Efficiency Machines: The Operating System Recontextualized
Operating Systems are boring, monotonous spaces. Ever since the personal computer was popularized, function has been the standard priority. Attempts to personalize the OS, such as Microsoft Bob and Packard Bell Navigator, never really caught on. Their ideas didn’t translate well to the tech available at the time, and were regarded as failures since they were slower and clunkier to use when compared to the desktop interface. As commercial OS design evolved, interfaces became more branded and conventional. Creative expression was relegated to decoration with wallpapers, themes and widgets.
Treating operating systems as mere productivity tools dismisses how personal they are. We don’t use computers just to work. We play, communicate and create with them. It ends up being a environment filled with our memories and art, which means there is a lot of potential to be explored. Nathalie Lawhead has been making games that explore this space for more than ten years, and with Everything Is Going To Be OK, they bare their soul with an interactive zine that is presented inside an OS.
You start at the system’s desktop. The background flickers between fractals, glitch art and pictures of eggs, all in harsh colors. A sparse drum beat is playing, with distorted melodies dropping in and out. Navigation is a disorienting task. Shortcuts to the zine’s pages are scattered across the desktop. The icons keep moving back and forth across the screen, often overlapping other shortcuts. Every single icon is shaking. This OS is struggling to persevere.
Struggle is the overarching theme of Everything Is Going To Be OK. The stories told by the zine follow characters attempting to fit in and to keep on going, regardless of the trauma and pain they have to endure. Its first page is about a bunny being repeatedly impaled by spikes, as it gleefully screams things like “This is wonderful!” and “Everything is perfect!”. It uses absurd humor to highlight that the ways we are expected to act are, well, absurd. But at the same time, and often in the same scenes, it depicts scenes of trauma with a brutal honesty.
This creates an environment filled with anxiety and pain, but also one that welcomes vulnerability. Here, in a context where being broken is not a shortcoming, an OS can malfunction and still be seen as valuable and interesting. Glitches and crashes are treated as being part of the system.
Decades of using the same interfaces means we expect certain behaviors, like clicking on the X on the border of a window will close it. Lawhead brings elements of old graphical interfaces to evoke these expectations. It creates this sense of familiarity, a common ground between you and the OS. From DOS prompts to Windows XP notification balloons, the efforts they went to recreate visuals from several different systems is impressive. The choice of only using old interfaces may seem like an attempt to evoke nostalgia for simpler times, but the lengths Lawhead went to make precise replicas show a concern for presenting the past as it was, not as we remember it. They are artifacts of a time where software was still being figured out. A time where there was more space for experimentation.
Yet it’s through the corruption of this past that the OS expresses itself. While at first the use of these visuals can ease you into the system, there’s no guarantee that the original behaviors of these interfaces will be preserved. This is often used for humor, like clicking on a zoom button will enlarge only the button itself, but it’s also used to unsettle you. Clicking on a help button can get you “People keep asking but I don’t think it’s coming” as an answer.
Error alerts and prompts are often used to comment on the stories told, usually as a reminder of how our culture sees those in struggle. In one of the zine’s pages, you start with a DOS prompt telling you that you lost all of your friends. The classic Windows error sound plays, and a pop-up appears. “You are ready to face the day!” it demands, with the OK button text being replaced with “Let’s do this!”. You have no choice but to agree, and so you head out to try and make new friends, regardless of how you are feeling.
In an artist’s statement for the game, Lawhead defines this as “a culture where we cannot really ever move past pain.” The relentless optimism often present in our lives is a tool of oppression, one that aims to shame those who aren’t as productive as society wants to. When we reach out for help, the most common answers are: “You must try harder.”, “You’re exaggerating.” and, of course, “Everything is going to be OK.” Instead of learning how to heal from pain, we are taught to hide it and to fight through it. Because no trauma is harsh enough for capitalism to stop milking all the labor it can get.
There’s a parallel here with the design philosophy of operating systems. An illusion of freedom is sold to the user, one where they can do whatever they want inside the OS. While ad campaigns and mission statements attempt to convince us that these systems aim to empower us, their real goal is to increase the amount of labor they can exploit. Cleaner interfaces and faster startup times are sold as main selling points of systems that are also tracking our data, limiting what software we can use and even slowing themselves down to force us to buy a new version.
This allows them to distract us from who is really controlling these environments, much like neoliberalism champions individuality to divert us from questioning it. If the only thing stopping us from having better lives is our own decisions, we don’t have anyone else to blame but ourselves. An OS who actively gets in your way, then, forces you to see beyond this illusion of control.
The system operates on its own terms, never completely following your orders. The usage of error aesthetics clouds what is supposed to be happening. Its rules are never really clear, with zine pages closing without explanation if you fail to follow them. Even accessing all its parts takes effort, as many parts of the system can only be reached through shortcuts and prompts hidden inside the zine pages. Interacting with this OS feels less like using a computer and more like listening to someone vent.
By disarming the user of its powers, Everything Is Going To Be OK sets the tone for its most vulnerable moments, where Lawhead shares her thoughts through poems and longform essays. Trying to describe these writings here wouldn’t do them justice, but they tackle difficult personal experiences the author went through with a brutal honesty. They are a sample of the alternative culture that Lawhead argues for: one where we are able not only to discuss our wounds and scars, but also one where we are able to work together to heal them.
As much as Everything Is Going To Be OK is about recognizing how we are forbid from moving on from pain, it’s also about showing what we can do in short-term. The time spent with the OS and with Lawhead’s writing is not about trying to step into their shoes, but about being there and learning about them while respecting boundaries. You never really get to grasp everything about them, but that would be missing the point. You’re meant to just be there. Several pages of the zine are about doing things together with friends: cooking, drawing portraits of them, creating songs. These are moments of pure play and creation, done without any concern on how they fit into your brand or your monetization plans.
After you’ve done with each creation, your system’s file browser appears, asking you where you want to store it. The game could’ve just saved them without asking, but having you decide where to store them serves as a reminder of how a space exists inside your computer, and how its molded by your use. With the saving of these creations, the boundaries between the two systems is distorted, as if Lawhead is daring us to imagine a future where an OS like this could exist, one where both society and its creations aren’t judged by their efficiency.
In its attempt to reclaim the personal space in operating systems, Everything Is Going To Be OK shows that they can have a personality of their own, even if they are just made to be tools. But more than that, it argues that when you stop treating everything as efficiency machines, we open ourselves to new possibilities. From new ways of expression to healthier ways of living. We should embrace rather than to overlook pain, and give space to others do the same.
Vinícius Machado is a Brazillian writer who is still figuring things out. You can find his tweets at @_vrmachado.
Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This Spring Quarterly has been funded by readers like you.
