WordPress has completed its long pivot and has finally fully transformed itself into a website design tool. It is no longer optimized for writing. It is designed to assemble media elements into engaging, immersive digital experiences, or something.
The upshot is I can no use it and absorb myself in my writing. The legacy text editor has been fully retired. The block editor is now non-optional, at least if you use the WordPress app. And the online editor is extremely broken. The block editor layout causes weird typos (for instance, I constantly hit underline when I mean to hit delete). When you tap on a word in a different text block, the whole thing lurches upward, and instead of the word you were trying to select, the word below it is selected. And it is now entirely impossible to cut multiple paragraphs. Everything conspires to distract and frustrate.
WordPress is no longer a tool I can use. Even right now, writing this little diatribe, I am having one problem after another. I can hardly get this out. It is depressing.
I loved WordPress.
I also loved Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
I loved MacOS, iOS and I loved Apple.
A new alienated generation of designers now dominates UX. One by one these alienated incompetents are destroying designs that I once loved and relied upon. These tools were part of me — extensions of my own being. My intuitive bond with these tools has been severed. I experience it as amputation. It is deeply personal. It is betrayal.
Alienated people cannot design intuitive systems, because alienated people do not even know what intuition is. To them intuition is just arbitrary mental habit, which can be retrained. With enough repetition and drill, just about anything can be made familiar, intuitive and true.
When one is fully alienated, this seems absolutely true, and, without any contrasting experience of intuition with which this alienation can be compared, it is impossible to know or even conceive otherwise. Where conception ends, imagination ends.
Things can be better. Things will be better. Whether we live to experience it, or die from alienation is the real question.