Back in the late 90s, or early 2000s, there was a commercial for some telecom company where a man checks in to a remote desert motel. He asks the clerk about the place’s amenities, to which the clerk lackadaisically relays a distinct lack thereof—save one. They apparently have every movie, In every language, ever made, and on-demand. “How is this possible?” asks the man, before we smash cut to a logo and a pitch that some day, in the future, this would be possible.

The future came, and suddenly every movie was at our fingertips. And then, just as suddenly, every movie was locked behind one of a dozen streaming video services. For $9.99, you can sign up of Netflix, and watch what they have. For another $9.99, you can sign up for Hulu, and watch that. There’s more: Amazon Prime Video, HBO Now, Crackle, Vudu… the list goes on. Some of these services libraries overlap, but there are endless exclusives and no end of complaining from cord-cutters about content going away from the one they’ve paid for.

And these same voices often love their music streaming service, just like they loved Netflix back in the day. Unfortunately for them, it’s inevitable that the same forces that fractured the landscape of streaming video are going to do the same for streaming music. When it does, all you streaming partisans will not be very happy.

The seeds have already been sown. There are artists who are holding out on different streaming services. Prince, for example, only allows his music to be streamed on Tidal. The music video for “Hotline Bling” was originally an Apple Music exclusive. Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify due to royalty issues. For the most part, though, music streaming licenses are handled on the label level, much like video content is handled on the studio level. What happens when a label decides they don’t like the deal, Spotify is giving them?

Imagine Universal Music Group pulling their entire catalog from Spotify. Here is a list of UMG artists, though I don’t know if that includes artists in their subsidiary labels. I bet there is at least one artist on that list that you’re a fan of. If you want to listen to them, you will have two choices: either buy the record, or pay for a second streaming service. And that’s only if the record is available to even be bought.

The next step is going to be streaming music services becoming music labels of their own. We already have digital exclusives, sometimes even locked to one digital music store, but these are often temporary. But, say Taylor Swift signs a deal with Apple to release her next album exclusively on Apple Music. No physical release. Not even a download. If you want to hear the new T-Swift record, you have to pay $9.99 a month for Apple Music. What are her fans going to think? If they’re signed up to Apple Music already, they’ll be okay with it. If they’re on Tidal… well, how would you feel?

There’s probably even more to Apple’s stance on encryption than the company’s business model and desire to promote a competitive advantage. My opinion, without having ever talked with Tim Cook, is that this is at least partially social activism on his part. I suspect that this is an issue he personally cares about, and he has the soapbox of one of the most powerful and popular companies in the world under his feet.

— Rich Mogull – “Why Apple Defends Encryption”

There are many, many reasons why Apple promotes encryption and privacy. Rich does a great job outlining the big ones, including the fact that Apple’s business model isn’t predicated on advertising like so many of the other contemporary technology giants. It’s not even a new phenomenon, stretching back to Steve Jobs’s tenure as CEO. Tim Cook, however, is making privacy a core value of Apple under his leadership. It’s refreshing to see, especially compared to his peers.

And, of course it’s social activism. I’ve never spoken to Tim either, but I don’t think it’s a leap to imagine why a gay man who grew up in Alabama during the 1960s and 70s would put a high value on privacy. Companies reflect the experience and values of their executive staff, after all.

What even qualifies as the technology industry these days? Tech is eating everything—media, logistics, the service industry, entertainment, even food. Back in 2013, Twitter founder Ev Williams described the Internet as “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.” It was pretty spot on then, and now, all you have to do to be labelled a technology company is to use software, typically built using off-the-shelf components, to make it easier and faster for a person to get the thing they want. Or, they make it easier and faster to get ads in front of people.

There’s value to that, I suppose, though whether that value is worth upending the lives and livelihoods of the people who used to get those things to us is yet to be determined. Is this really what we think of when we think of technology? I’ve always thought of technology, and the industry around it, as being in the business of making tools. Some of the tools were hardware, and some of the tools are software, but the emphasis was on enabling people to make things with them, from spreadsheets to spaceships. Looking at the tech marketing spin, we’re a long way from Steve Jobs’s “bicycle for your mind.”

I don’t want to imply that there isn’t anyone working in the pure technology space, but their numbers appear to be thin on the ground. Most are long-lived, established technology companies from before the great shift to on-demand goodies, like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM. The rest are often a passion project of someone who’s already made bank in the technology-as-a-service space, like Elon Musk’s endeavors.

And you have to be an Elon Musk level of wealthy to do something like that. VCs don’t want to fund hardware startups. There’s too much risk for too little return. A safer bet is to fund a software-as-a-serve startup that can get bought out by one of the big players in the tech space. The current model doesn’t allow for much experimentation in pure technology fields. Ask anyone involved in Biotechnology, which has been a historically tough sell to investors as well, and is still in a funding slump.

The darlings of the tech investor world, the various unicorn startups do have a technology component to their products. I don’t doubt the acumen of the engineers on staff at many of them—well, maybe Jawbone. It takes a lot of skill, and a lot of work to scale something to the level of an Uber, or a Spotify. That technology, however, is—as mentioned before—often running on commodity platforms like AWS [1], and what isn’t, is not a platform anyone else can build on. Sure, some of these companies have APIs, but they’re also subject to being closed and revoked at any time.

I continue to be excited about what we can do with technology. Not necessarily by becoming engineers, but by the possibilities created by hardware and software tools for ordinary people. That’s way more exciting than yet another social network, yet another connected home device, yet another way to stream media I don’t own, or yet another service that underpays people to do unpleasant jobs for me. I can do my own laundry, tech industry. I want to be impressed again.

Opinions are stretched out to their absurd conclusion for effect, no argument nuanced. Trolling, playing to the home team, and a never ending thirst to keep it all going. What I am more interested in is the idea of creativity being driven to frivolity shorting us on artists and writers making things.

The energy that should be devoted to making something interesting is being devoted to creating content that is disposable.

— Mike M. – “Creativity In The Era Of Hyperreality”

Once you’ve given this a read, go watch Heather Armstrong (aka dooce)’s XOXO talk. She discusses much of the same ideas, but from the inside. Heather’s story is frightening, because her children became caught up in the demands of creating a personal brand that companies leveraged to sell more units. Yet, without a solid, alternative business model for many independent content creators (boy, do I loathe that term), what other choice do we have? It’s not sustainable. And whenever someone rejects the model, there’s another ten who are willing to do it for a tenth the price.

I went to college to study Computer Science. It ended badly. I wanted to learn to write code, maybe make computer games. I ended up taking the same math class seven times in three semesters (they were half-semester courses, and one try was a two-week rush session between semesters). I ended up failing out, and refocusing on earning a degree in English.

Back in November, I decided it was high time to get back in the game. Knowing I teach myself best when I have a project to work on, I picked up a couple of eBooks, scoured Google and StackExchange, and began working on an app idea I’ve had bouncing around in my head for probably close to two years. I decided to build it in Vanilla JavaScript, with a little help from jQuery, since I already have solid fundamentals in HTML and CSS.

It’s a simple app: a tool for tracking goal progress. You check in every day, and mark whether you accomplished your daily goal or not. You only get to track one goal at a time, and you get a one-day grace period if you fail to check in. I call it: Just Do The Thing. Since late November, I built it out from a basic prototype into a largely fully-functional in-browser web app. It stores all its data in the browser using Local Storage, and has only two dependencies: jQuery, and calendar-base, ’cause who the hell wants to write their own calendaring system?

Amazingly, a lot of CS 101 came right back to me. I had to adapt a bit to JavaScript—my programming courses were taught in C++, and I hadn’t touched JavaScript as a hobbyist in about fifteen years. Thank goodness for the wealth of programming knowledge on the web. Whenever I hit a roadblock on how to do something, I was only a search away from help. As for roadblocks on program logic—I was on my own. So far, so good.

I’m now ready to show off the fruits of my labors. You can find the code at https://github.com/sanspoint/justdothething, and you’re encouraged to poke and prod it to see where it breaks. Just today, I finally cracked (I hope) a long-standing bug based on my incorrect assumptions around date math, which means it actually works the way I intend.

There’s still more to be done. I don’t want to rely on native alerts, and the app itself is still pretty homely. Once it’s feature-complete, I’ll be making it look pretty, adding some responsive layout functionality, and throwing it up at http://www.justdothething.com. You can expect an announcement here, when that happens.