What screens want

It’s not about pixels.

It’s not about CSS or JavaScript or HTML or favicons or responsive design or plugins or patches or video loads or jpgs or gifs or pngs or pre rolls or the hundreds of other tools and techniques we all use.

It’s not about coding computer software. It’s about coding culture.

Frank Chimero knows the screen wants to see a better version of us. We have to remember the screen is a mirror.

It can reflect the best of us. Or the worst of us. It can reinforce the good or the bad. It’s our call.

Currently, our screens large and small (and on our wrists) are delivering some late era capitalism hopped-up version of the web where everyone’s personal data is sucked through the glass and sold to the highest bidder.

That’s what corporations want. It’s not what we want. We want to see a better version of us. (Not a cheaper, hustled, nickled-and-dimed version of ourselves.)

We can produce a version of the web that isn’t based on the following limiting values.

- Consolidation

- Privatisation

- Power

- Hierarchies

- Surveillance

We can make a world built on values that benefit us as a species, as a whole.

- Extensibility

- Openness

- Communication

- Community

- Freedom

This feels infinitely sensible. Instead of hegemony, power is distributed through the web across a multitude of uncontrollable networks. It’s how nature works so well.

We can use the efficiency and power of interfaces to help people do what they wish more quickly and enjoyably, and we can build business structures so that it’s okay for people to put down technology and get on with their life once their job is done. We can make people powerful again.

We make the tools and then the tools makes us. Why not make them so they serve us rather than limit us. Serve us rather than enslave us.