Victor’s “Pictures Under Glass” critique is most compelling not as a takedown of touchscreens specifically, but as a diagnosis of a failure of imagination — the industry confused accessible with good, and then mistook good for visionary. The tool definition he anchors everything to (amplifying human capabilities, not just addressing needs) is doing a lot of work, and it mostly earns it. The sandwich analogy is a little theatrical, but the underlying point lands: we have genuinely extraordinary hands, and sliding a finger on flat glass uses almost none of what makes them extraordinary. The shoelace example is sharper — close your eyes and you can still do it, which is exactly what good tool design should exploit, not eliminate.
What’s interesting is that Victor isn’t really against touchscreens. He’s against treating them as a destination rather than a waypoint. The Kodak analogy in the responses piece clarifies this well: color film wasn’t inevitable, it required people deciding that black-and-white was missing something and doing the research. His concern is that without the rant — without the explicit articulation that something is missing — nobody funds the research. That’s a reasonable fear, and it gives the piece a purpose beyond the polemic.
The responses page is where the argument gets more nuanced and also more interesting. The voice section is the strongest part: his distinction between oracle tasks (ask and receive) and understanding tasks (explore and manipulate) cuts to something real about how knowledge works. You can’t skim a possibility space with your voice. You can’t point at a region of a graph with a command. That’s not a limitation of NLP, it’s a limitation of the modality for that kind of cognition. The explorable explanations he gestures at are a better argument for his position than anything in the rant itself.
The weakest section is the brain interfaces response, which slides from a reasonable point about body-computer mismatch into a somewhat alarmist vision of immobile humans that feels grafted on. And the “my child uses the iPad” rebuttal — channeling all interaction through a single finger is like restricting all literature to Dr. Seuss — is rhetorically satisfying but probably too cute. Accessibility and expressive richness aren’t actually as opposed as the analogy implies; the question is whether you optimize one at the permanent expense of the other. Victor would say yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing. That’s the argument worth sitting with, and it’s one the responses page never quite resolves — which, to his credit, he seems to know.