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Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow
In William Gibson's 1992 novel "Idoru," a media executive describes her company's core audience: "Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections." It's an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes, but for how it captures the character of the speaker and her contempt for the people who made her fortune. It's also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV's role in a societal "dumbing down," that had brewed for a long time, at least since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely attributed not to JFK's ideas, but to Nixon's terrible TV manner.
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This is an incredibly glib response to the issue of why people or products haven’t jumped on the Gutenberg bandwagon.

I’m sure I’ve already raised several objections to this strawman explanation but I’ll continue to do so every time it gets raised by Matt.

Speaking for myself, I’ve been using computers since before there were true screen readers. I’ve adapted with every single change to that piece of software alone, to say nothing of operating system changes and application changes and even WordPress changes since 2005. I promise you, this is not about being afraid of change. And I seriously doubt “afraid of change” is the case for even half of the rest who haaven’t aadopted Gutenberg.

As of June 9, 2021, Gutenberg is still an efficiency and useability nightmare, despite the technical accessibility improvements that have happened over the last two years or so. I see this every day with my own usage, John’s own usage, (and he’s got just as much or even slightly more experience with computer usage than I do), with clients who use assistive technology of any kind, and even with clients without any disability who don’t spend all their time living in their WordPress dashboards.

I have a single client who truly does enjoy Gutenberg, and that’s because their only familiarity with using WordPress was through visual composer.

I’m not saying, and I’ve never said, that WordPress should never change. I get that WordPress needs to adapt, I get that it needs to modernize, and I have no problem with any of this.

What I have a problem with is that adaptation being poorly thought through and poorly managed, the complete disregard for tons of completely avoidable problems having been created during almost the entire development cycle of Gutenberg, the prioritization of dreams at the expense of technical realities, (see that whole discussion on GitHub about how Gutenberg is never going to be Microsoft Word on the web no matter how much that’s wanted by product designers), and then the pretense that none of this has happened and that everything is just peachy and it’s all about people just being afraid to change.

If this were really about being afraid of change or unwillingness to evolve, I would have quit using computers cerca 1995 around the time of quite literally a seismic shift in the way screen readers work under the hood and the way they present information to users. Or that other seismic shift in 1998/9 or so when MSAA became a thing. Or that other one in 2006 when Web 2.0 became a thing.

But I didn’t. And that should tell you something.