What it is not good for is 'All Ages', originally the internet was seen as a research tool for adults and later commerce. After all, the target demographic for videogames is still largely the 10-20 years old crowd, still seen as the prime territory for malleable minds to build brand loyalty. if we saw an anti-toy-marketing regulation like we have in television history applied toward games, the industry would spin so hard we'd have solved the ongoing energy crisis.

That's one thing for games, but it's an entirely different thing when it comes to software. Akin to Cory Doctorow's now-famed enshittification, which chronicles the journey of the things you like to use getting worse as a natural part of their lifecycle as substrate for shareholder profits, I propose a term:

I want you to imagine a world where every office real estate company got bought overnight and every single office worker was forced to share a lease with Chuck-E-Cheese. Boardroom meetings? you grab a greasy handle of plastic cheese, Try to use the elevator? you're greeted by goofy slogans on loop that could be legally classified as psychological torture in under a day. Loud looped music from the stage, food fights ongoing, funny mascots giving you a hug every time you try to use the printer. Quarterly reports interrupted by a man in a rat costume crashing into your laptop, breaking it into a million pieces because he thought you guys needed cheering up with Pizza that is banned in the European Union.

This is now what it's like to work. Paper can't advertise to you in the invasive way the net can, notebooks don't spontaneously combust, pens don't charge you 5.99 for "Premium" ink every week, and your whiteboard doesn't say "Hello- would you like to login to get a free game token!?"

Yet we put up with this EVERY SINGLE DAY both in our personal lives and now professional lives too. Every horrendous attempt at garnering engagement using tactics that work on a decreasing fraction of the population, the only stable cohort of which is the aforementioned age demographic targeted by games. Games & social spaces are casinos now, so that means work (which is IN SERVICE of the Wall Street Casino, which makes More Casinos.. I swear if these were paperclips this would be some kind of famous metaphor..) is .. what, exactly?

see, last I checked- the 10-18 demographic isn't super famous for using Jira (yet anyway: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/some-lawmakers-propose-loosening-child-labor-laws-to-fill-worker-shortage )

so if that's so, why the hell am I getting the above popup?

Just stop. Just fucking stop. I want tools, I don't want your idea of a good time and I don't want your half cocked idea to justify engagement metrics to your shareholders or your manager. I want tools that work, I don't want them to talk to me- I don't want them to onboard me, I want them to be relatively intuitive and if they're not going to be, just warn me! We are adults, we can handle it. I promise. And the economy will have a NET POSITIVE EFFECT if you just get out of my way and hand me the right wrench when I ask for it.

I want you to recognize who you really serve- yourselves. That's right- not me, not us, not the whole world; yourself. This race to the bottom of design conventions that try to cater to all, and thus very few has resulted in a degredation of your own tools and functionality- and thus for every piece of shit UX or software that hospitals, reactors, lawyers, designers, artists, therapists, firemen and so on have to use, functional minutes are lost. Functional minutes can mean lives saved, monetary disasters avoided, and yes, productivity lost.

It doesn't matter if C-Suite thinks the product is in service of profit of shareholders, the end result is a dysfunctional world. There comes a time where money can't buy you, or them, out of the problem. Regulations & good design are written in blood, and the modern world around us is only possible because of them. If we continue down this path of enshittification at all levels, including professional, it's going to undermine everything until the world is held up by a handful of underpaid contributors even moreso than it is today.

Stop worrying about your coworkers velocity, and start working about the death of a thousand paper cuts they face every day trying to do the smallest of tasks. If it's happening to you, think about everyone else in your life that it's happening to too, and think about how that adds up in a way that hurts you and them. Once you realize we're all connected, you may start to advocate for changes differenly; and if your manager won't let you (as is the case with MANY folks out there, this is not a rant directed at UX designers who are very talented, but the people who get in THEIR way from protecting us from shit design) then consider going elsewhere or finding ways to publicly voice dissent through trade groups and so forth, youtube explainers, blogging, whatever.

Steve Jobs (eugh) once made a cute analogy that the computer is the bicycle for the mind; what we now have turned them into is a Segway. Yes, it beats walking- but at what cost?