Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

When you design something for a group that doesn’t include you, it tends to be for people you consider less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated. And looking down on the user, however benevolently, always seems to corrupt the designer. I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them.

If you open an average “literary” novel and imagine reading it out loud to your friends as something you’d written, you’ll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader.