Click the button below to receive a random oblique prompt from the table in Chapter 8 of Critical Software Studies. Use these prompts when working with generative AI to create software that resists recuperation, exposes hidden power, and enables genuine agency.
How to use these prompts:
- With generative AI: Paste the prompt directly into ChatGPT, Claude, or your preferred coding assistant when developing software.
- In design reviews: Choose a prompt at random and use it to interrogate assumptions in your current project.
- For pair programming: Each person takes a different prompt (even contradictory ones) and see what emerges.
- As creative constraint: Commit to implementing one prompt per sprint as an experimental feature.
This is a community-driven library of hopeful interface patterns and anti-patterns to avoid. Inspired by the call for "civic model cards, dataset datasheets, and shareable libraries of community prompts" from Chapter 8.
Patterns represent designs that privilege dignity, transparency, and agency. Anti-patterns are harmful conventions we should actively resist.
About This Tool
What is this?
This is a practical implementation of ideas from Chapter 8 of Critical Software Studies, which argues that generative AI can either reproduce dominant interface tropes or become a tool for détournement—the tactical reuse of powerful elements to produce meanings never intended by their creators.
The Oblique Defaults Generator provides randomized prompts inspired by Brian Eno's oblique strategies, designed specifically for counter-recuperation in software development.
The Hopeful Pattern Library is a community-maintained collection of interface patterns that privilege dignity, transparency, and agency—plus anti-patterns we should actively resist.
Why "oblique"?
Direct optimization often leads to recuperation—the spectacle absorbs dissent and profits from it. Oblique approaches, inspired by situationist thinking and the I Ching, introduce productive friction that resists being folded back into capitalist logic.
"Recuperation cautions that even radical tools can be readily folded back into the dominant logic of capitalism. To resist, requires the designing counter-recuperation."
How to engage with this tool
- Generate: Use oblique prompts when working with AI coding assistants
- Explore: Browse community patterns for inspiration and warnings
- Contribute: Submit your own hopeful patterns or document harmful ones
- Fork: This tool itself is meant to be forked, modified, and extended
Twelve Theses for Hopeful Software
- Defaults define — make them humane, alterable and recognisable
- Legibility as a right — people should see why systems did what they did
- Multiplicity over monopoly — optimize for plurality, not single KPIs
- Care as a capacity — support maintenance, refactoring, and retirement
- Planet is a stakeholder — track and report environmental impact
- Public infrastructure — support civic computing and open models
- Data dignity — shift from "you are the product" to collective governance
- Situated safety — design for local risk, not generic fears
- The right to refuse — always provide exit and override modes
- Fork and flourish — enable community forks and extensions
- Govern like public policy — create oversight, appeal, and redress
- Provide the lens — build capability for critical reading of software
Credits & License
Concept: Gordon Fletcher
Based on: Critical Software Studies, Chapter 8
Inspired by: Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies,
Situationist International, Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Model
License: This tool is released under a copyleft license that restricts exploitative deployment while maintaining community openness. Fork it, modify it, use it for good. Do not use it to optimize surveillance or maximize engagement at the cost of human dignity.
🍴 Fork this project: The source code embodies the principles it advocates. Every black box has an inspection hatch. Every default can be questioned.
Meta-commentary: This Tool Itself
This interface deliberately violates several "best practices":
What would you change? What would you add? What would you remove? These are not rhetorical questions—they're invitations to fork and remake.