The Quiet Betrayal
The most corrosive trend in modern digital design is not incompetence but intent. What appears as poor user experience is, in truth, meticulous engineering. Today's interfaces aren't failing to help you find what you seek—they're deliberately preventing you from finding it too quickly.
The Gruen Transfer has escaped the shopping mall and colonised our screens. Each search box that returns irrelevant results, each feed that buries friends' posts beneath algorithmic noise, each marketplace that conflates categories—these aren't bugs but features, carefully crafted to extend your journey and divert your attention.
This represents a profound inversion of technology's promise. What began as tools to augment human capability have transformed into labyrinths designed to capture and monetise human attention. The expertise once devoted to making interfaces intuitive is now deployed to make them just confusing enough to be profitable.
The greatest sleight of hand isn't that we're being manipulated, but that we've been conditioned to blame ourselves when we can't find what we're looking for. As if it were our failure of navigation rather than a deliberately engineered disorientation.