irreducibility go brrr
As technologies have become ever more sophisticated and integrated into our lives, it seems the apps on our devices have taken on an irreducibility of their own. No matter how hard the designers and engineers try to distill an app down to pure function and utility, there always seems to be some inexplicable subjective element that resists reduction. Even the most useful of productivity apps seem to take on more significance in our lives than their functions alone would suggest. Why do people develop emotional attachments to Notes or get anxiety from an unread Email? There's something about our relationship with technology that seems to go beyond inputs and outputs. Our experiences of apps, it seems, are constitutively shaped by inscrutable subjective factors just as much as their objective natures.