Post #2330121

2026-04-25 13:35 UTC

@larsmb@mastodon.online If you find an apple watch useful for monitoring a medical condition you have found that it would be useful to have a 24/7 method for monitoring a medical condition. When you credit that "use case" to the apple watch, you legitimise everything else it does (and can potentially do) This is not a position of privilege, it's a position of pushing for and expecting products which take real purposes seriously and not legitimising See-what-you-can-do-with-this-as-a-Service for free

Replies (2)

@brib@bribstodon.xyz 2026-04-25 15:40

@fasterandworse@hci.social @larsmb@mastodon.online Tech seems to have a malaise that invents a shiny new tech first (sometimes borrowing from famous sci-fi books like "Please Do Not Create The Torment Nexus For The Love Of God, This Isn't Even Subtext It's In The Title For F's Sake") and then tries to come up with a reason to use it. A Wired article from 2015 even calls this out! (https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/): Apple decided to make a watch and only then set out to discover what it might be good for (besides, you know, displaying the time). Then apparently the company decided that watches were good at getting us away from smartphones (!) (https://www.businessinsider.com/why-apple-made-the-apple-watch-2015-4). LLMs seem to be similar, they were kinda originally made as a digital God and now they're being reworked into a productivity/coding/labour displacement tool. Of course, if you don't have a tonne of resources to hand, you kinda have to work with the artifacts that exist... even if they suck. And the people with resources are too busy building digital Gods to actually look at problems like "someone needs a cheap way to get their health monitored". So the result is "we can use tech for accessibility purpose" even though I'd much rather see accessibility as a core concern to design around rather than something baked-on as a use-case of the Torment Nexus

Open ##2330122
@larsmb@mastodon.online 2026-04-25 15:41

@fasterandworse@hci.social Sure. I agree. And yet the reality is that these instances are often the first time someone gains that ability that was previously inaccessible to them. Or even realizes for the first time that this was an option.

Open ##2330123