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Essays on Technology and Culture

What Happens Now?

What happens now?

Writing about technology often means having a bent towards the future, extrapolating trends and thinking of what happens five, ten, twenty years from now. There’s precious little about the now, beyond what short term decisions a company can make to optimize for the five, ten, twenty years we look out upon. Then there’s a new gadget, an upgrade, a Touch Bar or a Surface Studio, and we’re all distracted by the shiny thing and What It Means for the Future.

But right now, none of that seems to matter to me. Computers will change, and how we use them will change, but figuring out the details is unimportant. Someone will figure it out, and it’ll be obvious and simple in hindsight. We’ll all nod our heads and stroke our chins, and go “Of course. It was there all along. How could we have missed it?” The pattern has held, and the pattern will continue to hold.

It’s not boring as much as it is predictable.

What’s on my mind is the unpredictable. What’s unpredictable is the short term. Forget five years from now. What will happen five months from now? Five weeks from now? That has a lot more urgency in my mind, and not a damn bit of it has to do with any new product announcements from any company in the entire space of technology. Even if it came from the mouth of the reanimated corpse of Steve Jobs himself.

All it take is one small event, a butterfly flapping its wings, to change a weather system on the other side of the world. It seems hard to understand, but once the effect is under way, it eventually hits a critical point where you can identify it, extrapolate from it, and plan for the hurricane or typhoon bearing down.

What happens when that small event isn’t so small? What if it’s a seismic shake-up of cataclysmic proportions? What happens when you didn’t see it coming? When you knew, as clearly as you know the sun will rise in the morning, that it wouldn’t happen, that it would be the complete opposite?

This is where I find myself. This is where millions of people, in the United States of America and abroad find themselves. We wake up in a new reality where the very bedrock assumptions we’ve made about how the world works are replaced, and now must build a new understanding starting from first principles. The task is daunting. Almost impossible. Where do we even begin?

We begin with questions.

These are my questions. What happens now? What happens to me? To the people I love? My friends, and my family? What do we need to do just to survive long enough to understand what has happened? How can you rebuild, when you don’t even have stable ground to use for a foundation? This is uncharted territory. So far off the map, that the damn map is only good as a firestarter.

This is not my world. This is not my country. These are not my people walking the halls of government, dancing in the streets, looking for the next suspicious looking person to beat down for their differences. Yesterday was different. Now, I wake up a stranger in a strange land, and the first thing on my mind is survival. Survival for myself, for the ones I love most, and—time permitting—those other lost and confused members of my tribe. These woods are dangerous, and we have no idea how far we must go before we reach civilization.

How do we survive?

I don’t want it to be this way. I want to carry as many people as I can with me. I want to be strong, be the leader, and say that I know what to do, I know where to go, and that I can take you there, no matter who you are, whether you’re in my tribe, or not. I want to extend the olive branch to the other side, and find out they’re just like me. In time, perhaps I will be able to do some of that, but for now, I need to find my footing in this new world. I need to survive long enough to make peace.

And bear in mind, we’re talking about a group where one of the leaders thinks it’s okay to electrocute me until I’m straight. They may be as afraid of me as I am of them, at least deep inside, but right now, they’re the ones with the big sticks, and I am the asthmatic fat kid with the glasses. My one defense is that maybe they’ll find another target. But there’s enough of them it seems that there is no escape from the pain.

The dream of every bullied child, I expect, is that one day the tables will be turned. That it will be them who has the power over their bully, maybe not physical power, but certainly power nonetheless. The dream is not necessarily to wield that power as a cudgel, nor is it to use that power to forgive. It is only to know that the balance has shifted, and for your tormenter to know it too. The rest comes down to our personality.

Will we become what we hated?

Empathy is a skill. It is honed through practice. You can empathize with your tormenter, but only the most skilled at empathy will be able to do so while they’re being stretched out on the rack. Do you feel you have that level of empathy? Meditate on it, practice empathy, and goodness, and mindfulness in your daily life. Maybe you’ve got it down, but I think the rest of us—myself included—need a lot more work at it. Lord knows we’ll get plenty of opportunities to practice in the next four years.

But we developed empathy for a reason. It is essential to our survival. We build our groups, our tribes, our families on empathy. Empathy ends wars. To look at another human being and have even the tiniest sense of how they must feel, and to feel it too, this is the greatest gift of human consciousness. We fracture, and we other, when we turn off our empathy.

Or, perhaps, when we fracture and we other, our empathy is turned off for us. The jury is still out on this. Freud called it the Narcissism of Minor Differences. Whatever mysterious mutation in our synapses that allows us to bring others into our tribes can also be used to create arbitrary dividing lines on the smallest of differences. Everything from skin color to religion, from gender to weight, from preferred entertainment activity to which side of some arbitrary line on a map you were born on. You don’t so much pick a side in these divisions as have it picked for you. The consequences of it will rule your entire life, and woe betide you should you ever dare to change sides.

Which puts us to where we are today.

Our minds, our empathy, our common humanity can be hacked by the clever among us. They can create new divisions where none existed, or stoke up the enmity that had burned out between divisions. They create new tribes, blinding their members to some of the minor differences in order to sick them upon another, arbitrary tribe who until the attack begins, never knew they were a tribe to begin with.

History is ripe with these demagogues. It is also ripe with leaders who use those same mental tricks to do the opposite: to bind fractured communities together, to build new, stronger tribes where a mess had been before. The latter is so, so much harder to pull off, because despite what the optimists among us believe, our tendency is towards smaller groups that are hostile to outsiders: “Let ’em all to go Hell, except Cave 76!”

We fracture. We heal. But how do we get from the former to the latter? Beats the hell out of me. That’s why I’m up at one in the morning, typing this out when I should be sleeping. That’s why I’m worried about survival for myself, and those I care most deeply about. Because I am afraid. I’m afraid, I’m in the dark, and the wolves are howling. I’m afraid because I don’t know what comes next. I ask questions because I have no answers, and all the answers offered up aren’t any good.

Yes, dawn will come. The light will return, and things will be okay. In time. How much time? I don’t know. How bad will things get before then? I don’t know. Will we pass the point where there is no return? I don’t know. What will I do until then? I don’t know. That’s the problem.

It’s the uncertainty that kills me.

I need solid ground beneath my feet. I need clear vision. I have none of these, just fear, and unease, and the very real sense that things are only going to get worse before they get better, because that’s how it always happens.

For any of that to change, I need to know one very important thing.

What happens now?

Why I’m Making Time to Breathe with Apple Watch

WatchOS 3’s reveal at WWDC might be the most successful OS announcement in Apple’s recent history. Of all the new features, UI changes, and overall improvements, only one got any groans: the Breathe app. In fairness, anything introduced with a quote by Deepak Chopra is worthy of skepticism at best. On the other hand, the science around deep breathing is legit. Enough so that promoting it with the nonsensical woo of Mr. Chopra isn’t going to undo it.

But, of course, the name and the presentation left so many chuckling and snarking “Oh, so the Watch is going to remind you to breathe now?” Six weeks after the release of watchOS 3, Breathe still is the butt of occasional jokes and snark from tech wags on Twitter. Well, let them snark all they want. I’m a believer. Here’s why.

Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. Well, re-diagnosed. I wad diagnosed with ADD as a child, but my parents opted not to medicate me. This was the early 90s, when ADD was just becoming a thing, and there were a lot of questions and concerns. The whole thing faded into the background as I struggled with my temper, my moods, with anxiety—and my ability to focus. After taking matters into my hands as an adult and getting diagnosed, I have been taking 10 milligrams of Adderall, every day (except Sundays) for the last two months. It’s been life changing.

While the image of ADD in adults and children is either that of the daydreamer or the hyperactive thrill-seeker, ADD can also include a number of symptoms, including mood swings and anxiety. I have both, though anxiety is probably the more prevalent of the two. The Adderall keeps both in check, but anxiety still creeps in around the edges. This happens when I’m on my medication, and even more when I’m not. This is why I love the Breathe app.

Every three hours or so, I get a gentle tap on the wrist, reminding me to take a minute and do a deep breathing exercise. I might not be able to get to it right away—lately it’s been bugging me in the middle of my dinner—but I usually take the opportunity. It feels good to take my brain off whatever it’s chosen to chew on, center myself with my body, and just breathe. When I’m done, I feel a little calmer, a little more relaxed, and a little more in control. It’s incredible, and I’ve made it a point to try to get four “Mindful Minutes” in with the app every day. I track it with Streaks, so I have a record. I’m on an eleven day streak right as I write this.

Whether you have anxiety, or just want a proven way to be centered for a bit, deep breathing is a huge help. No, you don’t need an Apple Watch to do it, of course. I first learned about the general technique from a video Mara Wilson made for Project UROK. It was just hard to make time for it in my life, especially during an anxiety attack. What the Apple Watch and the Breathe app do is give me the first push towards making this a habit. That is powerful stuff that gets sold short when people brush off the app with dumb jokes. Instead of snarking, or turning off the notifications, why not give it a try. You can afford a minute or two to sit at your desk and breathe. I think you’ll be surprised.

Microsoft Has a Big Problem Under its Surface

Microsoft just announced some neat new hardware, including the Surface Studio desktop computer, with it’s equally neat Surface Dial controller. Considering how weak-sauce Apple’s computer offerings have been lately, I’m glad to see Microsoft pushing the desktop, laptop, and tablet to strange new places. There isn’t much they showed off for the average user, but boy howdy are they making a push towards the creative market—a market that used to be the exclusive domain of Apple. Bare minimum, it’s a way cooler demo than the Magic Toolbar’s gonna be.

It used to be that Microsoft’s biggest strength was its dominance in the workplace. Even when the creatives loved their Macs at home (when nobody else did), creative apps had to become Windows-first apps, because that’s where the money was. People could get away with pirating Photoshop at home, because Adobe was making bank on site licenses to companies with thousands of Windows machines. Now, Macs are (slowly) becoming the new IT hotness, and Microsoft needs to get a thin edge of their wedge in somewhere. Why not Apple’s old market?

One thing Microsoft is great at is coming up with neat ideas for hardware and software. Under Satya Nadella, they’ve also been great at shipping them. But, there’s two big problems Microsoft needs to solve if they want to coax over the creative market from Apple. Problem one is Windows. It’s come a long way in the last few years, but Windows is still a clunky OS loaded with far too much legacy cruft. Microsoft needs make a clean break with the past, and pull a Mac OS X style new operating system. Maybe even give up the Windows brand entirely.

That still leaves the other, bigger problem. How does Microsoft win over creatives without apps? This is the essential chicken and egg problem. Microsoft can’t get users to switch without compelling apps for their platform. Microsoft went through this once before, with the Windows Phone saga. It got to the point where they were literally bribing companies to port their iOS and Android apps to Windows phone. After all, nobody wants to switch to a phone platform that doesn’t have the apps they use on their phone.

Whatever your complaints may be about the Mac and iOS ecosystem—and remember, Windows is also a Tablet OS—apps probably aren’t one of them. Well, maybe for iPad, but that drum’s being beaten a lot more quietly of late. Android and iOS are almost at parity when it comes to apps, at least on the phone, so switching between the two isn’t that painful. Switching to Windows Phone, on the other hand? If Microsoft hasn’t learned from that debacle, however cool the new Surface hardware platform is, it’s not going to go very far.

Without users who will buy apps, app developers aren’t going to make apps for Microsoft. A compelling new suite of hardware, a refreshed operating system, and cool new input methods will only get them so far. Microsoft’s suite of first party apps, like Paint 3D, and that Minecraft thing will help. It just remains to see how much. I hope they get some traction, if only because it might knock Apple out of their torpor and get us some cool, powerful, and feature-full hardware and software for the Mac and iOS. Without healthy competition, the tech industry goes nowhere. I’m excited to see things heat back up again.

The PC In The Coming Tablet Age

Pity the poor personal computer. Its time is swiftly coming to a close, eclipsed by its progeny, the tablet. Hampered by legacy architecture and legacy operating systems, the PC will soon fade away from desks at home and in offices. Instead, PCs will live out of sight and out of mind, stacked to the rafters in server closets and data centers. An dignified end for a technology that changed the world.

Well, let’s not be too hasty. Steve Jobs’s famous metaphor about trucks and cars from the iPad introduction is an apt way of thinking about tablets and PCs, but only so much. In the intervening years, tablets have gained capabilities on par (light) trucks such as in the case of the iPad Pro. During the same time, PCs have become more car-like as in the single-port retina MacBook. And that’s muddied the waters plenty without even getting into the world of convertible hybrid tablets, Windows 10, and Chromebooks.

I’ll put myself in the camp that laptop/tablet hybrids are a short-term solution until the tablet and PC divide fully shakes out. The dividing line will be drawn when we establish the things a traditional personal computer can do that a tablet can’t—and vice versa. There’s some clear lines now: you can’t develop applications on an iPad for the most part, though this is certainly going to change. You can’t do heavy graphics work, or anything more complicated than the most basic audio and video editing, but this is only for now.

More difficult to change is how tablets are locked to themselves. You can’t use a tablet with an external display, except to do a presentation. There are limited options for input and output, as well. Latency and transmission speeds for wireless connections will improve with time, but for now, anything that must be real time for input or output is hampered. What wireless solutions we have now for the tablet to escape itself are kludges and hacks.

As tablets get more powerful, they will expand to allow you to do what you can do on your traditional PC. In tandem, PCs will become more powerful too. A PC, even in a laptop form factor, has more headroom for computing power. This goes for both size of chips, but also thermal headroom. Nobody wants a tablet with a cooling fan, after all. The increased computing headroom of the personal computer opens it up to all kinds of new applications that will, in time, trickle down to a tablet in time for the personal computer to have more applications that require more power.

It’s better to think of the tablet as a sort of computing appliance. You buy it, and it serves its purpose of giving you the best of basic personal computing. When it gets old, and unsupported, you replace it. You could do this in the PC world, but it’s easier just to upgrade the components. That’s impossible on a tablet without a soldering iron, specialized components, and a lot of patience. Some bemoan the loss of upgradability, and we see it coming to the PC too, as they become more “car”-like. I’m not sure it’s such a bad thing.

How many of the problems that plagued PCs back in the day were a result of the componentized nature of the platform? Stick a bad RAM stick in your PC and watch things go sideways real fast. I know for a fact that part of why Windows is such a pain, even today, is that it needs to support a nearly infinite number of hardware configurations. Not everything will work well together. Upgradability of a PC’s components is nice and convenient, but opens up so much potential for hassle. Better to just plug stuff in without opening the case. At least there’s less possibility for things to go wrong. A point for the tablet, but also for the tablet-ified PC.

But why do you need more power right there at your fingertips, anyway? What about the Cloud? Who needs a computer at your desk, when the tablet (or ultra-portable PC) can offload its storage, processing power, and whatnot off to some box somewhere in a data center? We’re closer to making this a reality than we ever had been in the when Larry Ellison proposed his Network Computer, but connectivity is the enemy again. American broadband is still crap, and it’s crap in a lot of other countries too. Unless getting data to and from that remote machine is as fast as on a local one, this idea is stuck.

Though the biggest obstacle to tablets is the entrenched culture of the personal computer in workplaces. Yes, there are some progressive companies that are integrating tablets into daily work life, but existing limitations mean that your average workplace isn’t going to be able to swap out everyone’s laptop with a tablet any time soon. This goes double for desktops. There are those who suggest that once the children of the tablet age, whose first computing experience was an iPad or iPhone, enter the workplace, they’ll have to migrate to tablets. Not at all the case.

Kids growing up into a workplace IT culture built around PCs is not enough to shake things up. As anecdata, I know most kids in my age bracket, at least in the US, grew up with Macintoshes in their schools as the primary computers. (Hell, my middle school had Apple IIs in the computer lab until I was in 8th Grade.) Macs are making more penetration in the office, but of the six jobs I had after graduating college, only two of them were a primarily Macintosh IT environment. Both were tech jobs. If a whole generation of kids weaned on the Macintosh couldn’t get Macs on desks at your average workplace, what makes you think kids raised on tablets will?

None of this is to say that a tablet-first future isn’t coming. There needs to be something compelling enough to disrupt the entrenched legacy of the personal computer at home and at work. Tablets will get there first in the home. They already provide an easier way for people to do most of the ordinary computing tasks they would do on a PC. A few more iterations and OS upgrade cycles, and the tablet will be your average user’s primary computing device. The office, not so much.

For the time being, the PC will rule the desk. That is, unless you fit a specific niche where you can live within a tablet’s limitations. Over time, yes, the tablet’s limits will fall away, and tablets will let you do more, with more. We’re not there yet, and I don’t see it happening for at least a decade. The thin edge of the tablet wedge has gotten in, however. Its only a matter of time. Just don’t assume your next traditional computer will be your last.

The Tension of Encrypted Messaging

Facebook just rolled out encrypted messaging on its Messenger service, but you’ll have to opt-in on each chat. This is coming not long after Facebook started collecting information from WeChat users, which used to be private. Google’s promised end-to-end encryption in their new Allo messenger, at least as an option. When released, Google went back on their promise so hard that Edward Snowden told the world not to use it.

There’s tension when it comes to technology companies and encrypted messaging. Snowden’s revelations about PRISM and other NSA spying through tech companies have them promising more encryption to protect their public image. Yet, if they use good encryption that governments can’t get their tendrils into, and if they do it by default, there’s other people who can’t spy in on people’s conversations: the companies themselves.

If Facebook is encrypting users conversations, they can’t mine data for its uses. That includes stuff like the News Feed algorithm, their digital assistant M, and—biggest of all—the data they sell to advertisers. That last one directly affects the company’s bottom line. It’s the same with Google, Microsoft, Snapchat, and any other advertising supported company that isn’t end-to-end encrypting messages by default. Whatever claims they want to make about valuing user privacy, and all that jazz, as long as they’re peeking into what you’re saying and doing, your conversations aren’t private. End of story.

Even with encrypted messaging, the provider does have to store something to make it work. Signal, which is end-to-end encrypted revealed that the FBI subpoenaed their user data. Of which they don’t have much: “only account creation date & last login time.” according to Edward Snowden. Apple, too, logs some user data, such as who you messaged and when, but not the content.

In the case of Apple, this is the sort of metadata that the NSA claims to have collected on phone calls. It’s still dangerous if it gets out—or subpoenaed—but it’s not great for marketing purposes. Advertisers are less interested in who you’re talking to, and more about what you’re talking about. This is why chatbots are so sinister. By presenting a friendly, playful personality that promises to do whatever you ask it to, chatbots are excellent tools for extracting your personal data. And what better way to get a good deal on a partnership with a company to integrate with your chatbot than promising to share valuable user data with them?

Messaging, even when you’re not talking about anything “important” is a gateway into our most intimate selves. That’s why that data is so precious to the NSA, to other governments, and to advertisers. By presenting a messaging service as private and secure, even when it’s not by default, a tech company can override yet another defense mechanism savvy users know to keep prying eyes out of their lives. Even worse, most ordinary users aren’t going to even know or care, as long as the service does what they want, and does it well.

This is what everyone is banking on. Without education about the potential of mass data collection by private companies and government agencies alike, most people won’t be aware of the risks. Without a compelling narrative about why people should care, education about the risks will just be ignored. We all have something to hide, not necessarily illegal things, but aspects of ourselves we want to keep between us and the human being on the other end of the line. If we can’t keep people from prying into this most intimate space of our digital lives, what will convince them to butt out?