Overview

Am I a man or a machine? There is no ambiguity in the traditional relationship between man and machine: the worker is always, in a way, a stranger to the machine he operates, and alienated by it. But at least he retains the precious status of alienated man. The new technologies, with their new machines, new images and interactive screens, do not alienate me. Rather, they form an integrated circuit with me. J. Baudrillard, Xerox and Infinity

In design, the main aim of interactivity has become user-friendliness. Although this ideal is accepted in the workplace as improving productivity and efficiency, its main assumption, that the way to humanize technology is to close the gap between people and machines by designing transparent interfaces, is problematic, particularly as this view of interactivity has spread to less utilitarian areas of our lives. According to Virilio (1995): Interactive user-friendliness ... is just a metaphor for the subtle enslavement of the human being to intelligent machines; a programmed symbiosis of man and computer in which assistance and the much trumpeted dialogue between man and the machine scarcely conceal the premises:... the total, unavowed disqualification of the human in favor of the definitive instrumental conditioning of the individual (135).

This enslavement is not, strictly speaking, to machines, nor to the people who build and own them, but to the conceptual models, values, and systems of thought the machines embody. User-friendliness helps naturalize electronic objects and the values they embody. For example, while electronic objects are being...