The dirty mouse problem
Why do things have to be perfect to function?
1.
When I say I am “of a certain age,” I mean, first of all, that I am more-or-less 55 years old. A dignified amount of time, to be sure, and my greying temples are almost enough to get me a discount at the grocery store. One does what one can to get by.
But that phrase “of a certain age” cuts another way, as well. It indicates that I have been around for long enough to see a thing or two change. Not any of the important things, mind you, and never quite the things that should change, but some things, here and there.
To put it another way, then, saying “Back in my day” is kind of the “You kids get off my lawn” for those of us who had access to some therapy in our thirties. It stakes out a certain sort of territory in the meme-space, though, I should admit, it seems to get me whatever the opposite of what the kids (who are now adults) used to call street cred, or maybe the opposite of what the kids (who are still kids) now refer to as rizz.
We should have been eager for the future, but once we get there, all we care about is the past. What a weird and bedraggled sparrow the average human life is.
2.
Anyway, back in my day, we had computers, too. Only they weren’t as snazzy as the ones we have today. They were heavier, dumber, slower, and useful in a way that just hasn’t been a requirement lately. We were a lot less eager to hang out with our computers then, back in my day. We were more like acquaintances then, rather than intimate friends. Nowadays, we are stroking and petting our little devices all the time (I mean, I have a few around me now. They are practically purring). Back in my day, back in my day, there was a more formal distance between human and machine. It was more like a formal ballroom dance, our interactions, than the current, joined-at-the-hip, sweaty grind.
Not that I’m complaining.
These days I am familiar with all my devices in a way that borders on the obscene. I routinely have to wipe down the screen of my tablet and my phone because all my interactions with it leave a bit of a residue. My digits, waxy and sebaceous, strew the scenes of my screens with evidence of my greed for information and distraction. Back in my day, I read books, for goodness sake. Now, in the futureless future, I can’t even recall the last time I went cover to cover like that. Not that I haven’t read things, of course, only now they are much more bite-sized morsels. I scroll, therefore I am.
Maybe I don’t mean a formal ballroom dance. Back in my day, we didn’t really foxtrot anymore. No waltzing, either. Everything was much more four-four time, with very little swing, really. Maybe it was more like a middle-school dance. We touched our partners, but only barely, and with an awkwardness that indicated that we had no idea what touching each other could even possibly be for. Unlike now, with all our best googling days already behind us, back then it was hard to imagine any of the various parts having any purpose at all, let alone how them might connect with each other.
3.
My first introduction to a regular interaction with a computer was a bulky, clacky keyboard. It was modeled on, and sounded like, the keyboards I knew well from the electric typewriters in my dad’s office (and not, thankfully, like the fully analog Smith-Corona we had tucked away in its briefcase-case back home). It was attached to the computer basically with the equivalent of a heavy-gauge phone cord, which coiled until it didn’t. The whole arrangement required quite a lot of real estate on whatever table it was sitting on. There really wasn’t much else you could do with a desk once the computer moved in.
Somewhere around my college years, though, things began to change. This was right around the time of the introduction of the first Macintosh computer system. The footprint on the desk got smaller, for one. But also there was a new appendage, beyond the keyboard. Things went from clacky-clacky to clicky-clicky.
Using a Mac was my first-ever reason to know about, think about, or click about a mouse.
4.
You have no reason to need to know this, but the computer mouse didn’t just happen. It actually had a person who thought it up, prototyped it, tested it, and then took it to folks who then took it to market and made a lot of money off of it (the marketers, I mean. Not the inventor).
The name of the person who invented the computer mouse is Douglas Englebart. At the time he came up with the idea, he was working at a place in California known as Xerox PARC, which stood for the Palo Alto Research Center. It was part of the landscape before the landscape became known as Silicon Valley. In fact, it’s part of the reason that that landscape became Silicon Valley.
The way Steven Levy tells the story, in his book Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything, the folks at Xerox PARC came up with a lot of the core ideas for hardware and software that we now take for granted. Chief among these would the graphical user interface, the visual metaphors that are employed on the screen that transform it from a linera landscape of line code to a free-flowing canvas of ideas and information.
It seems strange now, in the era when we can literally put our fingers on the screen and move things around in real time, but back in my day, it was revolutionary to look at a computer screen and see pictures instead of weird and slightly alien words. The graphical user interface became the bridge that took us from using computers in distant ways to engaging with our devices as intimates. Soon, the graphical user interface was being referred to as a “GUI,” which might be pronounced “Gee! You? I?” or “gooey,” depending.
It’s one thing to look at pretty pictures instead of words. It’s quite another to be able to reach into the realm of the pictures and manipulate them to match our desires. That was where the mouse came in. Douglas Engelbart’s weird little invention started out as a block of wood with a set of rolling potentiometers attached to the bottom and a thin wire connecting it to the CPU. By all accounts, it wasn’t much to look at. But really, if you were looking at the mouse itself, you were looking at the wrong thing anyway. What mattered was not the matter under your palm, but the unfolding virtual landscape before your eyes.
The mouse, combined with a now-manipulatable GUI, really did change everything.
5.
There are times when it is helpful to realize just how small the world is, so just in case you were thinking that the invention of the mouse, and its inventor, is some artifact of remote and distant history, here’s what you need to know. Somewhere around 1996, I got a wild hair one day at work, and I dialed up Douglas Englebart and had a chat with him.
At the time he was working for a mid-sized tech company called Tymshare. In addition to his world-revolutionizing invention, he had also had some other interesting hardware ideas here and there, but they had never really managed to take hold like the mouse did. So he was basically working the same sort of desk job he had been working at Xerox PARC, near as I could tell. Inventing something that changes the world doesn’t necessarily get you famous, or rich, or even get you promoted.
Let that be a lesson, kids.
Anyway, what you need to understand is, if you are reading this, you are now one degree of separation from the guy who invented the architecture of computer interaction that we all have come to depend on for everything from masturbation to drone strikes, and all the stops in between (I’m referring here, of course, to our endless Amazon purchases and Netflix choices).
The lever and the fulcrum, both, are not distant from you, is what I am saying. All that is lacking is your understanding of how close you are, every day, to everything and everyone that has rendered and designed the world that you assume is “natural.” It isn’t, and as long as humans as we understand them have been tromping around the neighborhood, it never was. But it sure feels that way—which is to say, given, natural, the way it should be.
Nothing could be further from reality. As that great moral theologian, Peter Gabriel, once put it, “all of the buildings and all of the cars were once just a dream in somebody’s head.” From the mouse in your palm to the structures of oppression that grab a brown-skinned man out of a car in front of his kids and smash him to the ground: It’s all been designed, and anything designed can be undesigned, or—at least—fucked with.
The structures that liberate us, and the structures that oppress us—they’re close. They’re accountable, and they’re relatively small. All it takes is attention to the connections—like those six degrees of separation that, for you, in reading this, collapsed down to one.
Like they say, Never doubt that a small group of neurodivergent, over-caffeinated middle managers can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
6.
I think meaning is a very fragile commodity, and we arrive at it only very rarely. But boy howdy we sure do act like we have it in spades. We act as if meaning were as plentiful as water, as ubiquitous as air.
Back in my day, we called this hubris, but who listens to an old geezer like me when the music is loud? Tapping toes want to dance, after all, and idle hands wish to be about the Devil’s work. Very few folks have time to worry about meaning in the meantime. There are bills to pay.
But that’s the problem. When I pull out my Bible, I read about a real old timer, an inveterate meaning-maker named Jesus. Back in his day, back when ol’ JC was stirring things up, he put it like this: “Narrow is the way, and straight the gate.” Which means, in common lingo, that you cannot get to heaven on roller skates. Heaven, it seems, is steep.
Which means, for both the meaning-makers and the heaven-seekers, we are in for a world of disappointment. You want the good stuff? You gotta get things right. You gotta get things near perfect.
7.
When I first used a mouse, it was the newest, weirdest thing. At the same time, it seemed like the most natural, intuitive thing in the world. I grokked it, by which I mean I grasped it in the Heinlein sense, and not the Musk sense. It didn’t take any time at all to understand that my hand was moving things around on the screen in the box. I didn’t have to be trained; I didn’t have to be taught. It just felt, well, normal.
Which is why, when I tell you I have a love-hate relationship with the very idea of the computer mouse, I mean that my love is fierce. But my hatred, unfortunately rivals my affections.
Let me explain.
If you are of a certain age, you may recall that there would come a time when the mouse would stop working.
The reason? Well, that had everything to do with what made the mouse tick in the first place.
Recall that first carved-block of a mouse that Douglas Englebart put together. It had a button to click, sure, but it also had potentiometers, which is a fancy way of saying it had a way to track how it moved across the surface of your desk. Then it would translate these movements into signals that moved the pointer on the screen. In the first mouse, these potentiometers were big metal wheels, one that tracked the X-axis, and the other the Y-axis.
Over time, though, the mechanism grew more refined, and these two discrete wheels were transformed into a little rolling ball, called a track ball (and later, a trakball), mounted along the bottom center of the mouse.
As you pulled the mouse across the table, the trakball would roll. As it rolled, it would spin a series of tiny potentiometers inside the chassis of the mouse, and those signals would get turned into pointer movements on the glowing screen.
However, there was a problem. In order to efficiently spin the potentiometers, the trakball had to be just a little bit sticky. This stickiness, though, meant that—as it rolled across the surface of the table—the trakball would pick up little bits of dust and gunk, and slowly deposit that dust and gunk up inside the chassis, all over the potentiometers.
Over time, this buildup of residue would completely clog the system. Your mouse would go from its proper working function, to a kind of intermediate state of glitchy function (where the pointer on the screen would stutter and weave as you tried to control it), to a state of complete disrepair, where the function of the mouse would cease altogether.
At that point, you really had no choice. You had to clean the mouse.
8.
Cleaning the mouse was a tedious process. First, you had to understand what was happening (because often the instruction manuals didn’t tell you). Then, once you grasped that invisible gunk had seized the day, you had to flip the mouse over and negotiate a weird little circular slipcover that resembled a flattened khaki donut. This was the gizmo that held the trakball in place. You had to rotate it a bit and it would pop open, allowing the trakball to be removed and exposing the inner cavity of the mouse itself.
From there, you had to get a hold of a highly specialized tool (usually a pencil with a functioning eraser), and get to work. You’d alternate using the pencil point and the rubber eraser to scrape, swap, and cajole the dirt and gunk off the potentiometer wheels. The process was tedious and improvisational; what worked last time might not work this time. At some points, the gunk would he hardened to the point of calcification. At other times, the dirt and gunk would have the consistency and staying power of peanut butter.
But if you wanted the mouse to ever work again, there was no way around it. You had to regularly go in there, take the cover off, get into the guts of the thing, and clean it out.
By the way, this post you are reading is about democracy.
9.
In order for a mouse to work right, it needs to be clean. In fact, the cleaner it gets, the better it works. By extension, of course, the mouse would work less and less well, the dirtier it got.
Let’s call this “the dirty mouse problem.” (Hey - that’s the title of the essay!)
Here’s the thing I have never understood, though. You know the mouse is going to get dirty. It’s unavoidable, really. Given the basic mechanics of how the parts work (especially with that sticky trakball) the one thing that you know, beyond any doubt, is that this contraption will be a dirt magnet. The gunk is inevitable.
So why, I mean why in the world, would you design it so that it only works when it’s clean, and that it only works better if it gets cleaner?
A mouse is a system that will only work when it has near-constant maintenance. This means, of course, that we might consider it a system designed to fail. The price of moving around pixels on a glowing screen is eternal vigilance, I guess.
The thing I have never understood about my computer mouse (and, by extension, for many human designs for which the mouse might be considered a metaphor) is why nobody has ever thought to design a mouse that would work better, and better, the gunkier it gets?
10.
Why do we design away from real-world conditions? I’m not saying that you have to maintain clean-room standards to use a computer ouse, but some days it sure did seem perverse (where’s that damn pencil?) to have to take the mouse apart, again, just to avoid a situation that literally everyone could have seen coming.
Every mouse that i have ever had in my palm, by this measure, was completely irrational.
A rational mouse would be a mouse that was designed not to eschew the gunk, but to embrace it. It would be a mouse that was designed to utilize the gunk and dirt in some positive way, and in so doing, constantly improve its performance, to where the last thing you would ever want would be a clean, fresh-off-the-shelf computer mouse. Rather than working the best, that cleaned up mouse would be the worst.
To understand what I’m talking about, think of a baseball glove.
The last thing you want is a glove that is fresh off the shelf from the store. The last thing you want is a clean, brand new baseball glove, because that glove will be stiff. That glove will fight you, and when you go to catch the pop fly, there is a real risk of the ball rolling right out of your hand.
No, what you want is the dirty glove. You want the glove that has been crushed, smooshed, stepped on, slept on, and left out in the mud a couple times or three. You want the glove that is oily, gunky, and greasy. That glove you can count on to keep hold of the pop fly. That’s a glove you can trust.
Why do we design so many things to only work properly when they are clean? It’s a dirty world, after all, and we should really plan accordingly.
11.
We are now well into the third millennium, and at this point we really couldn’t turn back, even if we wanted to. Isn’t it time we stopped designing for the world we used to live in, back in my day, and started designing for the world we actually have?
The Founding Fathers were a ripe bunch of old dudes. They had some good ideas, for sure, but it’s high time we got off their lawn.
12.
I’m old enough to remember the Bicentennial. At two-hundred years of age, America had accumulated a lot of dirt and gunk. In the fifty years since, it has gotten dirtier and gunkier still. I fear nobody remembers anymore how to work the catch on the flattened khaki donut ring. Even if we got the damned thing off, nobody can recall anymore where we keep the pencil to scrape the potentiometers.
I’m tired of maintaining our democracy like a fussy mouse on a gunky tabletop. We need a new kind of democracy—a baseball glove democracy—where the parts work better and better, the more they are submerged in the gunk and guts of the real world, the world we all share.
I want a baseball-glove democracy, so well-broken-in that we can trust it with every weird grounder and pop fly, trust it that no balls—anymore anywhere—get dropped.