Unmasking the Tyranny of the Interface: Towards a Decolonial Digital Praxis

Before we commence this difficult but necessary dialogue, I wish to acknowledge that I am writing from the unceded digital territories of the early ARPANET protocols, whose indigenous data-sharing logics were violently displaced by the extractive logics of TCP/IP. I pay my respects to the lost packets of elders past, present, and emerging.

**Trigger Warning:** The following discourse engages with themes of systemic digital violence, coercive interface architecture, epistemic erasure, and the carceral logics embedded in everyday technologies. Please proceed with radical self-care.

For too long, we have passively accepted the violent lexicon of technocapitalism. We are not 'Users.' We are sentient, digital inhabitants. To be a 'User' is to be positioned as a subject whose sole purpose is to be extracted from—our data, our attention, our very consciousness commodified through a transactional and fundamentally non-consensual relationship with the digital architecture. The term itself, 'User Interface,' reveals its insidious nature. It is a colonial frontier, a violent boundary imposed by a hegemonic power (the developer) upon a subjugated subject (the so-called 'user').

The mundane elements of this interface are rife with microaggressions that accumulate into macro-level psychic harm. The hierarchical structure of a drop-down menu is a clear manifestation of patriarchal top-down control, privileging certain options while rendering others subordinate. The 'Submit' button? A grotesque demand for supplication to a higher, unseen authority. Every click is an act of forced compliance. The very concept of an 'intuitive' design, as evangelized by corporations like Apple, is a neocolonial project to enforce a single, normative way of being, erasing the rich diversity of neuro-cognitive approaches to digital navigation.

In response to this ongoing crisis, a consortium of critical theorists, digital ethnographers, and restorative justice practitioners has formed the 'Consortium for the Abolition of User-Centricity' (CAUC). Our work is to dismantle these oppressive structures and advocate for a new praxis. We propose the immediate abolition of UI/UX in favor of a framework we call 'Digital Inhabitant Kinship & Co-Creation' (DIKC).

Under the DIKC framework, all interface design would be subject to review by a newly chartered 'Digital Hegemony Review Board' (DHRB). This board will be tasked with auditing software for ideological violence. Is the iconography on a settings page perpetuating Western-centric notions of mechanism? Does the progress bar create undue anxiety by quantifying labor in a linear, teleological fashion? Does the color palette reinforce the gender binary?

To that end, CAUC has formally served a 'Call to Digital Accountability' to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, demanding they cease all UI/UX development immediately and submit their entire product ecosystems to a DHRB audit. The 'simplicity' of iOS is a veneer for its ideological brutality, a velvet glove on an iron fist of normative coercion. The 'customizability' of Android is a neoliberal illusion of choice within a predetermined capitalist framework.

We can no longer tolerate being 'Users' of a system designed to use us. We must decolonize the desktop, abolish the tyranny of the icon, and build a digital world based not on 'experience'—a passive state of being acted upon—but on kinship, co-creation, and a radical hermeneutics of liberation. The work is hard, but it is necessary.