disney content.

In this way I’m thinking about how people need to think about user interfaces as, well, business interfaces. Sure they’re user experiences and user interfaces in the sense that in an absolute way, they are used by uh users. But that experience is dictated by a business and there are business needs. That’s why user-centered design felt a bit like a breath of fresh air as a design practice or concept, but you know how successful was it ever going to be? The context of user-centered design was always going to be in opposition or at best in tension and a potential tiny pendulum swing in favor of “well, if we’re too user hostile then we’ll kill the host and can’t extract enough money out of the user.” It’s like, you can’t be too user-centered because then you’d end up with perpetual licenses for the user and they’d actually get to own things? No, remember user-centeredness only exists to the extent it can fit inside an envelope of business-centeredness. And hey, maybe the user-centeredness was indulged during the ZIRP period when money was 5free and line was going up anyway. But now, line must go up more.

I was thinking as well that one of the turning points was when you had those little icons on desktops and computers that said My Computer and My Documents so went to see if I could grab a screenshot from Windows or whatever and I see that it’s not My Computer anymore (am I misremembering?) but now it’s just This Computer and Documents. I was prepared to do this whole gotcha where I’d be like: ha, they call it your computer but it’s not! Because you think you’re downloading and installing things on your computer but no they can still be removed.

Cory Doctorow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are standing by, waiting for your donation.

None of this is new, I know. It’s also unreasonable I think for someone to know everything about how everything works to survive in modern society. I mean, we have specialization for a reason. There’s the whole deal with actually society is great because it means I don’t have to test my food every single time for the presence of a diarrhea-inducing parasite or whether the baby milk formula is dangerous or whether the place I’m renting is covered in dangerous mold. I mean, you should be able to rely on those things and if I borrow from Chachra, those things might also fall under the ways we care for each other in an infrastructural scale for, like, tens or hundreds of millions of people.

You shouldn’t have to know that much maybe about how the internet works and where it is and all that jazz does, but maybe you delegate that to your representative? I’m not entirely sure what it is I’m grasping at here other than “shit is really complicated, yo” and “it would be a lot of hard work and time and effort to keep up to date on all of this” when, like, there are other things to be getting on with.

There was a post (there’s always a post) I saw the other day which was along the lines of Americans in 2030 realizing what things like “the CDC” and “vaccines” were for now that they see what they do. That’s kind of heartbreaking.

I think if I pull it back to something to do with technology and culture and society then I’m going to pull a word out of my ass and say something like realcapital, like realpolitik? The depressing realization that the products and services you work on or use are well no matter how fun and whimsical and surprising and delighting they are -- they’re still businesses operating inside a so-called regulatory framework. Realpolitik might describe the compromises you have to deal with, but maybe realcapital describes the realities and compromises you have to make in order to exist when there’s all this gestures at the influence of money all around. I mean hell, a bunch of states in the U.S. have sued to prevent the ParamountSkyDance WarnerBrosDiscovery merger and I thoroughly, in a doomerist way, expect the supreme court to rule later that preventing companies from merging is, like, super harshing on their first amendment rights to express how much they love each other and want to deliver some amazing corporate synergy. Like, what’s more of a first amendment expression of speech than corporate synergy and savings?

This was pretty angry and defeatist. I am also feeling a bit that way? Meanwhile, Mamdani continues to Just Do Things!

How are you doing?

Best,

Dan