The Mirror of Fragmentation
You are dragging the mouse toward the ‘Submit’ button for the 18th time this hour, but the cursor feels heavy, as if it’s moving through digital molasses. The blue wheel is spinning-that hypnotic, rhythmic stutter of a machine trying to justify its own existence while you stare at the reflection of your own tired eyes in the monitor glass. I tried to go to bed early tonight. I really did. I had this plan to be under the covers by 10:08 PM, but instead, I am here, caught in the gravitational pull of an expense report that refuses to acknowledge the existence of a perfectly valid $48 receipt from a lunch three weeks ago. The software isn’t broken in the way we usually think. It isn’t crashing. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to serve as a digital barrier between a human and their goal. It is a user interface for a life that has been optimized into a series of hurdles.
We tend to curse the developers. We yell at the screen as if the code itself possesses a malicious sentience, but that’s a misunderstanding of the tragedy. The software is merely a flawless mirror. It is a perfect, 1:1 digital twin of a workflow that was designed by a committee of 38 people who don’t actually talk to
