The release of the iPad Pro has rekindled the endless debate that has plagued Apple discussion over the last five years. No, not the “Is Apple doomed?” debate. That one is older than five years. It’s the “Can you do real work on an iPad?” debate. We’ve gone around and around in circles on this. One side cites the limits of the iPad hardware, the limits of iOS, and the limits of the App Store against doing “real” work. The other side cites the expansion of “power user” features in iOS, the massive computing power of the latest generation of iPads, and the few standouts who get by with an iPad as their primary computer. And then another major iteration happens, and we all start writing think-pieces again.
Seriously, if I see another tweet about how the iPad is only useful for writing 30,000 word iPad reviews, I will scream.
I have to draw comparisons to the original Macintosh. When it dropped in 1984, the attitude from many tech people was that it was a toy, not something you can do real work on. Macs had limited software support, no PC compatibility, a tiny black and white display, no command line, no multitasking… I’m only a fairly recent Mac convert, switching in 2005, but I recall this “Macs are toys” attitude persisting among PC users until the 2000s, long after many of these issues were resolved. The tide might have turned around OS X 10.3, which came out in 2003. In other words, it took nearly twenty years for attitudes to change around the Macintosh and deem it worthy for doing “real” work.
The iPad as a platform is five years old, iOS is eight years old. They’ve changed a lot in that time span, and not just visually. There are still limitations to both, but a lot fewer than there were even a year ago. There were professionals using Macintoshes to do all their work in the 1990s, but they were a rare breed. We’re approaching the iPad equivalent of the 1990s now, and the iPad Pro is equivalent to the beloved Macintosh II. Will it be enough to turn the tide and make iPads the computer for everyone?
No. At least, not yet.
Ten years from now, iPad and iOS will have another decade of development under its belt. The limitations that make the platform unsuitable for whatever you do that makes you stick to a Mac will almost certainly be gone by then. Likely, they’ll be gone sooner. Ask yourself if you can do all your work on a Macintosh II, or even a Mac 512k. The answer is probably going to be no, but that’s fine—they don’t make those anymore. Now ask yourself if you think you’ll be able to do all your work on the iPad of 2025. The answer to that is almost certainly yes. We just have to wait until then.
There are certain bands and artists which risk becoming a shibboleth among a certain type of Serious Music Nerd: names like Jandek, The Shaggs, Pere Ubu, and—probably the biggest of them all—The Residents. I’m no fan of cultural shibboleths. The more you love an obscure artist, the more you should preach their name from the mountaintops, in the hopes that others will be compelled to listen. Most might only listen once, but the ones who come back will become fans for live. Though this, those artists gain longevity.
Fortunately, The Residents have that. They’ve been making music for over forty years. In that time they’ve evolved from a group of bizarre San Francisco hippie transplants from Louisiana with no musical ability—but a ton of creativity—to a highly respected artistic enterprise that has created some of the most beautiful and haunting music put to disc, while never losing their idiosyncrasies. And after all this time, nobody knows who they are—except for their handlers and collaborators. They’re not going to give up the secret, even for a documentary crew. Even if you don’t know them and their music, you might know their most iconic look: a giant eyeball mask, worn with a top hat and tuxedo. It looks a little something like this:
In the film, Homer Flynn, who is one of the band’s handlers via The Cryptic Corporation, and their graphic designer notes that the band may not have any hit albums, but they do have a hit T-shirt—with the image above.
Theory of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents dwells very little on the mystery of the band, to its benefit. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter who the people are behind the eyeballs. What matters is their body of work: musical, visual, and performance. _ It takes the band’s forty year-plus evolution and puts it center stage. Drawing from the band’s extensive archives, going back to their first audio tape experiments from 1969, it explores the development of the band and their impact on art and culture. There’s interviews with figures you expect from the music world: Les Claypool (Primus), Gerald Casale (DEVO), Michael Melchiondo (aka Dean Ween of Ween) and Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads), and interviews with folks you might not: like Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller, and Simpsons creator Matt Groening.
Theory of Obscurity_ gives the audience a peek into the remarkable artistic world of The Residents, and a sense of the exploration and process they have cultivated over their multiple decades of work. Theory of Obscurity should be a source of inspiration for anyone who creates art. To paraphrase Penn Jillette (since I didn’t write down anything in the dark theater), the important thing isn’t knowing how to do something, it’s knowing how to finish something. It’s a mantra that runs through the film. When you take away the masks, the theories, the lore, what stands is a four decade run of creative work, because The Residents finish things. If four weirdos from Shreveport can, so can you. That is advice for life.
For newcomers to The Residents, I helped collaborate on a guide to Residents albums for my friend’s website Kittysneezes called The Residents Project. It gives you a good overview of their major discography. If you want just a quick introduction to their music, here’s a few songs to get started with:
These are not abstractions. And this is where the arguments about the freedom of speech become most tone deaf. The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of oneÃs liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another.
Freedom of speech also applies to people criticizing the speech of others. In all the debate around campus protesters for safe spaces and trigger warnings—or against racist behaviors on campus—the attitude I keep seeing is that these protestors are the enemy of free speech. Nothing could be further from the truth. Free speech is not free speech when it is used to silence the marginalized. When speaking up puts your life at risk, how is that free?
It has so quickly become acceptable practice within mainstream web publishing companies to reuse people’s tweets as the substance of an article that special tools have sprung up to help them do so. But inside these newsrooms, there is no apparent debate over whether it’s any different to embed a tweet from the President of the United States or from a vulnerable young activist who might not have anticipated her words being attached to her real identity, where she can be targeted by anonymous harassers.
What if the public speech on Facebook and Twitter is more akin to a conversation happening between two people at a restaurant? Or two people speaking quietly at home, albeit near a window that happens to be open to the street? And if more than a billion people are active on various social networking applications each week, are we saying that there are now a billion public figures? When did we agree to let media redefine everyone who uses social networks as fair game, with no recourse and no framework for consent?
An important question to ask. I’m guilty of embedding tweets without permission, and I’ll try to reach out in the future. Beyond that, though, part of the problem is that on social networks—especially Twitter—privacy is a binary. You’re either entirely public, or entirely private. Real life does not work that way. Why should the places we live online work that way?
When I was a child, my father would tell me that “you only own two things: your words, and your mistakes.” Nobody wants to take credit for your mistakes, after all, but your word is your own. It’s not quite the way he meant it, but I’ve found myself worried that we no longer can be said to own our words. The Internet has been a boon for the democratization of publishing. It’s easier than ever for us to put our words out for the public to see. It’s easier now than it was when I first set up Sanspoint.com in 2002, let alone how it was when I got online for the first time in 1997.
That ease has come at the cost of control and ownership. The more of ourselves and our work that we feed into the demanding maws of LiveJournal, Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Tumblr, WordPress.com, and so many other places that offer us a free—as in beer—place to express ourselves, the more power and control we give those services. We give them ourselves, and in return, what do we get? An audience, but also targeted ads, and the right to continue using the service until the terms change for whatever reason.
For many, that tradeoff is worth it. I’ve probably fed more words into Twitter in the last year than I’ve written for Sanspoint.com. I’m on Facebook and Tumblr, but I don’t use either much, and never for anything long-form. I even have a Medium account where I’ve reposted a few pieces I felt deserved more exposure, but I’m wary of creating anything original for it. When I post something to Medium, I feel like I’m surrendering ownership of it.
I give up the same for any other service. Why is Medium different? A visitor to this site knows it is mine. My name is in the footer, my logo is at the top of the page, and there’s a way to get in touch. On Medium, I’m just an avatar and a byline above the title. It feels like I’m giving up more, and getting back less. Over fifteen thousand people read my Medium piece on working for the welfare office. 111 have viewed the original piece I wrote here. That feels wrong, somehow.
I suppose it comes down to what you want to get from the words you put out. If all you want is a place to “just write and publish, write and publish, write and publish.”, places like Medium are just right for you. If you want to own your words, and know that the people reading them are coming because those words are yours, Medium isn’t the place. At least for me.
