On Cybernetics

This was originally posted as a thread on X/Twitter, written in the span of 2 hours early this morning. I’m re-posting it here, so it’s easier and more accessible for people to read.

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I’d like this to look less at the UI Design and more at the UX Design. The problem is less about the visual design hierarchy, which directs a user’s attention, and more about choice architectures available to users.

Which options are you giving me? Are you forcing me to do something I don’t want to do? How easy is it to reverse a decision?

All-or-Nothing/Never Back Down choice architectures do not offer meaningful choice to the user. This diminishes their sense of agency. It makes them feel forced.

Maybe you’re not giving them a choice, and in the moment they don’t care. But maybe that’s because they don’t know what’s really happening. Yet if they did know what was really happening, they’d never do the thing you want them to do.

In that situation they chose to do something but they didn’t know what they were choosing. This is a lack of informed consent.

Good parents are trusted to make decisions for their children because children don’t know enough about the world to be able to make informed decisions for themselves. They can’t be expected to understand the consequences of their decisions until they’re older.

It’s the parents’ obligation to make decisions that protect their children precisely because of this. Children (and some disabled people) are the only ones whose decisions should be managed by adults.

Obviously, there are plenty of bad parents and just plain horrible people who make bad decisions for their kids.

But no adult has the right to manage (or manipulate) another adult’s decisions, by arbitrarily or manipulatively limiting choices, intentionally withholding critical information, manipulating users’ expectations or using other nefarious tactics.

It’s unacceptable for someone to make decisions on someone else’s behalf because everyone should be able to direct the outcomes of their own lives.

If they can’t do that, then on what basis would we be holding them accountable? They’re not responsible since they didn’t actively choose to do it. That’s how some people get away with doing very bad things: by pleading insanity.

Rational choices are made when you understand the consequences of your actions, you weigh the pros and cons, and you decide what’s best for you.

Yet, we are mortal beings who will die someday and it’s impossible for an individual to make a decision that considers all of the possible outcomes.

Many outcomes are unknown or unknowable, and everyone has biases. There are many other kinds of biases— institutional bias, publication bias, etc. Your biases make you, you. Our collective biases make us, us.

The people I’ve seen who were most effective at making decisions had values, principles and personal philosophies that they used to help speed up decision-making. They’d spent many years crafting those values, principles and personal philosophies.

Yet they were also able to recognize when their way of doing things needed to change. They had a way of acknowledging it and deciding to do something about it.

If a system is always making decisions for you, then on what basis will you grow or change? On what premise? By whose values, principles and personal philosophies? Well, the designer of the system, of course.

The more complex the system, the more of the designer’s personal philosophy is incorporated into it.

The complexity is not only comprised of the hardware and software affordances, but also the organizational, cultural, political, social, psychological, medical, economic affordances of the company and countries within which they exist.

Some designers love and appreciate complex systems because they’re like philosophical treatises or entire worlds, with grammar, syntax, logic, characters, narratives, goals, challenges, currencies.

Some designers love designing complex systems. Yet when we look at the career trajectories of most designers, and at corporate organizational structures, almost no designer has the privilege of making decisions about an entire complex product.

Only authoritarian, overly-privileged designers are in positions to make the enormous number of decisions that get made in order to create complex technological systems.

This style of employee should not go unchecked. Why? We live in a democracy and this style of leadership is incompatible with our laws and way of life.

It’s also strikingly incompatible with people’s expectations of each other, our systems and… ‘the system.’

People expect products to be designed for them. They expect products to solve their real problems. Most of the time, those problems are emotional. And the way a person decides whether a product will solve their problem or not— that’s emotional too.

People who openly acknowledge the emotional dimension of product design, policy design, system design, and who openly acknowledge the emotional dimension of our own (and others’) decision-making, can see how cybernetic systems come to feel how they feel when we interact with them.

Governance systems are cybernetic systems. We want our governance systems to be designed intentionally, based on how we want to feel as citizens of this country. Not as a function of happenstance, or the power divide amongst political parties, or vacation schedules.

I like the smoothness of an elegant and well-designed system. I like low friction. It’s calming. But do I ever experience those systems in real life? No. They’re the ideal Platonic forms of systems that only exist in my mind. All systems are broken, in one way or another.

When you focus on this fact for too long, you start to get irritable. What do you do about that? Create the aesthetic experience of smoothness by controlling yourself, not your surroundings. You are the only one you can try to control.

The fact is, none of us are fully in control of ourselves. And when many of us experience aesthetic un-smoothness, we use negative coping mechanisms to deal with how irritable it makes us feel. We’re trying to get away from the bad feelings so we numb ourselves.

But when you’re numb you can’t solve anything because you can’t feel anything. You’re not calibrated to the feelings anymore— the feelings you intentionally distanced yourself from.

Paying attention to, describing, navigating and managing the feelings is how you solve the problems. It’s painful for all of us. It’s painful AND difficult for some of us.

No one is born with words that describe how they feel. Yet without words, we aren’t able to manage our emotions. Look for patterns amongst body sensations, the way you express yourself differently when you feel differently, the words people use in connection with those things.

Once you have labels for physical feelings, you can look for patterns. What kinds of situations make you feel good, not good? Once you see a pattern you can make a list of coping mechanisms to use in the future when that kind of situation comes up.

The smoother it feels, the lighter you feel, the less you have to worry about. The calmer you feel in your body.

It’s not only our ongoing relationships with broken technology systems that makes us irritable. It’s also our interactions with other people. In places like this app, we’re exposed to people with many, many different views, because they’ve had very different life experiences.

My experiences are not more valid than theirs, nor are they less valid. If I want to do something to create the aesthetic sense of smoothness for myself in a situation, but it creates turbulence for someone else, is that ok?

Ethical emotional intelligence considers more than just how each of us feels emotionally, in the moment. It also considers the nature of our relationship and of this specific interaction, and it also considers the true motivations each of us has for interacting.

Did we choose to be here? Were we forced to be here? How can we be here peacefully?

Am I obligated to give equal consideration to everyone on this app [X/Twitter]? No. They can express themselves freely, but I’m not legally obligated to listen. I can mute or block them.

What if I block everyone I disagree with, or who interrupts the smoothness?

I used to think algorithmic internet tunnels of confirmation bias were bad. Maybe at one point they were. But today in the US, I don’t know if I think that anymore.

We’ve given up on making good faith arguments to authentically persuade each other.

And although the content of our arguments is almost entirely comprised of ego-plays and nonverbal emotional expressions, they go unacknowledged. Most of the time we keep fighting because we aren’t addressing the thing we’re really fighting about.

Plenty of communication and negotiation frameworks exist. That’s not the problem.

It’s that we don’t have an etiquette for how to disagree with strangers on the internet. It’s not just because the internet is relatively new, or because people behave differently online than offline. It’s because suddenly we’re connected to almost everyone else on Earth.

Who gets to decide the etiquette for Earth? If we don’t have etiquette we can never get to laws, because we won’t talk to each other long enough to write them.