RETROFUTURIST ART MANIFESTO OF WITHERED TECHNOLOGY
PEBCAK: Everythings amazing and nobodys happy.
IN AN ERA where everything wants to be fast and beautiful, we must be
brave enough to take a stand for slowness and uglyness. Where things are
smooth and pleasant, we must be chunky, choppy, lumpy and contrary. Instead
of ease of use, we must insist on inconvenience and frustration. For too long
the users have been getting a free ride on the backs on the hardware.
Above all else we hate accessibility and responsiveness. Our idealised iPod
would be turned inside-out, looking and feeling like a toxic tropical
caterpillar, actually sucking music out of your head through little white
earplug siphons.
Speed is the enemy, for it takes us there before we are ready to a
arrive, too irritable in the jarring, abrupt transition to appreciate the
wasted miracle, and generally ungratefully unworthy of the future
superimposed on our present. A slow process allows the mind to explore
alternate avenues and investigate possible outcomes in its own imaginary
simulations, ultimately achieving the subconscious conclusion that the goal
or objective of the process is extraneous, as the mind has already delivered
us there after exhausting all possible permutations.
When we get there we are underwhelmed, but disappointed for a good
reason: for our native flesh having triumphed over our broken silicon child.
Any new, well-performing machine can be hobbled and crippled until
achieving a virtuous limping degree of only pseudo-function. Invert the
screen-saver to only kick in while taking user input, which is only accepted
while the Guru Meditation Board is centered. Rig up the Coke machine at the
end of the hall to reply to telnet visitors asking how many Cokes are in the
machine, but secretly replace the cans of Coca-Cola with angry bees. Smoke
banana peels because the tfiles told you to. Wardial pizza parlours and
prank them into delivering to each other. Overclock your 386, and make it
work at least as well as a 436. Point your webcam at its own stream on the
monitor and invite visitors to give you feedback. Refuse to take a side
on an issue until Eliza or Racter can decisively come out on top in a debate.
Nothing is as desirable to us as an inexplicable error or glitch
producing emergent undesired behavior, an unexpected middle finger point
between the expectations of the user and the machines interpretation of the
programs actual instructions, this third place a result of a kludgey and
poorly-understood or outright ineffective mechanism unknown to the user
hoped to achieve some tangential outcome, like tapeworm eggs sold as diet
pills: Rename FORMAT to TIDYUP replace your monitors off switch with a
handgun code your spaghetti! Every optical disc tray is a cupholder. Re-
use stale random numbers. Delete data files from your applications until
they stop working, then undelete the straw that broke the camels back. Use
a hex-editor to scrawl obscene graffiti in critical sectors and delight at
the unpredictable effects!
Make every key a boss key, and why are those key caps still in their
original locations, anyway? You did change to the Dvorak layout, didnt
you? Use a system font that automatically ROT13s any output. Any change
that results in the system beeping is an improvement. See just how long you
can protract your machines boot-up sequence, or if indeed you can forestall
its ever completely successfully booting. MS-DOS aint done until Lotus
wont run. By delivering precisely the opposite service as it suggests, no
hardware function is more beloved of us than the TURBO button, and the use of
the three-finger salute to initiate logins is a source of endless delight.
I AM THE COOKIE BEAR. GIVE ME A COOKIE.
Make every computing device a trapped puzzle-box of an onion,
resisting, attacking and stinging in response to attempts by outsiders to
access the most harmless functions, nested and buried beneath obfuscating
layers of deceptive interface like a secret presidential underground subway
line. Direct it even to defend against use attempts from its creator, to
keep you on your toes. After exhausting 106 ID errors, you must embody 107.
Every interaction must surprise and dismay you in a new and unexpected way.
Your machine feeds on your skin, found in the fan enclosure in great, snowy
drifts, but have you recently bled on the sharpness of a circuit board?
Pit a worm against a trojan and breed a better malware. Screw no boards,
peripherals or cables into place, unless you are entrenching them in the
wrong port. Turn your command line into a text adventure with mazes, carry
limits, hunger daemons, and darkness. Make merely getting to a terminal
window a grand triumph, the high point of your week arrived at only after
hours of struggle. Synthesize vi and emacs into a blend featuring the
problems of both and the features of neither. To disorient, add shareware
nag screens with countdowns to software you have already purchased a license
to use. Grind your system to a halt with desktop assistants and search
bars. Develop your touch-typing by conducting all your business on a
headless machine.
Beauty is the red stare of a modems LED continuing to shine after you
have unplugged its power source.
The first application for any new technology is to brutalize human
flesh the second is to draw pictures of naked ladies. You were put here on
this weird wired world to invert that sequence.
Lifes a bitter kind of joke
let out all the magic smoke.
Watch out for the killer POKE!
Hack until you croak.
Everyones amazing and nothings happy.
k-ThUlU+++
Shouts out to our brothers in CDC, l0PHt, the Chaos Computer Club,
and of course Concrete and the iLF imagination liberation front, which is
gonna rock you.
Free the disappeared political prisoners of the 604 detained without
charge by Bob Eden and Detective Dennis Thiessen!!! The d0c hasnt been seen