Older and wiser than most bands thrust into the mainstream limelight, and having shared a house together and then shared vans and tout buses together for the best part of fifteen years, we were better equipped than most to deal with the situation and to use it to our advantage.
Having talk show queen Barbara Walters ask serious questions about Anarchism on prime time network US TV, and seeing David Letterman’s staff in a complete flap because we changed one of the chorus’s of the song, to “Free Mumia Abu Jamal!” was quite spectacular from where we were standing, in the situationist sense.
Prescott’s face close up, giving 70 grand to anti-General Motors activists from a song of ours being used to advertise a GM car, gave us some sense of dignity in the capitalist workplace.
If a Victorian gentleman arrived in present-day London, he’d think we’d been invaded by glowing rectangles. The average single Londoner’s day runs as follows: You wake up and watch a screen until it tells you it’s time to leave the house, at which point you step outside (appearing on a CCTV screen the moment you do so), catch a bus (with an LED screen on the outside and an LCD screen on the inside) to the tube station (giant screens outside; screens down the escalator; projected screens on the platform), to sit on a train and fiddle with your iPod (via the screen), arrive at the office (to stare at a screen all day), then head home to split your attention between the internet (the screen on your lap) and the TV (the screen in the corner) and your mobile (a handheld screen you hold conversations with).
All we city dwellers need is a screen to have sex with and the circle is complete.
When the software required confirmation from the user, it displayed a small window called a “dialog box”, that contained a question, and presented two buttons, for positive or negative confirmation. The buttons were labeled “Do It” and “Cancel”. The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at the point that the dialog was displayed, clicking “Cancel” when they should have clicked “Do It”, but it wasn’t clear what they were having trouble with.
Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, “I’m not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?”
It turns out he wasn’t noticing the space between the ‘o’ and the ‘I’ in ‘Do It’; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital ‘I’ looked very much like a lower case ‘l’, so he was reading ‘Do It’ as ‘Dolt’ and was therefore kind of offended.
After a bit of consideration, we switched the positive confirmation button label to ‘OK’ (which was initially avoided, because we thought it was too colloquial), and from that point on people seemed to have fewer problems.
