i have come to have a very negative reaction to high quality user-interfaces. not just dark patterns and stuff like that, but genuine user-interface quality.

UI quality is painstaking and expensive, much more than most backend functionality. i associate investment in UI with well-funded growth-seeking ventures, and i associate those kinds of ventures with traps, enshittification, neofeudalism. 1/

the world of UNIX command lines and emacs/vi-ish editors is, not unreasonably, associated with a kind of bearded-dude elitism, a caste of self-styled wizards not always very inclusive or kind to those who have better things than try master its arcana. 2/

but what has been touted to supplant that caste is capitalist "democratization", which has nothing to do with democracy at all. it just means widespread access to products in the role of often captive consumers, rather than agents who exercise meaningful control. 3/

i think it's probably more helpful expand the circle that enjoys the broad, flexible agency provided by cheap user-interface tools than to treat as progress expensively making capabilities very widely accessible, but always under the control of and largely captive to the people who paid the expense. /fin