To those who are in control now — MBA types, incompetent “designers,” and useless developers — anything that is whimsical, informative or attractive is verboten. Giving the user pertinent information, a good experience, or even a little bit of fun is something against their highest credo, which is: Engagement is all that matters.

The user experience has been abraded till only that one one metric remains. There is no concern with delight, nor understanding, nor the small pleasure of a tool that does exactly what you hoped it would. Just engagement as the sole MBA focus, a number on a dashboard and a quarterly line that must go up. Everything else is seen as friction that must be eradicated since there is no way to A/B test beauty, or delight, or satisfaction in using a well-designed tool competently.

Anything that can be taken from a user will be as the entire corporate structure around software and the web is now only concerned with how much they can extract from you while providing the bare minimum themselves.

And so we get sludge world. No whimsy. No beauty. Just an infinitely-extended hospital cafeteria, a deserted mall the size of a galaxy as we are all condemned to the backrooms — an inescapable hell of fluorescent lights that always flicker but never go dark, a voice that whispers of freedom just below intelligibility, a non-place where waking and sleeping take the same shape and even nightmares seem pleasant in the face of unbounded inexhaustible insipidity.