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Essays on Technology and Culture

On My Second Brain

I consider my iPhone to be my second brain. Some would even argue its my first brain, but let’s not go into that. My iPhone remembers phone numbers, my calendar, and the items on my to-do list, but this is nothing new. Increasingly, I’ve taken to using it to remind me to eat better, to go to bed and wake up at a reasonable hour, and make sure I get enough sleep. It tracks every step I take to make sure I get some exercise during a twelve-hour work day spent mostly with my butt in a chair. It reminds me when my bills are due, and thanks to Siri, all I have to do is ask and it reminds me of anything on my mind I’ll need to remember later. My iPhone is, in many ways, the superego I lack. It’s my Skinner Box, offering myriad forms of behavioral reinforcement techniques.

How is an iPhone like a Skinner Box? The phone gives me a cue, offers an action, and then I get a reward. Let me start at the end and mention that the rewards are often intangible. I track my walking and my food intake, but the reward for that isn’t another food pellet—it’s quantifying calories burned and consumed. It’s knowing I hit a goal, and it’s taking my belt in another notch when I get dressed in the morning. It’s the pile of completed to-do items and finished things I’ve made. Compared to that, who needs food pellets?

Let’s use weight loss as an example. At 9:00 every morning, my iPhone buzzes to remind me to tell the Lose It! app what I ate for breakfast, that is if I haven’t told it already. At 1:00 and 6:00 the same thing happens for lunch and dinner. Lose It! tracks what I eat, it’s calorie content, my exercise, and my weight. It reinforces good eating habits—that bag of Peanut M&Ms looks good, but that’s 250 calories I could spend on something better, or not spend at all. Another example is the Motion-X Sleep app which, yes, monitors sleep, but is also an excellent pedometer. I work a desk job, and when the app notes I’ve spent an hour at my desk without moving around, it cues me to get up and take a walk, tracking my steps and estimating how many calories I’ve burned based on my height and weight. These sorts of apps are proven to work, too, if you follow through.

I also get prodded to get things done. Recently I bit the damn bullet and finally switched to OmniFocus from Things. Two features were the impetus to switch: Siri integration and geofencing. Siri makes getting things into my trusted system as easy as pushing a button and speaking. Really. Siri reminders appear in my OmniFocus inbox automatically, and iOS 6 is only going to make the integration more powerful. The other feature is geofencing, which allows me to be reminded of various tasks wherever I go. One simple application is the humble grocery list. If I create a context for my local supermarket, OmniFocus can detect when I’m there and ping me with the list of stuff I need to pick up. It works the other way too. When I walk out of my building, OmniFocus buzzes with reminders of any errands I need to run. The power here is almost limitless, especially since contexts don’t even need to be linked to a specific place, but can search for any sort of location type, post offices for example, when you have an action in that context.

The iPhone even helps with the actual doing of things. There’s a whole holy host of apps for creating content, but also apps to help just manage the time it takes to do the work. For tasks that I dread but have to get done, there’s Phocus which allows me to set up an hour of Merlin Mann’s 10+2*5 Productivity Hack with enforced work and recreation periods. Other timer apps like Due keep me aware of anything I’m waiting for, be it laundry or a power nap—though Siri has taken over a lot of my single-use timer needs. And let us not forget the simple Pomodoro Timer.

This system isn’t perfect though. One thing I’d simply love is a The Now Habit-esque time tracker/procrastination journal. I’m sure I could repurpose another app for this, maybe one of the kajillion time tracking for invoicing apps, but one dedicated to just giving me a buzz every thirty minutes to log what I am doing right then would be terribly handy. As it stands, I do have the Fathm app which allows me to track how I spend my time but it’s fiddly, not automated, and a bit buggy. Sure is pretty though.

Of course, the biggest problem in the system is the human element. Namely, me, and my grumpy, change-resistant lizard brain. All the alerts and dings and sirens are useless if I decide to simply ignore them. Call it “alert fatigue.” I noticed it happening to me when the daily reminder I’d set to nudge me off to bed in Due hadn’t gone off in a few days. This was because I had ignored an alarm to go to bed without acknowledging it in the app. I had taken to simply dismissing the notification and going about my business for another hour or so before crawling into bed.

To avoid this, I’m spending time thinking about where and when I need my alerts. Is it enough to have a buzz when I get home, or should it pop up at a specific time? Is this task so time and context sensitive that it even deserves an alert? Clearly my phone buzzing at 11 PM to remind me to sleep is a bit much. There is a balance to strike, and a well timed or well placed iPhone alert works far better than tying a string on your finger. Why did I tie the string to my finger? To remember something, but now I don’t remember what I was supposed to remember. If I’d fed what I was trying to remember into OmniFocus, it would be there for me to find.

It all comes down to mindfulness, and the subtle distinction that I control my second brain, it does not control me. An iPhone, Lose It!, OmniFocus, and other apps are ways to build and break habits, but not an end to themselves—and the trick to habits is to try and change them one at a time. In fact, you can only do one thing at a time, period, but that’s something for another essay entirely. My second brain, my iPhone, is no substitute for mindfulness, but it is an aid to it. That’s the best part of it—these apps take my iPhone from being a shiny device I can use to browse the web, listen to music, and take phone calls and make it a way to actually change the way my mind works.

B. F. Skinner would be proud.

On Fear and Bad Motivators

I’ve spoken before about fear. Fear is a terrible motivator, at least in the long term. Fear takes a lot out of a person. Fear amps your body’s systems to the maximum. While fear is in control you can accomplish incredible feats at great physical cost, true. However, you can only run so far, and you can only fight so hard before your reserves are depleted. When that happens, you’re done. With any luck, whatever your body stored up in preparation for your fear event was enough to get you through it. If not, you’ll end up worse than when you started, drained and pained, and in deep trouble.

Living a life in perpetual fear is a guaranteed recipe for utter and complete misery.

Why?

Fundamentally, it’s biology. The human limbic system evolved in a way to ensure our survival against very real, very present, very specific threats to our person. I’m talking about “being attacked by a hungry lioness,” or “facing down an angry rhinoceros” sort of threats. Now-a-days, however, our chances of facing down a dangerous animal that could kill us is exceedingly rare. The limbic system is well-suited for when a car veers out of control at you while you’re crossing the street. It is not suited for when you have, say, an overdue tax bill that you can’t afford. One is an immediate threat; you either escape, or don’t. There’s going to be a very quick resolution when a car is coming at you. The other threat is going to linger…

When you become afraid or experience a threat, the body experiences a number of symptoms that work to prepare it for either fight or flight. The heart accelerates, lung action increases, blood vessels in the muscles dilate to increase blood flow, and the body becomes ready for action. Sure, in the face of a less tangible threat, you can leap into action and start doing stuff, but you’re probably not going to neutralize anything in the time it takes for your hormones to metabolize and your body to crash. At this point, the body needs rest and nutrients to replenish itself, which—one hopes—are in supply, and rest is hard to get when you’re still afraid.

It’s not a huge leap from here to the effects of the fear cycle we can get ourselves caught up in, but fear isn’t the only thing that taxes our systems. Anger triggers a lot of the same systems as fear. An angry life is just as bad as a fearful life. When we talk about stress, this is, in many cases, a function of long term fear and/or anger. Think about it: you’re not going to be stressed if the thing you’re afraid of or angry about is not a threat anymore. That is, if the mind can let go of it.

The mind sucks at this.

We see it manifested as Posttraumatic stress disorder, and it doesn’t just happen to people who survive war, natural disasters, or acts of criminality. Any stressful experience can cause it, and it may be one of the biggest public health problems facing America—especially children.

Severe and chronic trauma… causes toxic stress in kids. Toxic stress damages kid’s brains. When trauma launches kids into flight, fight or fright mode, they cannot learn. It is physiologically impossible.

When you’re afraid, when you’re stressed, when you’re angry, it drives you toward one thing above all: to escape. This is biology. Nothing more. Our bodies evolved to address threats that manifest as tangible, physical things. If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’re not living the sort of lifestyle that would put you in the presence of free wild carnivores and other dangerous beasts. Instead, your threats, as stated, become more existential and far less tangible. We can be paralyzed by this, unable to fix anything, and unable to escape. You may know someone like this. You may be someone like this.

There are no easy answers to escaping the fear cycle. Medication, meditation, and therapy, are all options, but as I am not a licensed psychiatrist or therapist, I can’t give you a prescription.

The worst part, though, is that when you’re afraid—at least early on—you can accomplish wonders. Think of all the all-nighters you’ve pulled in college, or the last minute preparation for your work presentation. Think of every time you’ve flown by the seat of your pants, and lived. If that number is greater than the times you’ve done it and crashed, you’re going to think that it’s okay. I’ve gotten plenty of A grades on papers I churned out the day before, night before, or two or three hours before they became due.

That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have done better.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do better, either.

Fear is a motivator, but it’s a terrible motivator, because it doesn’t keep things going for very long. If you expect to keep moving, keep surviving and fighting, and doing the work, what motivates you needs to be something more sustaining than sheer, blind animal fear. What that is will vary from person to person. Whatever it is, long- term success will only come from using a motivator that can sustain you in the future.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

—Frank Herbert, Dune

On the Price of Free

I’m starting to get wary about free apps. It probably started with the purchase of Instagram by Facebook, but the underlying problem is a lot older. A few quick examples that should have tipped off my radar: Yahoo! ditching Delicious, the Facebook privacy kerfluffle(s), Readability versus Instapaper versus Pocket, and Google, Google, Google. Many free applications and services have a hidden price. We all know this. Google and Facebook use your data to sell ads. You’re not the customer, you’re the product. Of course, that applies to the companies that actually get your data, whether by asking or taking. Other free services just ride on venture capital until a bigger company decides to buy them. You’re still a product, but having you in their user numbers is what drives their value up, more than the data you put into it.

It’s quite the quandary.

I’ve entrusted so much to “The Cloud,” almost all of it to free services. A lot of my important files are in the care of Dropbox. I use Apple’s iCloud to store calendars, and move data between my phone and laptop. Google handles my e-mail, my contacts, and even my text messaging and phone calls through Google Voice. [1] I’m not so worried about Dropbox and iCloud. The former has paid levels that will keep it running, and iCloud is subsidized by purchasing Apple hardware. Google’s not likely to go away, and there isn’t much that they can do with my contacts, I suppose, except try and nudge them into joining Google+. That doesn’t mean I’m happy to let them…

Then, there’s specialized places, like Flickr that house my photos, and Pinboard for my bookmarks. Pinboard doesn’t worry me—it’s a paid service. I paid $7.54 to sign up around the time Delicious was expected to go the way of Geocities. [2] At the time of this post, it costs a little under $10 to sign up. Flickr, on the other hand, has me worried. It’s a mostly healthy organ attached to the withering, diseased body of Yahoo! and it’s attendant properties. Flickr has paid options, but there is a very real chance it might go away and take a lot of my pictures and memories with it. I have most, if not all, of the images I keep on Flickr stored locally, but I know there are gaps. I’ll need to throw down for a pro account to fill those in, particularly photos from my earliest days on the service. This is that odd case where a service with a paid tier may still die, but that’s more the fault of its caretakers negligence. Sadly, I can’t find another service that matches Flickr on features and price.

Every new, free service I see that offers something I might want now has me mulling over its longevity. Can I trust this service, app, website, platform, et cetera to be here in five years? One year? Six months? Instagram was independent for seventeen months before Facebook bought them. What’s to stop the next interesting looking free app from either vanishing, selling itself and my data to another company, or both? I want to trust these apps and services. Increasingly, it seems the best way to do that is make sure they get some money from me. Marco Arment is infinitely less likely to throw me under a bus by selling Instapaper to someone. Even if, hypothetically, he did sell it, the service doesn’t have much more data on me than a couple hundred saved articles. There might be something there to target ads with, but that’s probably a less viable solution in the long run than just charging a couple bucks for the app, and offering paid subscriptions to users.

I wish I had an answer, but I don’t have one. In the mean time, I’ll try to give money to people who are asking for it, and be cautious about how much I’m willing to share with free services. In time, maybe it will all shake out, hopefully in a way that keeps the Marco Arments of the world successful, and keeps people’s personal data safe. I can’t help but be pessimistic about the chances.


  1. It’s worth whatever sneaky stuff Google’s doing behind the curtain just to have free, unlimited text messaging.  ↩

  2. My first website was hosted on Geocities. I moved to a couple different hosting providers the last of which finally went under back in 1999. Even archive.org doesn’t have a copy. Good riddance.  ↩

On Crush On Radio

Sometimes, all it takes is asking a question. In this case, the question was asked via Twitter. For ages, I’ve had the idea in my head to do a music related, well, something. First it was a podcast, then a blog, then a podcast, then a blog again. I even signed up for a trial of Squarespace, to set the blog up, but it never reached fruition. With podcasting, I found it exceedingly difficult to sit in front of the computer and blab for an extended period about something, alone. Even if I wrote up what I was going to say in advance, it was still hard to do. Besides, if I was writing it all up, why not just make a blog post out of it? As for blogging, I didn’t just want another music review site. I wanted to tell stories, share experiences, and talk about what it meant to be a fan of something, not just search for what’s new.

So, the idea remained, unfulfilled, until I thought to enlist the help of others—namely, Andrew Marvin of Quarter-Life Enlightenment, and Matt Keeley of Kittysneezes. I had come into contact with Andrew on Twitter, bonding over mutual interest in self-improvement though the Back to Work podcast, and the work of Merlin Mann. Through his writing, I learned he was a music fan as well as a musician. I’d wanted to collaborate with him on something, and this seemed like a good thing to try with. Matt, on the other hand, I’d known for ages, going back to the days when LiveJournal was a going concern and way to meet cool people. We had similar tastes in music, and other culture, and when he started his online ’zine Kittysneezes, it didn’t take too long for me to start writing for it. Matt had been wanting to start a podcast, anyway, and he works in radio, which is always a plus.

There was some planning, a bit of back and forth on titles, theme songs and formulating a format. We did test recordings, and hammered out all the gory details that go into any collaborative effort. At last, on Sunday, May 6th, 2012, we all got together (via Skype), and spoke passionately to each other about what turned us into hardcore music fans and the band that ruined us. We also shared some albums we liked with each other, and fought with Skype. After a lot of late-night editing, uploading, and nail-biting on my part, we had Episode 1: Passionately and Ineloquently, which went up around 1:30 AM on Monday, May 7th. Whether anyone liked it or not, I didn’t care. I was just glad to have made something, and have done it with people who I enjoy the company of.

Actually, I did care. Fortunately, some people did like it.

The next Friday, we got our feet a little wetter, tweaked the format, and discussed the ethics of downloading. The next week, we talked about falling in and out of love with bands, and a week later about the things that make us like music. Most recently, we blabbed for nearly two hours, mostly about remasters, special editions, and bonus tracks—as well as Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Each episode is, I think, better than the last, both in terms of content and technical execution. I’ve been doing the editing on all of the episodes, except Episode 4, which Matt handled, and learning something too, every time.

It’s been great to learn the technical side of things, great to learn about new bands and artists, but just sitting with a glass of water, and chatting with good friends about the things we’re madly passionate about has been the best part. It’s proof that Obsession x Topic x Voice is a great way to make cool stuff. If you like the idea of hearing three complete music nerds talk about their obsessions for over an hour, this show is for you. If you like to hear about cool music you might not know about, the first half of each show is for you. In either case, I hope you’ll tune in.

Crush On Radio. It’s about being a music fan, and all that entails. I hope you’ll join us.