Originally published in Portuguese on June 24, 2002 at Webinsider under the title "Não seja masoquista tecnológico. Reaja."

"We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, and the worst part is, we did it to ourselves." This sentence summarizes the thoughts of Don Norman in The Invisible Computer (MIT Press, 1997), which clarifies the fact that we are people and not machines, but we submit ourselves to the machine voluntarily.

It appears to me as a rather stupid attitude to be aware of a problem and continually repeat it. But we develop new software, new Web sites, new equipment and new services without solving the problems of their previous versions and add even more confusing features to them. We tolerate and endure the difficulties of interaction in all these products – imposed by ourselves upon ourselves – and defend the new creations raising the flag of modernity and innovation. But if there is no improvement, why even bother to create a new version?

Economical principles. This is the answer that justifies our ignorance pattern, which allows us to accept the worst and surrender to the barriers that human-computer interaction brings into our lives. We develop products that don’t adequate to the user but are financially viable. We create web sites that glorify "design", even though the purpose is not artistic. We provide services that satisfy our management while the consumer is left alone disregarded and overlooked.

This economy rules over a dissatisfied society, complacent to its self-imposed hindrances. But this won’t last. We are learning to identify these errors and vices, which we inherit from past generations raised NOT to participate in "technology". But let us not blame them; they did not live in the information age, where knowledge is the factor that adds real value to what is created. But we do, so what are we waiting for?

Those economical principles will always be the same and it would be a frustrated effort to attempt to modify a market structure based on idealism alone. It is necessary to demand that what is produced be what we want, rather than what others expect to be adequate for us. Complain, protest, criticize, call customer service, create counter-advertising, send an email; talk to the ombudsman! Don’t put up with a product that is less than what you expect and less than you deserve.

Notwithstanding the Internet’s relatively little age, this concept is hard to propagate. We start out by accepting all sorts of junk – slow hardware, sluggish connections, failed operating systems, browsers with bugs and sites that don’t facilitate the search for information. There is no energy left to try and enlighten the person responsible for a Web site about how she could have done something better for the user, after being repeatedly reminded of how dependent and insignificant you really have become before all that technology.

As a user, it is difficult to contribute to the qualitative improvement of web sites by free and spontaneous willingness, but as a producer of this sort of product-service, complex and complete as web sites have become, it is more than an obligation. It is a social duty – with the risk of sounding Utopic – because it is the only way to change this retrograde and anti-evolutionary paradigm that we should accept things as they come.