-------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Threat of Graphical User Interfaces -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. What is GUI-ism ? ====================== Together with water shortage, civil wars and meteors flying by too closely, GUI-ism is likely to become one of the major problems of humanity in the 21st century. Despite the fact that this movement is spreading since the mid-eighties of the last century, it is only now that some isolated avantgarde-thinkers realize the seriousness of the affair. The wide population of the so-called civilized countries remains unaware of its catastrophic influence. In fact, more and more people openly declare themselves as GUI supporters or even GUI-ists ! Explaining GUI-ism, its evil goals and its blind supporters, requires first of all a clarification of the term GUI. Second, it is discussed how certain people (so called GUI-ists) use GUIs to achieve their vicious goals. Once, this is clear we discuss how the modern society has to defend itself against the danger of GUI-ism. 2. What is a GUI ? ==================== Officially, a GUI is a Graphical User Interface. GUIs are rectangles that can jump on your screen at any moment without warning. GUIs usually think about themselves as being more intelligent than their users. An accomplice of the GUIs is an input device called 'mouse' - a misleadingly cute name for a visor device designed to click on the screen. One inadvertent click on a GUI causes armies of new mischievous GUIs to pop up, requiring more and more clicking. Quickly, the computer screen is proliferated with obnoxious rectangles and a user finds himself abandoned to confusion and desparation. Thus, long term direct confrontation with GUIs ultimately will cause a chronical confusion of large parts of the modern society. In order to understand how it could ever come so far, one has to notice that the last twenty years of the last century were stamped with an ultra-liberal tolerance, including even people trying to use a computer without studying computer science. With this ethical background and the 'good' intention to help those individuals, some philanthropists wrote the first GUIs. Now, people were able to launch their video games even from a PC. Software industry then realized that their products would sell much better if they look like video games. Soon, even text processing systems came with a GUI to make things funnier. This tolerant treatment, though, has turned against us! Now, they impose on us to use GUI-software to submit our documents, rather than as latex, ps or plain text files. To designate this special kind of individuals we refer to them as the GUI-ists. 3. What is a GUI-ist ? ======================== A GUI-ist is any person who 0) commands people to program GUIs, 1) programs GUIs, 2) commands people to use GUIs, 3) uses GUIs, 4) officially declares an inclination towards GUIs, or 5) likes GUIs but does not officially declare an inclination to it. Thirty years ago, GUI-ists did practically not exist. The desire to have the same mess on the computer screen as on the desk simply appeared too absurd. Nowadays, nobody feels ashamed to ask openly questions such as: "Does your program have a GUI ?". This reflects the GUI-ists' rapid increase in number. The confusion caused by the proliferation of rectangles popping up on the screen is often considered by GUI-ists as entertainment. It is this type of entertainment that makes many people being inclined towards the GUI-movement. 4. GUI-ism: Means and Goals. ============================== Behind its beautiful face, GUI-ism exactly hides three goals to be known as the Triangle of Evil: Confusion Ignorance Apathy a) Confusion: The evil influence of surprise attacks of popping up windows has been extensively discussed above. The obvious goal of this is confusion and psychological destabilization of the society. Instead of searching in well organized Handbooks and Man-pages, the user has to undertake a long Odyssey on a sea of windows full of atrocities and temptations. b) Ignorance: The GUI's assumption to be more intelligent than its user results in a perversion of the data-hiding paradigm. Where command line interfaces allow to specify the desired process down to any desirable precision, GUIs hide everything that might help the user to get more insight about what is going on behind the curtain. They deliberately promote ignorance between computer users. Resulting from confusion and ignorance, the user developes a dangerous indifference about their computer's sensitive inside. Ask your secretary about what she knows about the nature of a Turing-machine, what she thinks about the different caching algorithms, or for what reason she wants to have a D:-drive instead of mounting its contents to a file system. The answer will be quite frankly: who cares ? So, these GUI-ists exploit the computational power of our computers, having them work for them day and night and then they don't care ? How can we let these people go on with their evil plots when they show no respect for the achievements of modern technology ? c) Apathy: One important goal of GUI-ism is often overseen: it tries to make people unaware of their own physical reality. This is accomplished by two means. 1) Making user interfaces look like real tangible objects. This gives the user the impression that there's actually something real on the screen. Now, the more beautiful user interfaces become and the better they integrate into video games, the less the normal user will notice a need to turn away from his computer screen. While spasmodicly trying to achieve a virtual reality that looks like real, the user looses his ability to lift his butt and enjoy what surrounds him day and night. A society consisting of such individuals has, of course, very few chances to survive on the long term. 2) Creating the stereotype of a 'bad guy': The Computer Geek. A computer geek, in the terminology of a GUI-ist, is a person who is devoted to computers. He forgets about reality because he is fanatic about command line and text interfaces. This, of course, does not make the slightest sense, since someone who stays away from graphical user interfaces has to turn to reality in order to enjoy his senses. He has to go out and search for the fragrant roses and the exalted beauty of mountain views. This virtual bad guy, however, serves as a target so that GUI-ists can point their fingers and say "Computer geeks have no idea about what real live means." It is this projection that prevents GUI-ists from pondering about their own tendency towards apathy. It basically seals their ruin. The three major goals namely Confusion, Ignorance, and Apathy display the evil nature of GUI-ism. It has become evidently clear, that there is no alternative to a combined effort targetting the abolishment of GUI-ism. 5. War on GUI-ism: United we stand. ===================================== When we turn away from our text console and look around how the vast majority of the society uses their calculation machines, we will find that GUI-ism has already established solid roots in our society. Computers that are not infected with GUIs have become rare and the decline of our society seems unavoidable. But let us not give up hope in the darkness of these days. There is definitely light in sight if we stand together: -- We must write more command line interfaces for our programs, more configuration file parsers (such as http://getpot.sourceforge.net). We must write more easy-to-use tools to produce text forms. -- We must force these GUI-ists to write their resumes, letters, dissertations, etc. in latex or plain ASCII format. -- We must use emacs, pico and vi. -- We must use ssh and scp instead of newfangled web-browsers. Why not developing a communication infrastructure based on emacs info-language ? -- Whenever a program has a text interface, we must use it. At least, we should use short-cuts instead of mouse clicks. -- We must ask software salesmen questions like: "You don't want to sell me a program with a GUI, do you ?"