Welcome to the Progress Not Progress

Hello

This blog will document the many ways that Modern Life is Rubbish (as Blur declared in the 90's). 

It will demonstrate through lived and shared experiences how design, the market and technology disrupts perfectly straightforward ways of doing everyday things. 

It will show then how the technological replacement for these things is not actually a convenient replacement, but in fact an incredibly wasteful, tedious and complicated series of functions that are inconvenient at best and downright sinister at their worst. 

I will attempt to document and share these experiences for as long as my blood pressure and general health allow. Please feel free to share your examples with me and i will add them to this blog, (which should probably be a Facebook group)

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Doors of Perception (of insecurity)

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  Just how many security doors does a place of work need (for efficiency or for security)?Crossing the boundary between inside and outside of the building is easy - automatic doors sense my presence and open to allow me inside. A great start, but its all down hills from here.  In order to then get to my office I have to: 1. Touch my ID card on the barriers to get from the Lobby into the main building 2. Once up the lift I need to use my ID card to release the lock on the double fire doors in order to access the studio (these are 'stuck together' for fire regs - making this an annoying action - pull one door and the other also opens as well. 3. Once at my office I need to use my ID card again to release the glass office door. Fine, wear a lanyard and this isn't too onerous. But on exiting the door to the office I need to press the door release button then use the handle to open the door - one very simple effective process immediately becomes at least twice as complicated. I ...
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Protect Me from What I Want

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I always loved this quote from a Jenny Holzer art piece. The promise of the capitalist market is that it allows us all a certain freedom to choose to think and do as we wish, buy what we want to buy etc.  But then WHY ADVERTS? Postmodern life means choosing to watch something on Youtube, and then being denied this until I have been put through the pain of having to watch adverts in advance. Choose one thing, get another. Designed inconvenience. My issue is that this is inconvenient when capitalism promises convenience. I am increasingly aware of the amount of time I spend in a day ring to counter or cancel or work around or submit to technological innovation when surely the idea behind progress is that it makes life easier?  I know, if I pay for a subscription the ads go away. so the solution to problems caused by the market and technology is the market and technology . That's annoying! Effectively technology is designed to serve the service provider as much, if not...
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