Making What's Broken Seem To Work

Edition #122 — September 4, 2009

Last Monday I was proudly admiring a new website I'd created for a client. It looked great in Mac Safari and Firefox. The next day I struggled for hours trying to make it also look good in Internet Explorer 6.0 on a PC but failed and gave up trying. I simply put a link up for users of that ancient Microsoft browser to visit the company's old website. I wasn't going to advocate for a broken piece of software anymore.

Big, Popular and Inferior.

The reason why this is relevant to my "realitychecking" is that Internet Explorer 6.0 reminds me of a lot of things in life that are broken but at which we work hard to make them appear to be working. In the case of Internet Explorer 6.0, which came out in 2001, it was once the world's most popular browser because it came with the operating system. Many people still use it because they don't venture beyond email, word processing and occasional Google-ing, so they're "happy" with what they have and don't suspect that it's broken. But this is an illusion that is aided by people like me who work hard to make the broken seem to work, and well.

Every professional web designer must build a working website then backtrack to destroy portions of code so that Internet Explorer can interpret it from its own skewed frame of reference. These are called "hacks" and website code is full of them and mostly for this one browser. But most surfers don't suspect this and if a website is broken, they blame the website, not their software. And Microsoft never admitted to any deficiency because that would be non-competitive. Nope, their software works.

GOP 6.0

As I mentioned, this IE 6.0 saga reminds me of many things whose broken state we try to mask. Obvious among them is the US Republican Party who hired some Clinton and Obama seem-alikes in a bid to make the party appear less old, rich, white - and broken. Meanwhile, the Democrats had the originals, candidates who weren't hired as a political marketing strategy for the party itself. They were the Safari and Firefox of politics. The GOP had obviously become Internet Explorer 6.0, and some people still cling to them as well.

Carbon Emissions 6.0

Another case of covering up farts with perfume is the idea of carbon credits. This way, the greatest environmental polluters can continue in their broken toxic ways by riding the coattails of companies who successfully implement environmental practices that curb their carbon emissions. The reality is that our health and survival depend upon breathing clean air. This makes it a necessity to clean up pollution, not an option to be traded on the carbon stock market. But here again, broken is being dressed up to make it appear as though its working and fixed. Why? Because it's big, dominant and rich. No surprise here because so is Microsoft, McDonalds, Exxon, Shell, Walmart. And what they have to offer now also comes with "the system" - imagine that.

But someday we'll be putting signs on our highways that say "for those still using carbon fuels, please switch to Safari or Firefox so we can all breath easier.

(I had to sneak that in there again, somehow).

See you guys next month.
Roland Kriewaldt


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