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NOTE
I realize a lot of the appeal here is also the fact that I have the freedom to allow some creativity and difficulty into my life. I’m not always pressed by others. I have no children. My job is stable. If these things were present in my life, maybe the appeal of the difficult device would be less?
But I do also think there’s a mindset here, where things are accepted and interpreted. A roll with the punches to take things in. “Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet”
“the modern home dweller is ready to cosset his ennui by plunging into an easy chair, whose form is the perfect match to the form of his body.”
Difficult devices
As we move towards increased ease of things I’m wondering the place of what I’ll call a difficult device. A difficult device is a device that makes your life harder, possibly arbitrarily (with the promise of thus making it more interesting or maybe not, just generally making it worse.)
In terms of a useless and deliberately “difficult device” I was wondering about an object you bought, that was just genuinely irritating (like a box, with personality, powered by AAA batteries that occasionally yelped like a goat, rising in decibels till coddled (shook rhythmically) for 3 minutes).
By welcoming it into your life, by choice, you impose a challenge. From the outset it might make things worse. (Not seeking a baby connection, but this simple device is what I just came up with).
What kind of consumer would bring this chaotic, ritualistic device into their life, and say if it’s 1 in 200, or popular with children (like a Tamagotchi craze) and the culture that would spring around this pain in the ass. People might develop friendships from this suffering device.
Also thinking of barbed seating (for humans, and pigeons), like of like deterrents for skating (nubs that don’t permit grinding.)
Failing Watch
I had an older smart watch which must have slammed into something which altered its function. The display started to fail.
This failing watch display became this “difficult device”. Occasionally my hand literally flashed with max brightness, fully white as the screen glitched. It was like a transponder. At night it was like I have flash photography going on. Like getting a wristbound Betelgeuse teetering on supernova effect for real.
Oddly I enjoyed it, even though it’s was the clear death knell it was making the interface with me a bit chaotic and fun.
NOTE
I was thinking about this, like “slap repairs”. “Percussive maintenance.” Slight overlap with old computer systems, where you felt as if you sped up computer loading through rapidly shaking the mouse (my understanding this is a mix of folk wisdom, placebo and in some cases it actually working - owing to early programming of refresh loops tied to event loops, but who knows). The Star Wars pod races always stuck with me, probably as one of the greatest contributions of that sequence. I loved how the racers would encounter damage and be forced to slap repair the pods mid race. Or droid climbing out of the vessel and bringing tools to the engines.
I replaced this watch, because eventually the screen completely blacked out. I so missed this chaotic function, that I wanted to program my own watch app which would simulate this failure.
Glasses
Glasses have are an exploitable interfaces for difficult devices. You can have a pair of lens that deliberately degrade vision, instead of improving it (you imagine this is possibly the case for some fashionable types.) Lenses can warp reality, or deliberately cause focus loss. Would you wear these?
NOTE
When I was in college I was prescribed glasses. I went through the process of purchasing a pair that worked and suited my face. It as in autumn. I recall driving home, and seeing all of the leaves in sickening sharpness. The colorful, impressionistic blend was lost to me. I wanted my vision blended with broken imagination. This may be dramatic, and I’m sure I’d acclimate but I never wore them again.
However, when I see someone with glasses subconsciously I am aware of the world they inhabit and how they see me. Is it so clear and detailed that they see all my flaws? Imagine if they wore the difficult device glasses and they so you wonderfully, with multiple twisted heads, blue skin and blurry eyes and a bit of them completing their vision of you.
My two favorite pair of sunglasses have minor defects which I love. As the result of being sat on, one lens sits higher that the other on my face. The other has the opposite problem, where a a bolt has fractured, leaving the lens dangling slightly from the frame (like a tooth ready to pulled.) I actually prefer both of these to the original pristine versions. They show a sign of wear that I appreciate. I’m also periodically fixated on them, applying adjustments to their level while at a red light etc.
Chopsticks
I got in the habit of having various bento boxes for lunch. Since I have my own chopsticks, I always ended up with extra as the result of the purchase. So, I ended up using them, often unnecessarily, for other meals since they were close at hand. Then what I did was only use my nondominant hand, a truly difficult device.
I realize this sounds strange. It’s not a very social way to eat (though it should be) so I contain this to private meals.
But have you ever eaten beans with your nondominant hand with chopsticks? I have. You have to basically work for every single bean. Every bean is considered, and held aloft.
When is enough with food? When you’ve tasted something, isn’t further taste at some point just a matter of filling oneself? How is the process of eating bean by bean, different than eating beans en-masse?
Breaking Leg
In a society obsessed with difficult devices, that society might attempt to walk on stilts (even better if unevenly matched.) You can also see an argument for breaking your leg deliberately, just to make walking different and more challenging. It isn’t as if your leg is malfunctioning, because that doesn’t exist as we see with brilliant people with a variety of manners of walking. It’s just opening up a new territory.
Mount Analog
Reading, “Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing” by René Daumal and funnily above thought I had is is touched on.
“If only scientists of today instead of constantly inventing new means to make life easier, would devote their resourcefulness to producing instruments for rousing man out of his torpor!”
A difficult device as I call it, causing torpor or relieving? The text goes on to list some of these inventions:
“…my leisure to inventing and constructing such in- struments. My brain was in a fever. I immediately invented some appalling devices: a pen for facile writers which spattered or blotted every five or ten minutes; a tiny portable phonograph, equipped with an earpiece like those on hearing aids, and which would cry out at the most unexpected moments, ‘Who do you think you are?’ ; a pneumatic cushion that I called ‘the soft pillow of doubt,’ and which deflated unexpectedly under the sleeper’s head; a mirror whose curvature was designed—and what trouble it gave me—so as to reflect any human face like a pig’s head. There were many more. “
Augmenting Intellect
I have come to find that Doug Engelbart provides and example of a difficult device in his Augmenting Intellect paper.
It is a pencil, with a brick strapped to it.
Brains of power equal to ours could have evolved in an environment where the combination of artifact materials and muscle strengths were so scaled that the neatest scribing tool (equivalent to a pencil, possible had a shape and mass as manageable as a brick would be to us-assuming that our muscles were not specially conditioned to deal with it. We fastened a pencil to a brick and experimented. Figure 2 shows the results, compared with typewriting and ordinary pencil writing. With the brick pencil, we are slower and less precise. If we want to hurry the writing, we have to make it larger. Also, writing the passage twice with the brick-pencil tires the untrained hand and arm.
He uses this to discuss how interfaces (in this case, a “bad” one) influence the way we think.
Clearly a difficult device results in more difficult writing.
Silver, illuminated hand
rel:Subtle fashion - pins
I had this idea to make life interesting. You purchase a metallic glove (similar to what you would get from a tinman costume). For most this would be an embarrassing thing to wear. So I almost want to see if I could get away with wearing one for an entire day, but concealing it. Specifically as a challenge.
Like I was afflicted with something. I might occasionally flash a gleam of silver at someone walking around, and when they notice I’ll give them a look.
This idea was really improved with the thought that you could also strap a flashlight that is always turned on to your hand for this experiment. You’d be struggling to conceal that light all day, perhaps light leaking out of the threads in the fabric of your clothes.
Padded Book
Thinking of the ease of handling a modern book. It must not do.
A standard size book, padded with pages. So a small book, say even a novella, would be 3000 pages and hardback. The text area would have no margins, or have varying white space density on pages.
All books from this manufacturer, would be an equal number of pages. They’d have a service number you could call, if the number of pages in your book were altered (age, rips). To honor the difficulty of the device for this reader, the process of restoring the pages would be done through an outstandingly obtuse automatic telephone line system.
The books pages might be gossamer, and flaking. They crumble at the touch, or streak ink when touched (getting upon the fingers) making the ordeal of replacement necessary.
Defective Item
A difficult device could be a device that you buy with the expectation that it is broken. Often this state (like when buying refurbished) but you would buy this difficult device with full knowledge that what you are to buy is broken and will cause you a path of challenge.
Thought
It strikes me that a refurbished furby is likely a thing, and possibly a difficult device? The word play here, -furbished. Possibly a tired joke in there.