“This is a joke, right?”
“How dare Apple change iOS so radically! It looks like flat candy! It’s not flat enough!”
“I’ll design my own iOS icons! With real flat design! And no gradients!”
“I’m gonna have to switch to Android… Or, maybe I’ll just jailbreak iOS. Install a Cydia theme or something.”
“They better fix this in iOS 8!”
I’ve spent the last week digesting the news about PRISM, the NSA’s system for spying on pretty much everything we do on the Internet. If you don’t know about it, Wikipedia has a good breakdown of what it’s about. Suffice it to say, the US Government’s domestic security apparatus has a way to see everything we do through Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, and more, with Dropbox “coming soon.” Reaction has been swift, and angry—justifiably so, but the more I think about it, the less worked up I get, and I was never terribly angry to begin with. It’s not that I don’t recognize PRISM as the grave threat to individual liberty and privacy that it is. It’s just another piece of straw thrown on the long broken back of a camel that can no longer care.
In the case of PRISM, it’s more the sense of ineffectiveness of any sort of organized protest against a program that’s already been in place for years. I don’t blame the companies involved for opening up access. When the NSA comes knocking on your door, demanding access to your data, the cost of saying “no” is likely to be worse than the cost of saying “yes”. Ire should be pointed squarely at the government, and I think few people would disagree with this. Only knee-jerk haters of Company X would think otherwise. [1] My only hope is that the sheer quantity of data the NSA is collecting makes real analysis difficult to outright impossible. It made me think of this clip from The Simpsons Movie. [2]
Perhaps the populist backlash will get PRISM dismantled, but that’s only a temporary victory. When the furor dies down, those with something to benefit from collecting our every move will try to do it again. If there’s a way to prevent this in the future, it’s through increased technological literacy. Tomasz Tunguz notes that “28% of Americans don’t use the internet and 32% lack broadband.” When more than a quarter of the population isn’t involved in technology, they’re disincentivezed to care. Even worse is the lack of knowledge that our elected officials have of technology. According to an article on Slate “The 111th Congress, which took office in 2009, was the oldest in U.S. history, with an average age of 57 in the House and 63 in the Senate. (The sitting 112th Congress is only slightly younger.)” The technological disconnect was only too well illustrated by John McCain asking Tim Cook why he had to update apps on his iPhone.
Without being involved and developing an understanding of the increasingly connected world we live in, both average citizens and politicians alike are in danger of being dominated by far more aware technocrats with sinister plans. It’s one thing to say the NSA can see what’s on some random person’s “Dropbox”. It’s a very different thing to let the NSA get access to your own personal files. Spying of this nature is never limited to just the textbook definition of “bad guys”. Ex post facto justification of PRISM could come from using it to bust anyone for the cause du jour. If terrorism doesn’t work out, the NSA could bust someone for piracy because they have an illegally downloaded MP3 on their Dropbox account. We need to nip this in the bud, have public accountability, and the knowledge to understand where the eyes of the government belong.
Perhaps I care more than I thought I did. The question remains: what can I actually do about this?
Near the end of episode 204 of Enough, Patrick Rhone delivers a short monologue on the transformative nature of modern technology: smartphones, social media, the web, and all of that jazz. Though, it would be a more accurate statement to say his monologue was more about how non-transformative this stuff is. Actually, it would be even more accurate to say that his point was it’s way too early to tell how much impact any of this stuff has had, or will have. It makes sense. When you’re up to your eyeballs in the sea of technological change, all you see is things changing. Only when the seas calm, do things become clearer.
Where I think Patrick’s argument falls down is comparing the impact of the Internet to that of fire, or the wheel—and arguably neither were as transformative as developing the hand-axe. The first technologies were technologies of control. They allowed us to be more than subservient to the environment. A hand-axe can cut down trees to build shelter, obviating the need for caves and other natural shelters. Fire provides light, and cooked food, allowing us to extract more nutrients. [1] The wheel was less transformative. Look at what the Olmec accomplished without it.
The changes modern technology are making are more on par with the printing press, and other democratizing communication methods. I think it was the recent episode of Quit! with Matt Haughey that discussed how the barriers have been lowered to creating things and disseminating them to a wide audience. To have a radio show, until someone came up with the podcast, you needed a license, training, internships at a college station, and a lot of luck. Now, all you need is a web server, an Internet connection, a microphone, and some free software. The more open and accessible these tools of communication are, the better it is for everyone. A small transformation is still a transformation, isn’t it?
If these democratizing communication technologies are changing society, it’s only in the sense that it’s enabling a desire innate to nearly all of us. We all share, we all communicate, we all create, but now we have new ways of doing those things, and a wider audience to do it with. We haven’t developed the next wheel, we’ve developed a better wheel. There will be social fallout from how we’ve made communication with a wide audience easy, immediate, and ubiquitous, but how much there will be has yet to be seen. It’s early days, indeed.
Technology as we know it now is merely a point along a slow, inexorable journey with no clear destination in mind. What if Google Glass, or wearable computing as a concept takes off? What if our bodies become input devices, or computers themselves? What if someone determines a new, better form of ubiquitous computing, or any device you touch becomes your computer? To pin down any existing technology as the game-changing, society-transforming inflection point to end all inflection points is to risk falling down yet another technological rathole. It behooves us to step back a bit and think about how transformative all of this stuff really is—or if it is. We could be surprised.
Raw food advocates, please don’t e-mail me. ↩
Part of writing the tech beat, even when you’re not focusing on news, is that there’s a lot of crap that gets posted and that you end up reading because its vaguely relevant. Particularly in the lead up to WWDC and E3, there’s a prevalence of prediction and analysis stories that mean absolutely nothing beyond endless speculation. Speculation that—at least in the case of Apple—is as likely to pan out as betting on a sloth in the Preakness. [1] Because there’s no real news, technology news sites are churning out endless rehashed articles and none of it is stimulating. I don’t want to step on Harry C. Marks’s toes here, he’s far better at tearing up the tech news bullshit than I. Fact of the matter is, the Internet is a void, and a void demands to be filled. If your niche is churning out ten articles about two stories, well, so be it. I’m not going to read them, and I’m certainly not going to write about them.
The thing about writing is that, “you are what you eat.†When all I have to eat is garbage, I’m not going to be putting out much of value. This site isn’t my job, though I wish it was. Because of that, when I’ve faced down the blank page for the last week or two, it’s been a struggle to find something inside me to put out. So, I’m writing about that. Not to pin all the blame on the news cycle—there’s been enough mental stress and strain of my own to keep me from writing too. It’s just that it’s harder to make anything good when all the best building blocks have been used up.
On an early episode of Crush On Radio, my co-host Matt Keeley coined the phrase “the don’t care switch†to describe the reaction when exposed to things that provoke neither a positive or negative reaction. I’m at the point where most work-a-day technology journalism flips that same switch. I don’t care about the latest mockup of what iOS 7 will look like, the latest prediction of corporate doom, and which company will finally dominate the living room with their set-top box/video game console/Smart TV system. It’s not interesting, and so many of the prediction stories seem to be a mix of bias, wishful thinking, and one-upmanship.
What interests me are the stories that actually try to explore what these new technologies and devices are doing to us, are allowing us to do, and the impact they have. Or, as in the case of a recent episode of Enough, the lack thereof. This amazing article, “The Philosophy of Google Glass†is a perfect example of what I’m on about. Some other good stuff lately is Tobias Buckell on survivorship bias and electronic publishing, “How Facebook and Brooklyn Killed America’s Obsession With Cars†by Brian Merchant, and James A. Pearson’s David Foster Wallace-tinged essay on binge watching TV. That’s three whole meals of technology journalism and nutrition. That’s what I’m aspiring towards.
We “know” there’s an iOS redesign in the works, but all your mockups and demo videos are bound to be wrong, wrong, wrong. ↩
If you haven’t heard, you’ve been living under a rock, or you don’t follow stuff on the Internet. In either case, I have to wonder how you got to be reading this. The big news is that Tumblr, the easy-to-use blogging platform that hosts hundreds of millions of blogs, has been purchased by Yahoo! for the sum of $1.1 billion dollars, a sum worthy of Dr. Evil. It’s an interesting development, because Tumblr is the service that has done more to help the average user build a presence on the web since Geocities—a free web site hosting service that was also bought by Yahoo!, and then shut down. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the worry of anyone but the most paranoid.
More than a mere victory for a service that has struggled to monetize despite a huge audience, it’s also a vindication of user-generated content services that do more than social networks. Twitter, Facebook, et al give you a place to communicate, with people, but you have to do it on their terms: a 140 character limit, “likes”, coerced public posting, and ads based on your “interests”. [1] What makes Tumblr so successful, from a user-adoption standpoint, is that it’s easy to set up and use, has good discovery tools, and precious few restrictions. Tumblr is very much a blank slate, allowing almost full customizability of the profile, and open posting of content. The only real limits are a ban on porn videos, which may be for bandwidth reasons, and actual illegal content. No other service gives you so much for so little effort. It’s a testament to the brilliance of David Karp, who has been smartly retained by Yahoo! for the next four years, that Tumblr has been so widely adopted by geeks and non-geeks alike. If you want to have a real presence on the Internet—not just a profile—you can sign up for Tumblr, for free, and start posting almost anything inside of five minutes.
The Internet is that its a vacuum that demands to be filled with something. With the endless human desire to make things, modify and recombine things, and share things, a service like Tumblr is not only a good idea, it is a necessity. Reducing the amount of friction between someone wanting to share a picture, a video, or anything else they desire, with the world—or just an audience of their friends—is a worthwhile endeavor. Yahoo! has freed Karp, and Tumblr, from those things preventing it from progressing in this mission. They can pay off their investors, hire more engineers, and keep the braintrust behind the service comfortable, so they can focus on the product and not where the next round of funding will come from. It’s really the best thing that could have happened to Tumblr, and by extension, the Internet as a medium of creative expression.
For those who are upset that Tumblr has “sold out,” the opportunity now exists for someone to try and improve on Tumblr’s model. Someone out there has the potential to something better, faster, easier and more compelling than Tumblr, and the cycle will start anew. When the time comes, the people behind that project should be handsomely rewarded as well.
I’m aware Tumblr, under Yahoo!’s stewardship, will likely be monetizing with, yes, ads. I imagine, however, it will work on a different model than Twitter or Facebook, because Tumblr is so open-ended that it would be difficult to nail down hard targets for advertising. Please correct me if I’m wrong. ↩