Most software is evil.
Hate is a complex emotion. It can destroy the hater while leaving the subject of the hate, the 'hatee' (a thief, rapist, or sadist) laughing all the way to the bank. It includes a component of dread not seen outside of physical torture or severe illness.
In the real world, evil wins. That's just the way things are.
Yet sometimes hate is the only appropriate emotion.
Computers are often so unusable, unreliable and outright defective that many users would happily sentence the programmers to death. It's one of the great outrages.
The main problem is communicating with the program, persuading it do its job.
This is by design.
Software firms want to make their users dependent by forcing them to learn proprietary interface methods and obscure functions, while making the users pay to update the software as often as possible.
Many Microsoft programmers deserve to be executed (after a fair trial, of course). Surprisingly, programmers from most other software companies are even worse.
They may think of their software as a community and a lifestyle choice, instead of a tool that exists to make a problem go away. Users should be happy to spend their time using their software for its own sake!
The worst but least obvious interface error is the keyboard itself.
Typists keep hitting the wrong #@%!& buttons, because they're too close together. That wouldn't happen if the keyboard had bigger keys set further apart, or barriers between the keys.
The evil joke is known as 'touch typing'. The keyboard was invented before touch-typing, but was later 'optimized' for this dark art, making it unsuitable for hunt and peck typists.
Learning touch-typing is one of the most difficult experiences a human can have. OK, that's an exaggeration. It's actually impossible.
Online user interfaces are even more arbitrary.
Like the rest of the modern world, the Net is still awfully primitive (see: PayPal). It's mostly defined by the things a user can't do.
Tracking visitors, web layouts, even recording what's onscreen (the cyberpolice is authorized to open fire under the DMCA), easy ways to backup data and to find new content are all possible in theory.
Things that should be trivial are made impossible for most non-experts.
It would be possible to make these techniques easily available, but each new software tool must be learned at great pain. Instead, we have viral social media trying to collect as much user data as possible.
Programmers go out of their way to worsen the experience by any means imaginable.
Around 2004 came the 'advanced' web, full of 'rich' media and 'streaming' content, designed to further centralize information management. Since then online user controls have been stealthily reduced to make users more dependent.
In many ways, the future will always suck.
Inefficiency will increase forever as society becomes more complex.
Users won't even notice the inefficiencies anymore. They will become the expected standard, like how dictionaries don't include brand names.
At the moment, the solution to get along with others is quite simple: learn to lie more. Or, to put it politely, be more diplomatic. Good manners took most of human history to evolve, but they can be forgotten much faster.
Self-denial, social taboos, delayed gratification; it's the only way to share living space with people with very different goals and outlooks.
Unfortunately, even that won't work anymore when diversity increases faster than new rules can be learned.
This can already be seen online. The Net is fracturing like the real world.
Many Japanese web services are only available to users with Japanese email accounts. All social networks invent their own dialects.
The first virtual nation will start out as an exclusive online video game. The first virtual war will start not long after.
Ideally, there should be only one program in the universe, a standard format to connect all data. It would simplify all human knowledge like a loosely linked nervous system.
Instead of HTML, the web will be broken into data atoms that can be reassembled as needed (each element should still be text-readable).
All files would be described through a universal comment layer. Every link would have outside descriptions. The first step would be self-updating, text-based link lists.
In the future, everyone should have their own mediated online interface. Why can't users evolve their own programs, instead of being forced to use software controlled by secretive corporations?
Software should automatically simplify itself, evolving in response to the user, by backing up and removing old content, and sorting bookmarks and file hierarchies. Automatic sorting systems could create common task folders.
Eventually, all common tasks would be described in flowcharts, with the goal of fully automating them.
Instead of repetitive mouse clicks, software would work much faster with face scanners, muscle interfaces, and eventually thought interfaces.
When inventing general-use software, the designers shouldn't even talk to each other at first, but communicate by text to organize their thoughts. Linear communication is low-bandwidth. The participants should figure out their hidden assumptions.
The penultimate goal of computer science (before the creation of a human-level AI) would be nothing less than life management and control software.
It would set the user's schedule, track every activity, test their personality and then try to change it.
Every user would be constantly analyzed and compared to standard personality profiles, based on their interests and habits.
Everything in the user's environment needs to be transparent and user serviceable. This even applies to their physical environment.
It might mean living in a glorified living box, with exposed utility pipes and a stilt-mounted foundation: paradise compared to how most people have lived throughout history.
One problem with integrated life control software is that it could easily be used by the powers-that-be to monitor and even enslave their subjects.
The only way to prevent these records from being successfully subpoenaed would be to encrypt them. This could be done by auto-compilation: making the life-management software totally dependent on each user's personality and habits. The files and settings would make no sense to anyone else.
Eventually, privacy concerns will of course become irrelevant.
If history is any guide, most people will want to join the Borg Collective.
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