Any advanced technology feels like magic, but some of the best-designed tools just work and we hardly need to think about learning how to use them.

The Happisburgh Handaxe

First of all, ‘Happisburgh’ is pronounced ‘Hazeboro’. It is one of those English spelling quirks that is a testament to ancient language change. It is a small town in Norfolk where, in 2000, archaeologists unearthed a chunk of flint that rewrote our understanding of the roots of technology. It became known as the Happisburgh handaxe and was shaped between 600 and 800 000 years ago by Homo antecessor, the likely common ancestor of both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. It is awesome to think that, between the time of dropping the axe until now, there have been five ice ages and warming periods. During five time periods, the landscape was remoulded and altered beyond recognition, but the axe was still there.

Despite the millennia, it speaks clearly to us now. Just by the grooves knapped into each side, you intuitively know how to hold it. This is ergonomic design. There is no need for a manual. No icons. No CE mark. With one end, it cuts, scrapes, butchers. With the other, it hammers.

Intuitive design: simple, durable and purposeful. Although it was not designed for us, not for our fingers, not for our hands, it still fits.

Tools unearthed from prehistory should be held up as gold standards for technology. Not for what it does but for how effortlessly usable it becomes. It is not about complexity, but simplicity.

From Axe to App

I do not and cannot get excited about technology. That might be an odd admission from someone who works in usability testing, but it is true. I am only interested in how it is used.

I see technology through the eyes of the people trying to make it work: lay users, not the developers who built it. I look for the friction points, the blank stares, the frowns that give way to tiny Eureka moments when someone figures something out on their own.

I listen closely to the feedback: what confused them, what helped, what they would change and make better for the next person. It is easy to imagine that flint tools evolved in the same way: by trial, failure and tiny, joyful breakthroughs. It is design by iteration and collaboration, over time.

The Bending of Technology Towards Unexpected Uses.

I originally wrote a version of this article in 2019. What interests me about technology, especially around health, is where ordinary people start using a digital tool in ways that were not intended or anticipated. In 2019, just over half of humanity was online, with much of that growth coming from China, India and Africa. Optimists hoped that this meant increased and low-cost access to health and education. But, in practice, people logged on for connection: social media, messaging, entertainment and we can all guess what else. Health and learning came later, if at all. How a digital tool was used was not always what anyone had planned.

Cultural Rewrites and Digital Workarounds

In Myanmar, women began quietly using their smartphones to bypass cultural taboos, learning about menstrual health in private. They could ask doctors questions anonymously, without fear or shame.

In China, new mothers turned to online forums to learn about breastfeeding. Printed materials were available but often poorly translated and culturally tone-deaf, featuring illustrations of Western bodies that hardly resembled their own.

These two simple examples were not the results of grand product design. They were bottom-up adaptations. People taking the tools and bending them toward their own needs.

This flexibility of technology is truly inspiring. But not all adaptation was benign.

Pushmi-Pullyu

How technology has been used in the past years reminds me very much of ‘Pushmi-Pullyu’ from Dr. Doolittle, the fictional two-headed unicorn-gazelle hybrid, with heads facing opposite directions. On the one hand, we have users who are like ‘Pushmi’, that want to move forward because they glimpse enlightenment and have a map to get there. This is where the Tree of Knowledge is. We know this. Meanwhile, there are the far numerous ‘Pullyu’ users, who seem quite unimpressed by the proposition of enlightenment and want to pull back to a pre-modern existence. This is one of squabbles, turmoil, unchecked disease and a rejection of evidence-based anything. Perhaps they forget that technology is out of place in that world too. Theirs is a future of darkness. And ignorance. And tiny worldviews. There will be a sharp and organic segregation between the two. Perhaps this is already the case and always has been.

2020

Even before 2020, disinformation was growing, but the Covid-19 pandemic compressed the digital world. In a very fast period – not a matter of weeks, but days – we had to migrate our lives online. Work, learning, care, community and even grieving were all filtered through screens and systems never designed for that. We were all vulnerable and disinformation took hold.

Public health advice competed with conspiracy theories. Doctors were drowned out by know-nothing influencers and podcasters. Trust in expertise and authority fractured.

It was not just a wave of bad ideas, it was a collapse of shared reality, epistemic instability. There was a sense that truth itself had become unknowable. ‘Pullyu’ dragging us back to a worse plain of existence.

The Intentional Misuser

While I am interested in unintentional misuses of technology that benefit users, now we are confronted with something more sinister: intentional misuse of technology that is even better and that we hardly understand yet.

-            AI-generated disinformation that looks indistinguishable from expert advice.

-            Voice cloning and impersonation.

-            Deepfake videos.

-            Automated campaigns of manipulation: think Brexit, the Rohingya, etc.

The technologies themselves are not broken, but they work too well, in the wrong hands. Now, tools shape our beliefs, behaviours and identities.

Even the flint axe could both cut meat or be used to crack a skull. Dual applications: benign and malevolent. It is not the tool. It is the intention behind it.

The tools are powerful, but the direction is ours. We still have the Pushmi-Pullyu effect: AI can do anything from co-developing new drugs and helping people through grief. It can also tailor health disinformation to your information-seeking behaviours and your belief system. The manosphere, with their ‘conspiracy-curious’ chatter, is now a multinational content industry and they engineer technology-enabled behaviour change: not always for the better.

We should not fear the digital revolution, but we should worry about its aftermath.

We have not broken technology, but we have bent it towards convenience, profit and sometimes harm. Let us keep paying attention to this. Let us ask better questions and build better. Where it has gone out of shape, we can bend it back.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, Easter 2025