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Published on: 2021-10-05
There's this story that's been floating around for a while, you've probably heard it by now. It claims that "normal" industries refer to their consumers as clients, buyers or patrons and that it's only in software industry and drug trafficking that term user is preferred. And while this might be true linguistically, the story draws connection from drugs abuse to exploitative practices of modern services such as Facebook or most of Google's offerings.
I agree that treating users as data points to sell to advertisers is bad. I agree that designing user experience so as to optimize for maximum attention capture is bad. I agree that practices and financial incentives of most tech giants are bad. But I do not think we should give up on the term user.
I'm a big fan of the Tron movies. I've recently watched an older YouTube video from Red Letter Media in which they review both Tron and Tron Legacy. What caught my attention was this particular comment from Jay:
One idea that I like in the first movie, it's kind of ahead of its time, that they don't really follow through on in Legacy, is the idea that every program is almost like an avatar for their user.
Section of the video where they go into details on this insight
Here Jay refers to the fact that each program in the Tron universe looks like their respective author. Additionally, each program refers to, almost with reverie, their author as the user. And this is what Jay gets wrong. Tron program referring to his user is not a prophetic prediction of dystopian present day internet where we are all represented by our avatars. It's instead reflection of the time when the movie was shot, and a reminder of our glorious past.
Computer literacy meant something different a few decades ago compared to today. Today it's all about navigating the swamp of social media. Ten years ago it was about using a proprietary and somewhat arbitrary set of office tools from Microsoft. But before that, there was a time when each computer user was also a tinkerer, a script writer, a small scale developer.
Users not only had control over their systems, they were the ones customizing it by writing custom code for it. Building an app to solve some particular issue wasn't a domain of hipster mobile app developers, it was a common way of using the computer. That's the link between programs in Tron and their users: it's a connection between a creation and its maker.
I like this idea of empowered users. Users that have agency. Users that take advantage of computers and use them to solve their particular set of problems. I like uncompromising users. Let's reclaim the term user, let's make it evocative of user rights, user freedoms, informed users. That's the kind of user I want to be. And that's the kind of experiences I'd like users of my software to have.