Can we be a bit more authentically digital?

Be authentic (not skeuomorphic), they say. Be authentic to the digital domain. Don't just ape the appearance and interaction of real-world objects. Instead, do things that are only possible with the power of today's hardware and software. Do something magical. For example, I like the way OneNote saves automatically. It may not be a super-exiting example, but it's pretty smart and convenient. But I use software and machines in my office every day, and it's not every day that I get a sense of much that's magical going on. Some things make me smile, but usually things work ok at best, and way too often they're dumb and annoying. Like: not being allowed into my admin commmand prompt until I've clicked on a safety button (pressing 'Y' doesn't work). Or having to say three times (using different dialogs/affordances) that I want to uninstall something. That was what started me thinking about this post, and the idea that making "undo" a more elemental piece of the experience of computing (and perhaps being able to passively detect a user's identity) might solve these annoyances and others.

Sometimes, you see signs by the road in mountain passes, signs with drawings of falling rocks. You don't actually have to click or tap an OK button before you can get past these signs, but you are meant to look at them and take notice. See, being careful is important in actual reality: you have no option. You have to look before you leap, so taking a moment to pause, consider, and confirm, is worth the investment. There's no CTRL+Z in actual reality, nor do you get three lives like you do in Super Mario. But in the digital domain, you CAN undo, and you CAN have multiple chances to get things right. At least, you can if the software has been written that way. But not enough of it is.

Why am I inundated with annoying, cloying confirmation dialogs at every turn? Why can't I be allowed to proceeed with impunity, knowing that if anything goes wrong I can just turn back time (like Cher wanted to do)? Something like System Restore, except at the finest level of granularity imaginable. Obviously, the answer is because of how Windows was designed and has grown over time. There's too much inertia, and resistance, to the redesign that'd be necessary. It's like a centuries-old city where the streets are absurdly, inconveniently too narrow simply because it's impossible to move all the ancient stone buildings. But, for some people, the charms of living in a medieval city would compensate. And, in any case, Windows is a digital artifact. There's no reason (except will and economics) that it couldn't be redesigned in these ways.

Both the real world and the digital domain are sodden and saturated with safety and security measures. FBI warnings on my DVDs, baby latches in my kitchen, ratings on my movies and games, locks on everything, passwords for everything, cardkeys, guards, walls, gates, speedbumps, and on and on. Why? Because the very young don't understand, and most other people won't do, what's good for them and good for the community. The primary personas and use cases of everything I use and experience--real and digital alike--focus on children and criminals. Kids and criminals are the users who were first and foremost in the minds of the designers of all these things. Catering for those folks is the priority, and the rest of us (the ones actually generating value in the world) have to make do. In the real world, this is unavoidable. We have no option, and prevention is better than cure, because we can't undo, unsee, or resurrect (and litigation is expensive). But in the digital domain we can work magic. I'm convinced that in the digital domain (if we wanted it enough to design things correctly) things needn't be as inconvenient as they are; that it needn't be as constantly-in-your-face obvious that kids and crooks are the pri zero when it comes to requirements. Being able to more easily undo seems like an obvious improvement (and that extends to being able to undo the unauthorized movement of digital wealth between accounts, for example). There's still the issue that you can't unsee a thing, and privacy and innocence are important, but for that the idea of passive authentication springs to mind.