My neck is killing me. Too much time staring down at the glowing rectangle in my head, or the glowing rectangles on my desk at the office. It makes it hard to get any work done in my off-hours, like writing. “Tech Neck” is a legitimate issue, though be careful when searching for it, as the term is also conflated with neck skin wrinkles caused from looking down into phones.

On top of the neck pain, my optometrist recently prescribed me special short-focus, blue-light blocking lenses for when I’m using a computer screen—in other words, all of the time. The lenses block the high-frequency blue light that causes eye strain, and the focal length helps prevent that issue as well. They have helped, and I think they’re even helping me sleep better, that is when I remember to use them at home.

I do my best to make sure my ergonomic situation isn’t too dire. Though I’m still a seated desk hold out, everything is placed in a fairly ergonomically sound position, and my chair is at the right height. That’s, of course, at home. The less said about my work setup, the better. Still, it could always be worse. I think about Phoenix Perry, a game designer and activist, who spoke of a four-year struggle with severe carpal tunnel syndrome at the recent Facets conference. The pull-quote I took away from her discussion was this:

The user should never be forced to conform their body to an interface.

So many of the tools we use on a daily basis are designed with functionality as the primary focus, not ergonomics. The exception to this is, of course, Apple—who designs many of their peripherals to look better than they work, as Phoenix related in an anecdote about meeting the designer of the Magic Mouse. [1] These tools should adjust to us, and how we use them—not the other way around. Okay, perhaps we also shouldn’t be walking along city streets, head down into the screen in our hands, but it’s a problem that extends far beyond handheld devices.

I suppose one of the advantages to the Thinner and Lighter Movement is that it makes arranging and rearranging the devices and accessories we use for maximum comfort easier. As for phones, will an Apple Watch or Moto 360 help reduce Tech Neck from constant looking down and checking a phone during the day? One can hope, though one can also hope that they won’t need a $350 accessory to protect their physical health from the $600 device in their pocket.

Tech companies need to start looking into harm mitigation. A good place to start might be the blue light issue. If they can put a coating on my glasses to keep the bad blue light from getting into my eyes, why can’t they coat the screens with it too? Okay, it’s pricey, but Apple’s margins are big enough to make it work without causing them to raise the price of a MacBook or an iPad. I’m sure Tim Cook can spin it on stage: “A lot of people love using their iPads in bed. This new screen coating helps prevent blue light keeping iPad users from a good night’s sleep.” Hopefully that’ll keep iPad numbers on an even keep through Q4.

Until then, it’s blue-blocking computer glasses, regular breaks, the occasional Tylenol, and grumbling about why we let our tools hurt us. Something’s gotta give before my neck does.

“Businesses today are obsessed with being social, but what they typically mean by this is that they are able to permeate peer-to-peer social networks as effectively as possible. Brands hope to play a role in cementing friendships, as a guarantee that they will not be abandoned for more narrowly calculated reasons.”

— How friendship became a tool of the powerful | William Davies | Media | The Guardian

And now you know why brands say “bae.”

There’s a lot of gold in this piece, including the idea of altruism being co-opted to simply reinforce market capitalism. It’s not enough to just sell our eyes and our data to advertisers. The idea of the “friend” itself is being neoliberalized into another market-based unit with its own economic value that’s far more important than the touchy-feely stuff it used to imply.

For the past few days, I’ve been trying to use a music streaming service—specifically Beats Music—as my primary way of listening to music. I have a number of thoughts that I’m still working through, but there is a design pattern I’ve noticed, common to all the major streaming services, that deserves some scrutiny. On Beats music, it looks like this:

Other services use the Siskel and Ebert “Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down” approach, but the idea is the same. It asks: “Do you like this song, or do you dislike it?” Your selection is tied to whatever algorithmic method the service uses to determine what else it should play for you, though it’s not terribly explicit how it works. I think it’s safe to assume that a Heart or Thumbs Up means “Give me more of this,” and the X’d Out Heart or Thumbs Down is “Give me less of this.” Opting not to choose, I imagine, is interpreted as apathy.

The problem is that I don’t relate to a music on the binary level (or trinary, if you want to count the “meh” option of not tapping either) that these services use. My feelings about music run along a fairly wide scale that, at the extremes, could be described as “I want to hear this song over and over again until I drive everyone around me insane” to “If I hear this song again, I will punch someone.” This is probably too wide, and personal, of a gamut of values to expect a streaming music to implement, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be more nuance involved.

It’s possible there already is. If the folks handling these algorithms are as smart as they think they are, they’ll probably assume that a Thumbs Down, followed by skipping to the next song would weigh heavier against a track than a simple Thumbs Down, or that a Heart followed by a skip would indicate “I like this song, but I don’t want to hear it now… maybe play this artist less often.” These algorithms are so opaque, however, that there’s no way of knowing for sure. That’s what really throws me. How many times do I need to tap the X’d Out Heart and then skip the song in Beats for it to know that I really do not want to ever have to hear INXS again, ever? [1] It would be better if I could be just a little more explicit in how I feel about a song or an artist, so that I don’t need to rely 100% on the algorithm’s learning process.

After all, if algorithms are going to play such a massive role in what media we’re exposed to, it benefits us to have some insight into how they decide, even if it’s to correct the inevitable mistakes it’ll make during the learning process—and, occasionally, after. I want to see what my streaming service thinks about me, something like Google’s Demographics page meets Last.fm. I’d like to see things broken down by genre, by artists, possibly even by song, if I’ve made any specific decisions on any. That’s one of the biggest issues I have with streaming music—i’m wary of giving up control of the music I listen to purely to some black box of an algorithm. Probably because so many of them are both opaque and inaccurate all at once.

In Chu’s view, nerds created much of what we love about Internet culture but also much of what we hate about it. Intended as a refuge from real-world hierarchies and prejudices, the Internet has often wound up simply reproducing, even exaggerating, the power dynamics of the “real world,” complete with bullying. Chu feels that if nerds were more willing to set some community standards… and behave with less indifference to the worst of their peers, they could make the world a lot more pleasant and protect the best of nerdiness—the joyful obsessions, the embrace of outsiders, the indifference to convention.

— Reform of the Nerds, Starring Arthur Chu | Pacific-Standard

Powerful. Important. Nerds who are fed up with the abuse, bullying, and harassment online need to step up. Male nerds, especially, need to call their fellow men on the carpet for their terrible behavior. Bravo to Arthur for using his platform for good.

One of, what I hope is, the overarching themes in my writing on technology is the relationship we have with it. It seems like a beat that is surprisingly untrodden, at least from where I’m standing. Most technology journalism and other writing I see in my circles only touches lightly on our relationship with technology, usually in the context of a new gadget category, or the default (if righteous) outrage over governments and private companies alike collecting our data for various, nefarious purposes. It’s either “Should I buy this?” or “You should be outraged!” In the end, it so often just feel like talking about technology for its own sake.

This came in sharp focus for me while attending the recent Facets conference in Brooklyn. Facets had a strong focus on the hard tech side of things: programming, machine learning, personal privacy, and other heady topics, but it approached it from an interdisciplinary perspective with art and education, so that even a Comp Sci fail-out like me could understand and be a part of the discussion. My time at Facets felt like exploring some mysterious parallel universe of thinking about technology in a way that I only knew about through theory and inference. I want to go back and live there, because the main ways of thinking about technology in the universe I live in seem small and meaningless now.

I’ve griped before about how discussion about the business side of technology drives me batty, but that’s only one of the aspects of most tech discussion I find increasingly infuriating. A theme that ran through so many of the panels at Facets can best be summarized as “People are more important than things.” It came up first in a discussion panel on Technology as Art & Digital Curation. When discussing the problems with how the history of technology is presented, it’s often in a way that emphasizes the thing—the computer, the operating system, the network—over the people who made it, and the people whose lives it changed. And when people are emphasized, of course, it’s usually just the Great White Men who Run Companies, and we hear enough of that narrative. [1]

Which leads to another wonderful part of Facets: the diversity in the panels, with a focus on underrepresented groups in technology: women, African-Americans, LGBT people, as well as people who focus on the intersection between technology and art, not just technical practitioners. Instead of “learn to code” to get a job, panels spoke about the School for Poetic Computation, and New Inc, the first incubator space led by a museum, with a focus on art over commerce. There was discussion on technology-focused activism about espionage and data collection more nuanced than “Put a Snowden On It,” of selfies as identity politics and performative art, and a really cool live demo of using machine learning to create new electronic music instruments.

And, again, throughout each panel and discussion, the focus was on the human element: the hacker and maker to be sure, but also the artist, the citizenry, and the community—in tech and beyond it. Technology is no longer a space that is all to itself. It’s infiltrating every part of our lives, in one way or another, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. By breaking discussion of technology out of its echo chamber with a multi-disciplinary approach to the tools and what can be done with them, we can foster a larger, more robust, and more exciting discussion of technology that isn’t just the same boring things over and over.

I leave the conference wondering why this sort of discussion is so rare in the larger space around technology. I’m sick, tired, and just plain bored of breathless excitement over the latest and greatest consumer gadget. I’m also sick, tired, and just plain bored of breathless anger over the latest and greatest consumer gadget. It gets us nowhere, and I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. There’s a bigger picture, a bigger story to all of this that gets lost in just focusing on the gizmos, the gadgets, and the UI, and the huge numbers funding it. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with occasionally looking at the tech world from that level, but right now I feel like it’s missing the forest for the fourth leaf on the middle-bottom right branch of the thirty-seventh tree to the east-southeast.