Tradire le interfacce estrattive. Le tecnologie persuasive al confronto con i manifesti di attivismo post-digitale

In the contemporary landscape of digital technologies, interfaces assume a crucial role, serving as witnesses to the tensions and frictions that emerge at the threshold between man and machine. Within this contribution, interfaces are framed in their dimension as cultural processes (Andersen and Pold 2011) and in their contribution to the creation of new subjectivities through the control of software (Hookway 2014). The argument to be made is that to understand the complexity of contemporary digital interfaces, one must consider both the guidelines that have made them particularly effective and pervasive in inducing consumption and dependence on them and the manifestos that suggest a critical attitude toward them. Three programmatic manifestos, The Critical Engineering Manifesto (2011), Post Digital Interface Manifesto (2014), and The Interface Manifesto (2016) are taken as references in understanding the roots of movements of antagonism to an extractive design of software (Joler 2020) providing a landscape where elements for a betrayal of the status quo of digital services emerge.