antipopper

Lena: You really had those sectarian Trotskyists going! They were so excited — they thought they were going to recruit you, and then you come out with that dirt on them. You really know how to push their buttons. [Pause.] Is that what you do with me?

Me: Yeah. I treat you like a Trotskyist sect.

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Meanwhile, the real Ben and Mena Trott were recently groping in the dark during that tornado about Movable Type 3 licensing. It feels wrong to add to the somewhat inbred blogospheric commentary on the matter, but I wanted to note that despite the sincere and heartfelt interview they recently gave about their business — how they want to listen to the immediate demands of their users, and so then wisely create tools that can be used in ways that they themselves never imagined — it’s clear from the mountain of recent misunderstandings that they still had no idea how people were actually using their software. (Three days ago, the original MT3 license unwittingly forced many existing users into the position of having to pay unusual amounts of money for less functionality if they wanted to upgrade.) In fact, the “leaky niche” of the product — a fairly flexible content management system that was originally intended for “developers”, but nonetheless branded like a shrink-wrapped product — almost guaranteed that this would happen. Ben and Mena’s error in judgement, and the resultant furore, were going to happen sooner or later, and now they’re scrambling to catch up with their irate users by altering the license and doing a little digging into the really-existing Movable Type landscape.

All of this serves to remind us that the crack in the world opened by the contradiction of “use” and “design” is, at base, uncontrollable. Ben and Mena have tried to handle it in good faith by trying to simultaneously

1. keep Movable Type’s commodity status (it’s no surprise that like their beloved Macintosh, it’s both a powerful brand and a largely proprietary system), and

2. focus on building MT as an “open” platform (rather than literally tacking on features as they’re requested).

The whole thing obviously spun out of control, which is more interesting than good or bad (although Ben and Mena might disagree). It caught up with them. Meanwhile, with something like Word, Microsoft try to handle the problem differently: they endlessly focus-group, and they find that most people don’t use most of the features, but that everyone uses a different subset of features. Chasing the ghost of an aggregated “user” — a postmodern Modulor Man — they then earnestly create a huge, bloated product that has every conceivable feature. The anti-niche. Thus, Microsoft Word’s presence in the world is an endless Dorian Gray-type moment, suspended in time, in which it is revealed as an over-engineered and overpriced monstrosity.

So if I had to choose between an inevitable gaffe like the current licensing scandal or the glacial torture of wordprocessing hell, I’d choose Ben and Mena’s current dilemma. Both express the limits of instrumentalist design in a world of flux, but some limits are preferable to others. But thankfully, we users don’t have to choose, at least on the blogging tools front, because there are plenty of tools to choose from, and a lot of the better ones aren’t proprietary. MT3 untenable? Move on. The avalanche of anger directed at Ben and Mena reminds me of Apple’s “iPod battery scandal” of last year: with both cases, the unusual frenzy of bitter complaints (rather than criticism) about getting “extorted by people who’ve sold out for big bucks” strikes me as the false naivete of consumer pettiness, underwritten by an unacknowledged fetsishism, rather than a critique of capital accumulation. Such overinvested apoplexy about a single boutique product can thus only spring from a weird, stalker-based kind of twisted brand loyalty, or even “loyal opposition”, which only arises with sexy cult brands like Apple and Six Apart’s Movable Type. And so ironically, the problem is again partly of Ben and Mena’s own making… The crack is out of control.