The Digital Shivers

My thumb is hovering four millimeters above the glass, and it is shaking, just slightly, because I am trying to hit a ‘close’ icon that is roughly the size of a single dust mite. It is 4:09 PM. I started a diet nine minutes ago, and the sudden absence of glucose in my bloodstream is making me perceive the entire world as a series of hostile obstacles. Riley C.-P., a friend of mine who identifies as a meme anthropologist, calls this the ‘Digital Shivers.’ It is that specific physical manifestation of the realization that you have lost control over a device that you literally sleep next to every single night.

I tap. Nothing happens. I tap again, slightly harder, which is illogical because glass does not respond to pressure unless you are trying to break it. The screen remains frozen. A third tap, desperate and poorly aimed, triggers a link I didn’t want to follow. Now I am being redirected to a page about artisanal floor wax. I don’t own floors that require wax. I live in a rental with linoleum that hasn’t seen a shine since 1999. I feel, in this moment, profoundly stupid. I know how a phone works. I grew up with them. I have written thousands of lines of code in my life, yet here I am, being outsmarted by a pop-up advertisement for wax.

Every time a button doesn’t click, every time a gesture-based swipe fails to register, and every time an interface ‘hides’ a basic function behind three layers of unlabeled icons, a tiny piece of our self-efficacy dies. We don’t blame the designers. We don’t blame the multi-billion dollar corporations. We mutter, ‘Maybe I’m missing something,’ and we rotate the screen as if that will magically fix the logic of a poorly coded UI.

Hesitation as Data

Riley C.-P. once spent 49 hours straight documenting people trying to use the ‘Share’ menu on a popular social media app. He found that 89 percent of them hesitated for more than three seconds. That hesitation is the sound of a human brain doubting its own sensory input. In the world of meme anthropology, this is the ‘Confused Math Lady’ meme come to life. We are all that woman, staring at floating equations that don’t add up, trying to figure out why the ‘Save’ icon is a floppy disk-a physical object that 29 percent of current users have never seen in real life.

I hate that I am this frustrated. I really do. I should be bigger than this. But the diet-did I mention I started it at 4:00 PM?-is making every micro-interaction feel like a personal insult. If the internet was a physical space, it would be a room full of doors that only open if you tap them at a 39-degree angle while humming a specific frequency. We have normalized the absurd. We have accepted that ‘digital literacy’ actually means ‘developing a high tolerance for being gaslit by software.’

The Expert Novice

I find myself constantly contradicting my own professional stance. I tell people to embrace the future, to lean into the digital transformation, and then I spend 109 seconds trying to figure out how to mute a video that shouldn’t have been playing in the first place. I am an expert who feels like a novice. It’s a bizarre state of existence. We are living in a golden age of engineering, yet we are drowning in a dark age of usability. We have $979 glass slabs in our pockets that can communicate with satellites, but we can’t reliably scroll to the bottom of a terms-and-conditions page without accidentally clicking ‘Accept’ on something we didn’t read.

There is a specific kind of design philosophy that resists this trend, one that prioritizes the human feeling of ‘I can do this.’ It is the philosophy championed by ems89, which focuses on the radical idea that technology should make you feel smarter, not more confused. When an interface is intuitive, it disappears. You don’t think about the tool; you think about the task. But when the tool is broken-not ‘broken’ in the sense of a crashed app, but broken in the sense of a confusing layout-the tool becomes the task. My task today was to read a news article. My actual activity was a 19-minute battle with a navigation drawer that kept sliding back into place like a shy turtle.

Exclusionary Design

I think about the elderly a lot in this context. We treat their struggle with technology as a joke, a punchline about ‘boomers’ who can’t open a PDF. But it’s not a joke. It’s an exclusionary practice. When we design things that require ‘discovery’ through random tapping, we are telling anyone with a lower risk tolerance that they don’t belong here. If you are afraid of breaking something, you won’t ‘discover’ the hidden gesture. You will just stop using the app. You will slowly opt out of the digital world because the digital world makes you feel like an idiot.

And it’s not just the elderly. It’s me, at 4:29 PM, hungry and annoyed. It’s Riley C.-P., who sees the tragedy in every ‘user-friendly’ update that moves the search bar three inches to the left for no reason. It’s the 49 percent of people who feel a spike of cortisol every time they have to fill out a web form. We are being trained to expect failure. We are being conditioned to believe that if we can’t find the ‘Logout’ button, it’s because we didn’t look hard enough, not because the company purposefully hid it to keep their ‘active user’ metrics high.

Designing for the Edge Case

This brings me to the ‘dark patterns.’ These aren’t just accidents; they are intentional choices to exploit our incompetence. It is the ‘No, I don’t want to save money’ button that is hidden in a light-gray font on a white background. It is the double-negative confirmation dialogue. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to cancel your non-subscription?’ It’s 149 ways to say ‘Gotcha.’ These patterns rely on the fact that we are tired, that we are distracted, and that we have been beaten down by years of minor UI failures.

“The gap between the lab and the living room is where dignity goes to die.”

I once tried to explain this to a developer friend. He told me that users are just ‘edge cases’ for his code. He said that if people followed the ‘intended path,’ there wouldn’t be any problems. I wanted to hit him, but instead, I just asked him if he had ever tried to use his own app while holding a grocery bag and walking through a turnstile. He hadn’t. He uses his app on a $2,199 monitor in a quiet room with a mechanical keyboard. He is designing for a version of humanity that doesn’t actually exist.

Riley C.-P. sent me a meme today. It was a picture of a guy trying to push a door that clearly said ‘PULL’ in giant letters. The caption was: ‘Every website in 2024.’ It’s funny because it’s true, but it’s also heartbreaking. We have spent billions of dollars to make the most powerful communication network in history, and we’re using it to build doors that say ‘PULL’ but only open if you tap them twice and wait 9 seconds.

The Analog UI

I’m sitting here now, looking at my phone. The diet is still technically in effect, though I am currently staring at a photo of a grilled cheese sandwich with an intensity that borders on the erotic. I want to save the photo. I press down on it. A menu pops up. ‘Copy.’ ‘Share.’ ‘Look Up.’ ‘Translate.’ Where is ‘Save to Photos’? I scroll down. It’t not there. I scroll up. Not there. I tap the ‘Share’ icon, thinking maybe it’s in there. I have to scroll past 19 different apps I never use to find ‘Save Image.’

Why? Why was that a better choice for me? It wasn’t. It was a choice made by a committee that cares more about ‘ecosystem integration’ than about a hungry person wanting a picture of a sandwich.

It’s a tiny thing, I know. It’s a first-world problem of the highest order. But these tiny things are the texture of our lives. We live in the friction. We live in the 799 milliseconds of lag between a command and an action.

When we stop demanding that our tools respect us, we lose more than just time. We lose our sense of agency. We start to see the world as something that happens *to* us, rather than something we participate in. If I can’t even navigate a settings menu without feeling like I need a PhD, how am I supposed to feel confident about the bigger things? The digital world is the training ground for our modern self-worth, and right now, we are all failing the course.

I think I’m going to go buy a sandwich. Not because the diet is over, but because I need a win. I need to interact with a physical object-a piece of bread, a slice of cheese-that doesn’t have a hidden menu. I need a door that opens when I push it. I need to remember what it feels like to be competent. Riley C.-P. says the grilled cheese is the ultimate ‘analog UI.’ You bite it; it nourishes you. No updates required. No ‘Sign In’ to chew. Just 100 percent user-centered satisfaction. I think he’s right. I think I’ll buy two. One for me, and one for the version of myself that just spent nine minutes being bullied by a ‘Close’ button.