An Introduction to DERP
- Alc, The Cracker
- Aug 9
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 3
You’ve heard of TERF, now get ready for DERP, or “Destination-exclusionary radical progress”.
DERP is exactly what it sounds like: radical progress without a destination. It’s a mindset that has grabbed the modern world by its neck and is twisting it slowly.
When YouTube removed the dislike button, that was a DERP.
When Chrome crippled Adblock (and other extensions), as a part of a plan to phase out older “Manifest V2” extensions, that was a DERP.
When Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone, that was a DERP.
When games cost billions of dollars and many years to make, yet they’re either short-lived or downright disappointing, that’s a DERP.
When a game is perfectly fine, yet the developers inject a load of bollocks for the sake of appealing to modern audiences, that’s a DERP.
Remember when you could simply pay once for a product? That is becoming a thing of the past in the modern day. That’s a DERP.
DERP infects our day to day lives, as seen in our article “optimization is a lost art”. In the name of destination-exclusionary radical progress, some things have become far less progressive.
One spearhead example is the user interface, because what is more representative of its time than web design?
The UI disaster
The UI designer’s goal is (or at the very least, should be) making an understandable interface and keeping the end user’s clicks and function hunting to an absolute minimum.
Do we have understandable interfaces? Well, that depends. Some UI’s have become so idiotically simple, it becomes an inconvenience. More on that later.
On the other hand, UI designers are told instead (or it happens by sheer incompetence) that they must maximize the amount of detours a user must take. If they can’t, then just overload the current page by squeezing in as many advertisements as possible.
It can’t just be a simple page when it needs to be. No, it’s a dozen popups about cookies, auto-playing videos, subscription requests, login requests, and ads.
In a sane society, we’d be giving the creator of uBlock Origin a Nobel Peace Prize. I shit you not, it actually saves on energy.
Web design used to be lively, eye-catching, fun, utilitarian…
Now it’s dumbed down to colossal amounts of wasted white space, basic squares or rounded corners, and just painful simplism.
One would think these sites are run by the exact same person. Or generated by ChatGPT. One of the two. It’s dystopian. I don’t want to hear anything about Dead Internet Theory – the corporations have sucked the soul out of this place long ago.
Nobody makes a cool website anymore. And even with an adblocker, you have to excavate several layers of shit before you get to the meat. “Sign up for our newsletter.” “Sign up for an account.” “Sign up for a subscription.” Fuck off, please, and let me see the page that I clicked on.
(See also: https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://blog.ctms.me/posts/2024-07-26-i-want-to-be-left-alone/)
But it doesn’t just stop at web design. Even our most popular operating system is an interface nightmare. Windows 7 and its predecessors were once in harmony. Now? Four years into Windows 11’s lifespan: the control panel, settings, and file explorer windows are still a stylistically inconsistent joke.
Microsoft… who knows what direction they’ve been stumbling towards. In MS Edge, there was once a super handy dictionary feature which could be summoned by simply right clicking a word and clicking “define”. A simple box would appear that would show you everything you need to know about that word in question.
Lo and behold, the feature no longer exists in Edge because convenience is a lost art. Now in its place is MS Copilot. If you want to know the meaning of a word, you have to invoke ChatGPT (Bing edition) to write you an essay length response. Who even knows if it’ll be accurate. ChatGPT hasn’t even proven itself to be reliable at math. ChatGPT isn’t a calculator, so how in the hell can I rely on it being a dictionary?
The gaming industry doesn’t want to make a game with lesser graphics these days. SNAP forbid, something looks unironically “old”. So they spend years and millions of dollars for graphics that look the same as every other realism entry.
Such are the ways of DERP. They think they’re going somewhere, but they’re really going nowhere at all. It’s no joke, man.
