Your systems are set up to judge me based on where I’m from, but like millions around the world, I’m not from one place. Yet you have chosen not to develop ways of computing multiple locations. Instead of adjusting your system to reflect reality, I’m forced to conform.
Where Are You Really From — Real Life (via newdarkage)
This piece is so good.
Another nice bit:
For all the 1990s utopian dreams of the internet as a space where nation-state borders don’t matter — typified by John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” in which he declares that “our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions” and that “the only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule” — what we’ve ended up with is an online version of our offline realities, in which borders are not transcended but instead exaggerated. Citizenships aren’t ignored but instead enforced more strongly, with internet users being put into stronger categories rather than having boundaries blurred like we had hoped. Data and the categorization of people and their identities have become more important than we ever imagined it would.
Confronted with a drop-down menu of countries, I think again of what you’re actually asking. Countries are complicated. Borders change, countries change names, divide, rejoin. Do your menu options keep pace? Who decides what makes a country a country? There must be different versions of the lists of “all” the countries in the world, tailored to different political conditions, and the official recognition of different prevailing institutions. No Taiwan, if you’re building a form for the United Nations. No Palestine, if you’re creating a system for the United States. What about the people of Transnistria, a self-proclaimed republic on the Ukraine-Moldova border, recognized by only three states? I wonder about my friends from countries not universally recognized: Do they ever get to answer the question the way they want to?
related: @triciawang‘s concept of Perspective Collision: when the things we design get used in such ways that it reveals the limited perspective of the designers themselves.
Also related: Facebook once didn’t allow me to sign up because someone decided that Kenyatta Cheese wasn’t a real name.
also related but more loosely: this is kind of the idea behind the name of the company @slavin @mememolly and I started. While we rarely say it aloud, it is the kind of thing we think when completing a sentence like:
How do you design experiences that make considerations for everybody at once?
(via kenyatta)
(via thebluepeninsula)
