People love to look at home screens. The current wave of interest may have started with Episode 11 of Connected, at least among the indie tech writers and podcasters I follow, but the launch of Betaworks’s #Homescreen app has way more people talking about what’s on their iPhone home screen. It got [the crew of Accidental Tech Podcast to post and talk about theirs](and how they organize them.). Hell, even I posted my home screen with #Homescreen, [1]mostly because I’m a sucker for an easy to climb on bandwagon. Plus, #Homescreen is way easier to use than homescreen.me, and lets you identify the apps.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. The site First and 20 was posting the home screens of famous tech folks as far back as 2009, though stopped around the time Apple went to a phone with 24 app slots. David Sparks runs an ongoing series of interviews about home screens, going back almost as long. David, and his co-host Katie Floyd, even did a deep dive on their home screens on the latest Mac Power Users. Home screens are also common parts of interviews over at The Sweet Setup. Even when meeting fellow nerds in real life, we’ve swapped phones to check out home screens.
And I can’t get enough.
What is it about people’s home screens that intrigues us? In part, it’s a peek behind the curtain of people’s lives. When you see people’s phones—if you see people’s phones—you often see them running an app. If my morning commute is any indication, it’s usually Candy Crush. A home screen reveals someone’s priorities—the tools or toys they want immediate access to on a daily basis. These little rectangles in our pockets are capable of being so many things, the few we choose to give primacy says a lot about us. How we organize them—or if—says just as much.
Oh, and there’s the discovery thing. It’s hard enough to find apps in the App Store. To see the icon of something you’re curious about on the home screen of someone you admire is an endorsement. To see an icon you don’t recognize is a call to explore. I’m trying to get better at not installing apps without thinking about their utility, but I still can’t resist something shiny that could help me get more out of the screen in my pocket. As vices go, it’s a comparatively minor one. A voyeuristic desire to learn about other people, their relationship with their gear, and what I can take away from it a bad thing.
Silicon Valley strives to “revolutionize†and “disruptâ€, but are their many “revolutions†and “disruptions†actually all that significant? Were they absolutely inevitable? Were they necessary? And are people happy to perpetually accomodate these new technologies?
I’d say no on all counts. And I certainly wouldn’t consider a vast majority of technological innovations revolutionary.
There’s a popular image of Silicon Valley as a place where the future is made. After all, it birthed the microprocessor, the personal computer, the GUI, and the iPhone. The problem is that all but the last of those children of the Valley happened during the 60s to the 80s. Since then, it’s coasted on its reputation, and the occasional good idea—if not a “good” idea, at least a commercially successful one. With the rise of Startup Culture over the past few years, that image of Silicon Valley is being replaced by one of young people creating new companies that raise obscene amounts of Venture Capital funding to be bought out by Google, Facebook, or Apple. They’re not making microprocessors or iPhones, they’re making silly apps that get huge user growth, and promoting them with “disruption” or “revolution.”
No wonder tech news has become either boring, or an outrage factory.
This is why Silicon Valley is such an uninteresting place. Its culture is one of future worship without purpose, ever driven by the idea of the next development without any regard for whether or not it’s worth being developed. Silicon Valley is in the business of validating delusions while earning as much money as possible, even if its product is detrimental to the various communities who use it.
Here’s where J.D. and I differ. I don’t think the Valley worships the future, so much as they worship the investment cycle. The culture’s not about the idea of the “next development” as much as it’s about making a big win for your investors. This explains the “sharing economy” startups that hire contract workers for abysmal pay, so they can drive their numbers up and raise their valuation. You can’t tell me that Homejoy doesn’t know that charging $25/hr for cleaning a house isn’t a sustainable model. What looks like “future worship” is little more than marketing spin to get VCs to open their checkbooks, and customers to give up their data.
There are people using technology to solve real problems and do interesting things. Whatever your opinion is on Elon Musk, Tesla is creating real “disruption” in the automotive industry by making electric cars that people actually want to drive, unless you’re the sort of asshole who likes rolling coal. Which is why you have established business interests trying to keep them from selling cars. That’s disruption, not the crap Uber is pulling. [1]
That said, it’s a mistake to think you can solve a problem, or make people’s lives better by just throwing an app, or a piece of hardware at it. I don’t know if the rise of “[s]mall businesses who use traditional methods and local resources, who want to make quality products from the best materials.” is as much a frustrated reaction to technology not living up to its marketing spin as it is a rediscovery of our abilities to do things by ourselves. If it’s the latter, then it’s a rise enabled by technology that allows us to share knowledge of skills. Plug any skill you want to learn into YouTube, and you’ll come across someone willing to teach it. And this includes making real things, not just apps.
If that’s the real revolution, then it’s something we can credit, in part, to Silicon Valley, albeit the Silicon Valley of the late–80s and early–90s. If you want to talk about a technology people have been happy to adopt, I’d put the Internet at the top of that list. We can haggle on the pros and cons of that happy adoption, especially around the omnipresence of it in our pockets, but there have been quite a few positive outcomes. Though “revolution” might be the wrong word to describe this—as might be “restoration.” “Renaissance” might be correct, in the sense of a rebirth or renewal of some old ways of doing things, aided by technology. If so, it’s something I’m excited to be a part of.
As an urban dweller, I’d like to see a startup try to improve public transit, not put more people in cars, but I don’t think there’s any money in it. ↩
It’s barely been more than a month since I officially cancelled Crush On Radio, my long-running, low-listner show about music. It’s been a lot longer since I sat behind a microphone to record one. I never intended to completely quit podcasting, just to focus on where my bread and butter was: this very site. In the back of my head, I’ve been thinking about a podcast that relates to the stuff I write about here. If I were to do such a show, I knew I’d have to do something easy. No guests, minimal editing, and short. A good example is the Birch Bark Podcast, by Matt Birchler. A conversation on Twitter around the so-called “Podcasting Renaissance” left me thinking that’s space for more short shows.
Once all the ideas came together, the only thing left was to do it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the show. You can shoot me an @-reply on Twitter, or use my Contact page. I’m super excited to be back in the podcasting seat.
I have a super power—the uncanny ability to be in someone’s way without realizing it. When it happens, and it happens at least daily, I get out of the way as best I can, flush with embarrassment, and apologize. Maybe it’s a symptom of Attention Deficit Disorder, or maybe it’s something else. Either way, it’s exacerbated by wearing headphones in public. I just end up stuck in a bubble of my self, lost to what’s around me, and it’s something I can slip into at a moment’s notice. I’m not the only one, either. Some of us are better than others at avoiding it, but day in and day out, we spend a big chunk of our time caught in our bubble of self.
And I’m not going to lie, those little screens in our pocket don’t help at all. You don’t need a little screen in your pocket, and a pair of speakers in your ears to get lost in your bubble of self, but they’re not making it easier to avoid it. Case in point: the inspiration to write this came during a morning commute on the subway, while a pair of men watched a loud, and profane stand-up comedy bit on their pocket screen, without headphones. I can be certain the only two people on the train who wanted to hear some random stand-up comedy were those two men, and yet they were inflicting it on the rest of the passengers. If they’d thought, even for a moment, about the fifty other people in the car, they might have opted to put on headphones, or at least wait until later.
Most of our obliviousness isn’t that high-profile. It’s just a good example of bad behavior caused by our bubbles. The only solution is to actively try to pierce our own bubbles, and be aware of the world we’re in. It’s something that is hard to do, but is made easier with practice. Call it a form of mindfulness, or whatever you’d like, but without that practice, without that effort, we can easily slip back within our bubbles, and damn the world around it. Piercing that bubble, just being aware of the people around you, and how much—or how little—you may be affecting them goes a long way towards empathy and other skills that make us better human beings.
That list of things is a wish list, a someday-maybe list, but it is not a task list until you commit a time for those things getting done. Those are things you hope to do — not things you are going to do.
Important stuff. It’s not enough to have a system for your things to do. You need to commit to doing them. Without it, even the best organized system falls apart.