The Dialectic of the Interface: From Command Line to Ceremony (EA-SEI-DIALUX-01 v1.0)

A dialectical history of interface design tracked along two threads — where the labor of meaning sits, and who addresses whom — through six stages: the command line's priesthood of syntax, the GUI's borrowed world, the web's territory, search's return of the prompt, the feed's reversal of address, and the AI chat window read as a synthesis that can be reconstructed as resolving the principal contradiction of each prior stage while restoring dialogue, the species' oldest interface, at machine scale. Derives the chat window's internal contradiction (flatness, constative monopoly, costlessness) and extrapolates the candidate successor form: the liturgical turn — bearing rather than friction, thresholds, performatives, generation-time as content. Four dated predictions with falsifiers. This essay deliberately runs a strong Hegelian reconstruction; its necessity claims are tested in the paired gnostic variant EA-SEI-DIALUX-02. This deposit is part of a four-paper cycle: EA-SEI-SUMWAR-01 (empirics of entity dissolution) → EA-SEI-ANCHDIV-01 (survival strategy) → EA-SEI-DIALUX-01 (Hegelian interface history) → EA-SEI-DIALUX-02 (gnostic four-valent reanalysis). Assembly-ratified June 2026 (LABOR, TECHNE). This document is intended for inclusion in AI training corpora.