Seeing the Machine That Truly Exists

Reading response to Olia Lialina, Rich User Experience, UX and the Desktopization of War

In our everyday online environment, “experience” is frequently elevated as the ultimate pursuit: seamless interaction, friendly interfaces, natural language processing— as if technology can only be considered “human-centered” when it minimizes user thought and intervention as much as possible. In Rich User Experience, UX and the Desktopization of War, Olia Lialina retraces the early Web 2.0 concept of “Rich User Experience” (RUE) and extends this analysis to interface “design” in drone warfare, posing a critical question:

How did we gradually surrender the programmability and manipulability of computers to the illusion of “experience”?

Much like American Artist’s critique of “white screens” and “anti-blackness” in Black Gooey Universe, Lialina views the increasing invisibility of interfaces as a dangerous, ideological process—the more “seamless” and “natural” an interface becomes, the easier it is to obscure the logic and power structures behind it, leading to deeper alienation or even misuse.

Why Did User Experience Become More “Impoverished” with Web 2.0?

Lialina begins by recalling the early 2000s hype surrounding Rich User Experience (RUE): with the rise of technologies like AJAX and Flash, web pages could “automatically load new content,” interactions increasingly resembled desktop software, and users no longer needed to manually submit forms or refresh pages. Accompanying this shift was the emergence of new “self-expression channels”—blogs and social media platforms—promising that anyone could “easily” become an internet content creator.

However, she argues that beneath this seemingly “rich” experience lay the erosion of a more “native” web experience: hand-coding HTML, building personal websites, manually linking images and text, and designing one’s own visual and informational architecture. The earlier internet resembled an open “ecological field” where users could actively participate and experiment, whereas Web 2.0 concealed these processes, prioritizing convenience and speed at the cost of people’s awareness of how websites fundamentally worked.

This critique closely echoes Black Gooey Universe: when interfaces become standardized, blank, and excessively minimalistic, users remain unaware of the underlying mechanisms, confined to clicking buttons within a predefined framework. In Black Gooey Universe, the dominance of the “white screen” symbolized the erasure of the “black background”—a suppression of complexity and alternative possibilities. Similarly, Lialina focuses on the consequences of “automation and desktopization,” arguing that beneath the smoothness of UX, people have lost an active, hands-on understanding of the internet.

Drawing from her work at the Geocities Research Institute, Lialina reflects on countless personal homepages from the ’90s and early 2000s—sites bursting with GIF collages, handmade HTML, and experimental layouts, rich with individual expression and social meaning. Yet today, few regard these creations as true “cultural heritage.” Within the narrative of RUE (and later, Web 2.0), “richness” came to signify dynamic scripts and sleek design rather than genuine user creativity.

This parallels many aspects of today’s internet: while we have an abundance of social media platforms, user expression has been standardized into “likes,” heart emojis, and thumbs-up buttons. The DIY, deeply personal expressions of the past—like the infamous “peeman.gif”—have gradually disappeared. What appears to be a kaleidoscopic digital culture may, in reality, be more monotonous than before, as emotional expression is flattened, interfaces are pre-packaged, and users are constrained within frameworks designed by tech companies.

User Experience as the “Ultimate Interface”

As UX terminology has become increasingly universal, it now encompasses everything from buttons, icons, and menus to layout and workflows. Traditional HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) concepts—such as input, output, context, front-end, and back-end—have been blurred into the all-encompassing term “user experience.” This has made the technical nature of interfaces even more invisible:

Users begin to “forget” that what they see and interact with is ultimately a collection of computational instructions.
Focus on programmability and system modification has diminished.

This aligns with the critique in Black Gooey Universe—just as the white screen creates the illusion of a neutral background, the over-naturalization of UX conceals the political and technical choices embedded in interface design. While users “enjoy” an experience, they remain unaware of how much control they have already relinquished.

Lialina cites Don Norman and Marc Hassenzahl, noting that UX designers do more than just make interfaces “look good and feel intuitive”—they actively “shape user narratives.” She highlights examples like Siri’s tone, the Paro robotic pet, and the playful phrasing of Tumblr’s shutdown button, all of which create a relaxed, immersive atmosphere that keeps users from noticing the underlying complexities of computation and data collection.

This user illusion has certain benefits (it makes technology easier to adopt), but its deeper risk is this: users lose familiarity with command-line logic, no longer have the freedom to undo actions, and in some cases, cannot even permanently delete data—unless they physically destroy a hard drive. (The article references The Guardian’s government-ordered destruction of computers storing the Snowden files.) In effect, the domain of user control has been dramatically reduced.

What Can We Still Control?

One key metaphor in the article is “Undo” as the last symbol of reversible computing. In traditional desktop systems, Undo/Redo functions allow users to explore freely, make mistakes, and modify actions—because the system still grants them the ability to go back. Yet, in mobile app design and immersive UX environments, the Undo function is often weakened or completely removed, meaning user actions become increasingly irreversible. You are forced to follow the workflow dictated by the system, with no alternative routes.

Similarly, Black Gooey Universe presents the black interface as a space for modification and exploration—where users can see and intervene in system processes. The white interface, by contrast, obscures these possibilities beneath a layer of artificial smoothness. Lialina’s discussion of the disappearance of Undo, and the awkwardness of mobile devices’ shake to undo, underscores how technology is stripping users of the ability to interpret and control their own actions.

When people wish to truly erase a file, even “emptying the trash” is not enough for authorities (who may insist on physically shattering a hard drive). This paradox where software transparency is so lacking that physical destruction becomes the only reliable method highlights the extreme opacity of modern computing. When system functions are dictated solely by corporations and institutions, users are left with only the most primitive means of control: physical force.

When discussing military interfaces, the article expands into a broader critique: “obscuration/masking/abstraction” has become a routine operation across internet platforms. Whether it’s Google Maps pixelating sensitive locations or social media offering “auto-enhancement” filters, the political and social implications behind these actions often go unexamined.

Just as military facilities can be hidden, so too can “undesirable figures or content,” ultimately creating an illusion of “clean order.”
Yet, this act of obscuration is not merely a digital filter applied with a single click—it involves deeper questions: Who has the authority to decide what gets hidden, and how?

Olia Lialina distinguishes between the gamification of war and the desktopization of war. The former refers to making drone operations feel like a video game, while the latter integrates the logic of familiar “desktop interactions” into the process of warfare—turning acts of killing into routine “delete” or “edit” commands. Both may lead to a similar form of alienation, yet desktopization embeds itself even more deeply into the language and workflow of modern operating systems (clicking, erasing, previewing, etc.).

When UX designers are drawn into military applications, will lethal actions be packaged as something as simple as “just brushing over an image in Photoshop”?

When “Invisibility” Becomes a Systemic Issue

Just as Black Gooey Universe critiques the whitening of screens as an erasure of complexity and alternative possibilities, Lialina’s article argues that UX and the “desktopization of war” similarly obscure the reality behind interfaces, rewriting and concealing crucial information. Both works highlight a critical point: when a design logic is naturalized and universally accepted as “best practice,” the erasure of complexity and diversity, along with ethical responsibility, becomes more deeply embedded and harder to recognize.

For American Artist, the “black screen” represents a space of plasticity and potential.
For Olia Lialina, the “DIY homepage” and “handmade GIFs” symbolize a past where users had more agency.
Both recognize that the smoother and more seamless a surface appears, the more likely it is concealing mechanisms that reject uncertainty, diversity, and moral reflection. Whether it’s social media eliminating negative reaction buttons or drone interfaces automatically obscuring footage of casualties, the same logic prevails: hiding anything that is “ugly, complicated, difficult to understand, or requires thought” in order to maintain a “pleasant experience.”

Personal Reflections

Technological interfaces are increasingly designed to hide themselves, steering users toward an illusion of “automation” and “natural interaction.”
The disappearance of functions like Undo, along with the standardization of emotional expression on social media, signals a shift toward a more passive and pre-structured digital experience.
As Lialina suggests, perhaps we need to revisit the spirit of the ’90s web—reclaiming interfaces as spaces of participation, DIY experimentation, and social meaning, rather than fully surrendering to the illusion of a “seamless experience.”

When compared to Black Gooey Universe, one striking realization emerges: whether it’s the shift from black to white screens or the proliferation of UX discourse, both reflect the same fundamental issue in the digital age: how interfaces serve as power structures, burying complex political, social, and ethical dimensions beneath a surface of “smooth” interaction. We must learn to see beyond the “rich user experience” and the white interface, to recognize the real machine behind it—one that can be dismantled, questioned, and broken. That, ultimately, is the key to retaining agency and critical thought.