I dislike WordPress more and more. This post was originally written in 2010. I was digging through old posts on Buber, looking for comments I might have made regarding experience and use of things (in the mode of I-It), when I happened upon this old post. I say a misspelling and corrected it. When I saved the post (on 9/16/2024), it obliterated the original date and published it as new. I’ve tried to correct it.

I need to rant again: in autumn of 2011, the world entered the Dark Ages of design, with speed prioritized over all else, in the mad rush to out-feature and destroy one’s commercial enemies. I mourn the loss of WordPress, Adobe and Apple as design exemplars. I respected and loved these organizations and their products, but they adopted the product management malpractices of Eric Ries, the disastrous blind-leading-the-blind guru, the anti-Jobs who undid twenty years of design progress with one ill-conceived book.

I’ve heard people say that Emmanuel Levinas is the heir to Martin Buber’s tradition (insinuating that a thinker can skip over Buber, directly to the fuller development of Levinas). I find the experience of reading the two almost directly opposite. Levinas makes the world feel heavy with overwhelming obligation, where Buber makes the world feel alive but steady with opportunities for responsibility. Levinas is valuable, and I think he says many true things (he might only say true things) but the spirit I must accept to make his work intelligible makes life unbearable. Whether this signals something wrong with him or with me is practically immaterial. It does not seem that Buber’s thinking necessarily leads to Levinas, even if it can — there must be other consequences that can be drawn.