That’s why it’s unsatisfying to see you reduce and implicitly deride the massive amounts of creative, productive and worthwhile online activity that lead to equally productive, creative and worthwhile offline activity, all without being primarily programmatic in nature. It’s a cheap bait-and-switch to talk about movies and Farmville instead of sites like Ravelry for knitters or the collective wisdom seen every day at Ask MetaFilter. (Yes, coders built and maintain those sites, and long may that continue; I don’t fear for their future.)

The context for this discussion is twofold: the release of a particular electronic gizmo that combines research-lab ideas about UI and filesystems with mass-market heft and appeal, together with the assertion that the underlying controls on developer access render anyone who might use that electronic gizmo not a ‘maker’. I think that’s far more elitist and cramped and meaner-spirited than my belief that it’s time to get the superannuated crap of ‘computing’ out of the way of people for whom it is demonstrably more a hindrance than a help. It perpetuates a theology, intentional or not, in which the only way to technological salvation comes through code. (The snarky answer to your point about programmatic thinking is ‘easy for you to say’; the less snarky answer is that even granting its ease, I’ve come to question its necessity as a gatekeeper. Particularly when the real gatekeepers are much more mundane and insidious.)

When I was 16, I wanted the latest and greatest shiniest tech, and its flakiness was part of the deal. (Young car enthusiasts lust after Alfa Romeos for the same reason.) When I was 26, I wanted to refine the tools at my disposal to do the jobs I wanted of them the best way possible, even if that meant wasting time on those refinements when I should have been doing the jobs. Now I mainly want technology to just work, for the greatest good, for the greatest number.

I noticed this comment from Martha Lane Fox on her digital inclusion work for the British government: “I say, don’t talk about the technology first. The internet can be scary for people. That’s why I’ve tried to say to people,’let’s flip this idea around’. If people see for themselves what the internet can do, then they will take it on from there themselves.”

No single device or manufacturer or website or coder is going to achieve this, nor will it replace community support (for all values of ‘support’) but those which muffle the insistant self-proclaiming voice of Technology are pointing the way ahead. Let’s see that done with open standards on open platforms.

[added Apr 6: closing the thread now, so I can move on to other stuff, but I'm grateful for the responses, particularly Michal's. You do fine work, sir: more power to your elbow.]

Thanks for all your responses, I appreciate that you pay attention to comments on your site. Not everyone does!

Anyway, a reaction to this: “What I meant by ‘guild mentality’ is something much broader than your example: it’s the underlying principle that productive or creative interactions with computing devices have to be tied to programmatic acts.” I understand that creativity etc. is broader than programmatic acts, but the fact is that the entire context for this discussion is the release of an electronic gizmo. You may be able to write on it, paint on it, communicate with it, play with pictures on it, or learn with it (paraphrasing Ian), but you can do that stuff with any number of other tools, while coding is the *specific type of creative act* that lets you change the terms of this particular device itself. Or would, if it was allowed.

This is why I’m unsatisfied with your “open up people” phrase that’s gotten so much attention for this post. It’s so broadly scoped as to be irrelevant to the thing being discussed. The iPad is not an inflection point, it lives on a long bendy line that stretches from Marconi to Engelbart to Bricklin to Atkinson to moot, a long hard slog towards making more things possible for more people. The thing *I’m* frustrated with is the recent willingness of talented, creative thinkers to throw up their hands and give up on the idea that programmatic thinking is a relatively easy skill to acquire – Ian’s got this in spades on his post, and it’s completely shitty and self-defeating. “Wah, not everyone knows how to manage memory in Obj-C so here’s a great new device that only lets you buy movies and play farmville.”

What will it take to help people understand that open platforms don’t require every user to also be a rockstar developer, but do allow for the possibility that people might help one another? There could be so many more interesting relationships here than consumer-to-app-store.

What I meant by ‘guild mentality’ is something much broader than your example: it’s the underlying principle that productive or creative interactions with computing devices have to be tied to programmatic acts. (Ian expands upon this over at his place.) Your ‘entry-level’ examples of scripts and macros still count as ‘computing’ — and I’d consider them much more advanced than posting to a forum, setting up a Facebook page, starting a blog, tracing your family tree, arranging a delivery from Tesco. (And the Marvel app doesn’t actually stop people from trading comics.)

We’ve reached the era of second-order curiosity and engagement, and about time too. Now the technology has to adapt to it.

That kind of device doesn’t fit into your life? Fine. Pretty sure that nobody’s taking away your preferred development machine. It probably doesn’t fit into mine either, and neither does a Kindle or iPhone. But it has the potential to fit into the lives of people who are currently locked out from the online world, and I now consider that more important than developer lock-in. (Perhaps such devices serve a diminishing demographic. It doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t exist.)

I agree that Cory is a bit over the top, but the points he makes aren’t completely off the mark. The Marvel Comics thing, for example, is a pretty good deconstruction of the importance of sharing and trading for comics fans. Overall I think the saddest aspect of the App Store is that it’s a suboptimal political arrangement for developers and coders. It routes most potential creative flows for the device through Apple, and we’ve all read the accounts of overworked app reviewers misunderstanding what they’re seeing and denying releases for specious reasons after weeks or months of silent limbo.

I don’t agree that this is a “guild” concern, by the way. One of my coworkers recently got an Android phone. We were working on a project that required 24 hour monitoring of a system, and so he wrote up a tiny Python script to alert him up with a spoken message if something in the system went awry. Python is a simple scripting language, worlds away from the caricature of the disassembling “maker” with a soldering iron, even recommended as a learning environment for children. This is entry-level stuff that’s never been possible on any of the “i-” devices, more akin to the way that people excitedly write spreadsheet macros for themselves than to real programming. This is the kind of consumer/producer that the iPad shuts out: casually curious, motivated by specific, small-scale needs, and nowhere close to the Make Magazine douchebag you parody above.

A few folks brought new iPads to an event I attended yesterday, so I’ve had a chance to play with it. It’s a completely gorgeous device (if you can ignore all the finger-grease smudges), with some responsiveness problems but overall it delivers on the promise of a functionally awesome tablet computer. Still, I don’t see where it will fit in my life. It’s not going to slip in my pocket like my phone, and I can’t do work on it like my laptop. I suppose it could replace my Kindle, but I consider the non-backlit display and heroic battery life of that device to be features. I suppose it remains to be seen whether the iPad truly abstracts away all the computery bits of using a computer; I know a thing or two about leaky abstractions so I’m not particularly optimistic on this point. This doesn’t mean that it won’t be a sales success of course, just that I don’t think we’re quite at the point of replacing all our parents’ desktop machines.