In a newsletter article I wrote for Sine Theta, I discussed the evolution of software design metaphors — you know, how we turn pages in e-readers because we turn pages in real books, the delete icon is represented by a trash icon, stuff like that. When I was reading the Wikipedia page on the desktop metaphor, I came across this description of a demo of the Mac interface:

Back in 1984, explanations of the original Mac interface to users who had never seen a GUI before inevitably included an explanation of icons that went something like this: “This icon represents your file on disk.” But to the surprise of many, users very quickly discarded any semblance of indirection. This icon is my file. My file is this icon. One is not a “representation of” or an “interface to” the other. Such relationships were foreign to most people, and constituted unnecessary mental baggage when there was a much more simple and direct connection to what they knew of reality.

What would Rene Magritte, nearly a hundred years after he painted his famous image of a pipe (not a pipe—a picture of a pipe), make of this? He noted:

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I’d have been lying!

“This is not a pipe” has also been compared to the fallacy of “confusing the map with the territory”—the abstraction of the thing does not equal the thing itself. I’m a bit more sympathetic to the GUI fallacy mentioned, though, because while you can’t stuff a painted pipe, you can perform a lot of physical operations on an icon of a file (dragging it into another file, for instance, or clicking a delete button) that would then affect the file. (Probably. Users don’t know what’s going on under the hood. For example, it could have simply been soft deleted, but they think it’s hard deleted.)

“The map is not the territory” fallacy brings to mind Borges’s short story “On Exactitude in Science,” in which an empire’s cartography has become so exact that maps now have a 1:1 scale to the land they represent. In other words, the map of one square mile of land is also one square mile. When applying this theory to technology, I can only assume that one day we will be walking into little VR cubicles filled with file cabinets stuffed with manila folders. (But I hope not. We can do better than that.)