Dark Mode (Sucks)

My problem with Dark Mode is that it makes everything harder to see. Most of our lives are not spent inside caves that are somehow equipped with USB-C chargers, but have no electric lights, which is where Dark Mode was (I think) invented.

Dark Mode turns your entire computer into a backlit keyboard. Obviously there are situations where a backlit keyboard is useful, but even in the most idyllic yuppie lives, you’d be amazed how much time isn’t spent “sending off email” while your spouse sleeps next to you. I mean, you want to have a backlit keyboard, but the truth is that if you’re using that feature multiple times per week, you are definitely killing your eyes, and probably also trying to use gauzy lighting as a substitute for meaning.

Dark Mode is not for your benefit. It’s just a way of making batteries last longer than they otherwise would — right along with hilarious Orwellian inventions like “TrueTone,” Apple’s way of constantly dimming your screen. This is so you don’t waste their tiny, feeble batteries lighting your pixels to a brightness Apple considers unnecessary. If you’ve ever tried fighting with TrueTone, you know it’s relentless. Relentless? No…let me amend that. It is a vicious, maelevolent force. It never tires. And it’s never content to leave well enough alone.

Like, what is the point, exactly, of the way words twinkle from within Dark Mode’s lightless windows? Are they supposed to remind you of how fragile and precious every exchange of information could be, in some better world? When I look at a playlist on (Dark Mode pioneer) Spotify, sitting there like a miracle cobbled from the icy vasts of interstellar space, I think: not all words can exist as crazy negatives of themselves, or as something composed on a Lite Brite. Everything that is, in Dark Mode, is both itself and an ugly Polaroid of some special comet that only people with sordid drug histories can see.

Not every sentence can survive being wired up like U2 during their Fat Elvis years. Nor is it good to scatter every utterance across a pitiless, ebony, digital loam, just because it’s five o’ clock somewhere, the middle of winter, and Original Dark Mode —in other words, the night — creeps up to your apartment so early, swallowing brightness as it goes.