"Micro tyrants" - love it. It goes well with my own term, "petty injustice".
I do object to "it's harder to understand than magic". I think that's a failure in communication, in pedagogy, and perhaps most broadly, the poor priorities of our major information systems, which include homes, schools, churches, the boy scouts, and all mass media. The profit motive should itself be deeply suspect with respect to any information service.
I don't believe it is difficult to understand the nature of your phone and how it works. You hint at it with your term - it's about size. Your phone is essentially a vast machine (truly vast, like a city block) that has been shrunk down. Your screen is a camera into that tiny city, so its like a microscope. As we move around, we can mark particularly interesting or useful views, so that we can come back to them (and even arrange them side-by-side). We find that we not only have the ability to see, but also to emit into the image, changing it, adding to it. (It might get tricky once you recognize that movement itself must constitute an emission if we are to be consistent, and this would be the invitation to look at the text of the code, which ideally be written with this intuition in mind.)
But yes, let us put an end to all the micro-tyrants and the petty injustices they subject us to!
I do object to "it's harder to understand than magic". I think that's a failure in communication, in pedagogy, and perhaps most broadly, the poor priorities of our major information systems, which include homes, schools, churches, the boy scouts, and all mass media. The profit motive should itself be deeply suspect with respect to any information service.
I don't believe it is difficult to understand the nature of your phone and how it works. You hint at it with your term - it's about size. Your phone is essentially a vast machine (truly vast, like a city block) that has been shrunk down. Your screen is a camera into that tiny city, so its like a microscope. As we move around, we can mark particularly interesting or useful views, so that we can come back to them (and even arrange them side-by-side). We find that we not only have the ability to see, but also to emit into the image, changing it, adding to it. (It might get tricky once you recognize that movement itself must constitute an emission if we are to be consistent, and this would be the invitation to look at the text of the code, which ideally be written with this intuition in mind.)
But yes, let us put an end to all the micro-tyrants and the petty injustices they subject us to!