Here’s Jared Spool talking about knowing who/what you are designing for as if it’s a novel idea. This UX influencer opinion that being able to recognise that you’re making something for people is some kind of UX skill superpower. Yet they never acknowledge the critical distinction between designing for-profit vs their usual non-commercial case study examples, like this one of a European government ministry.
Commercial design has always been somewhat dumb in how egotistical it is, but we’re in a golden age of believing ones own bullshit where people think that UX is a force for good separate from whatever the UXer is being paid to do. In an ad agency, that kind of ignorance was usually isolated to the sales suits who snorted copious amounts of coke to cope with the internal anguish, while everyone else was comfortable with being paid a lot of money to make ads.