For maximum effect listen to this in the background https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I
Friends, I want to tell you about a heist.
Forty years ago, a group of brilliant people at Xerox PARC built a cathedral of ideas. They gave us windows, icons, menus, pointers — and we said “thank you”, and we stopped there. We took their demonstration and made it our destination.
This has to be the biggest wasted opportunity in the history of the information society. Alan Kay didn’t build Smalltalk so you could just double-click on folders. He built it so an eight-year-old could inspect a running system, find out how it worked, and change it with immediate effect.
A computer is a medium for thought, not a static filing cabinet with pictures.
Somewhere between then and now, we committed a crime against ourselves. We took a system designed to make the user powerful and turned it into a system designed to make the user comfortable. We traded agency for familiarity. We exchanged a language with infinite expressiveness for a vocabulary of twelve gestures and a hamburger menu.
Think about what we now accept as normal:
- You cannot ask your computer “what just changed?”
- You cannot say “show me everything I was working on last Tuesday.”
- You cannot point at two things and say “connect these.”
- You cannot look at your own system and see what it is doing.
and no, I don’t mention or consider any advertising-related content
The desktop metaphor told us
- that computers work like “desks”
- Files go in “folders”
- Applications are separate rooms you visit,
Unfortunately, we believed it so hard that we forgot it was a metaphor — a simplification for beginners that became a prison for everyone, which became the biggest slow-motion disaster in the history of computing.
We live in a world of infinitely “copyable”, instantly “linkable”, universally addressable information, but we interact with it using a spatial model designed for paper that can only be in one place at a time. This is not a technical limitation. This is a failure of imagination that calcified into an industry.
Forty years ago, Steve Jobs invoked Orwell to sell you a beige box. But here’s the truth he didn’t mention: the (Orwellian) telescreen in 1984 wasn’t frightening because it watched you. It was frightening because it reduced the language. Newspeak didn’t add surveillance — it removed words. It made certain thoughts unthinkable by making them unspeakable.
This is exactly what the desktop metaphor has done; it has reduced the vocabulary in the name of simplicity at the cost of agency.
When the only verbs are “open“, “close“, “save“, “copy“, “paste” — when the only nouns are “files” and “folders“, and the only relationship is therefore one of containment, you cannot think thoughts that require richer grammar. You cannot imagine systems where objects talk to each other — where everything is queryable, or where the history of your own work is visible and navigable, or where the computer is not a tool you operate, but a partner in thought.
The Macintosh didn’t free us from Big Brother. It gave us a smaller cage with nicer furniture.
But here is the beautiful secret: the cage was never locked. The good ideas: Morphic. Smalltalk. Hypercard: they never went away. The notion that objects should be tangible — that you should be able to inspect a running system, modify it, or connect it to other things. The idea that a computer is not a appliance but an environment — a place where you live and think and build.
These ideas didn’t fail. They were abandoned.
Fortunately, abandonment is reversible. We do not need permission from Apple, Microsoft, or Google to build something better. We need only the courage to stop genuflecting at the altar of familiarity. So let us ask: what if we remembered what we were originally given ?
If you as an intellectual worker, had a system which had no “applications”, only capabilities that could be composed? If, in this system, every object knew how to describe itself, query itself, and link itself to other objects at your command? What advantage could you gain if your information system’s memory was your memory — searchable, associative, alive?
What if the screen was not a desktop but a viewport upon an infinite space where your work exists spatially, temporally, semantically? Where you could zoom in to the details and zoom out to the patterns? Where nothing was hidden in folders and everything was one question away?
This is not science fiction. This is archaeology. These systems existed. They were working. They were better conceived. They may have been plagued with low-quality graphics and fonts, but their semantic thesis was sound.
We just forgot.
The desktop metaphor is not wrong because it’s old. It’s wrong because it’s a ceiling disguised as a floor. It makes the simple things simple and the powerful things impossible. It was never right to begin with.
Let’s stop seeking to improve the local maxima and start climbing the global maxima, which is in easy view if we only stop to think and consider how best to interact with our media content and each other.
The computer is the most powerful thinking tool humanity has ever invented, and yet we have spent forty years using it to simulate the furniture on a desk from 1973. We can and must do better. The vocabulary of thought (actions on data) should be expanding, not shrinking.