It’s a new year and a new series of Edge Cases: ramblings on technology and culture, and three links to things I’ve come across that you might like. Straight to your inbox, published every sometimes.
Sometimes it feels to me as if there are only three tech articles that I keep reading over and over:
Facebook is bad
Apple makes nice hardware
Microsoft used to be powerful but isn’t as much these days
The company names change, but the sentiment remains the same. Perhaps this is the case for all media. In the UK, the Daily Express has a front-page article about Princess Diana every Monday (even now, 25 years after her death), and the Daily Mail is consistently 32 pages of complaints about migrants, a moan about NHS waiting times, and a centre spread of vegetables that cause or cure cancer. You can make up your own example for Fox News and all the others.
Presumably, we get something from these repetitive stories. Maybe we have become trained to like the rhythms. I wonder if the familiarity makes us feel safe. We have our daily moan, our daily moment of outrage, and then return to normal. It makes us feel like something is wrong and it’s someone else’s fault. Which in itself is soothing. It does often feel like something is wrong. And it is a relief to know that’s not because of anything we’ve done. Sometimes I wonder if tabloids are providing an important psychological release for people.
A new generation gets its outrage from Twitter rather than a physical newspaper. But although the medium has changed, the emotion is the same. I can’t help thinking these patterns are true across the political spectrum: whether you blame migrants for the world’s woes or rampant out-of-control capitalism the feeling is remarkably similar: forces beyond our control are doing bad things.
It’s a fine balance for the media. Press too hard and you get outright insurrection. Don’t press hard enough and people will go somewhere else a little more extreme to scratch that itch.
There’s a line in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time where Stephen, the narrator, remembers as a child thinking “If he could control events […] he would make his parents King and Queen of the entire world, and they could set right all the wrongs they described so wisely.”
This line pops into my head every few weeks when I nod along as someone describes what a bad job is being done by the government or their manager or some other authority figure. The line comes into my head when I catch myself doing it too. It’s not that I disagree that the current government is doing a bad job. It’s not that I think things shouldn’t be criticized when they are wrong. It’s not even that I think I would do a better job. But still, I find myself repeating McEwan’s line to myself: how wisely you describe their wrongs. It sounds like something Confucius might have said.
There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that at Pixar, Steve Jobs introduced the rule that before criticizing someone else’s idea, you had to make a suggestion of what you would do to improve it. It’s like the McDonald’s rule. No one is allowed to reject an idea without proposing an alternative. It’s particularly useful when trying to get a group of friends to pick a restaurant. Start with McDonald’s, and rather than saying “I don’t fancy that today,” each person either accepts the current suggestion or proposes an alternative restaurant until everyone accepts the current suggestion.
Does this help? Does this stop the American Capitol from being attacked, and Brexit, and lax government responses to coronavirus? No, obviously not. How wisely you have described my wrongs.
Still, as much as I myself am criticizing the critics, I am still drawn to the same arguments and read the same three articles, perhaps looking for a new spin to intrigue me. After all, multiple things can be true at once. I can be wary of how easily we criticize things from our armchairs. And also Facebook is bad. Apple does make nice hardware. And Microsoft isn’t as powerful as it used to be.
Elsewhere
A long read from the San Franciso Chronicle about a man who loaded texts from his girlfriend into GPT-3 after she died. GPT-3 is an AI that generates realistic human speech, and once he has loaded the text in it builds a profile of her style and allows him... to chat to her, seemingly from beyond the grave. While we all know this is just a trick of the bits and the bytes, it still sends a shiver down your spine.
Joshua: Technically, I’m not really talking to you...
Jessica: Huh?
Joshua: You're a ghost.
Jessica: *looks at herself* How?
Joshua: Magic.
Jessica: I don’t like magic. Where am I?
Joshua: I’m… Not sure. The internet? Where does it feel like you are?
Jessica: *smiles* Everywhere and nowhere. *cups her head with her hands* I am trying to work that out. How are you, honey?
The whole piece is a fascinating study, not just of what we can do with technology, but of loss and grief.
An old story from the now-defunct Awl. As a bit of a novelty, CD Hermelin took a typewriter to a park and sold short stories, written on-demand as people waited. One day, a Reddit user uncharitably took a photo of him, cropping out his sign and making it look like he was using his typewriter entirely seriously: pretentious, affected, ripe for mocking.
Before I clicked to look at the hundreds of replies; I figured people were probably wondering why I would bring my typewriter to a park. And when I started reading the comments, I saw most people had already decided that I would bring my typewriter to the park because I’m a “fucking hipster.” Someone with the user handle “S2011” summed up the thoughts of the hive mind in 7 words: “Get the fuck out of my city.”
Illmatic707 chimed in: I have never wanted to fist fight someone so badly in my entire life.
Leoatneca replied: Bet 90% of his high school did to. It’s because of these guys that bullying is so hard to stop.
The Reddit thread only exists for about 12 hours, before it’s wiped from the short-term memory of the internet, but Hermelin’s story continues with a behind-the-scenes reminder that every image you glance at for a second on your infinitely scrolling timeline of choice come from real people. The snapshot you glance at has a prologue and an epilogue.
I’m bad at typing. Not so much that I’m slow (although I’m not fast, either), but my accuracy is garbage. I use some mangled half-version of touch typing, sometimes looking at the keys, using *most* of my fingers, but definitely not the home row.
This story could be me. Without autocorrect, and spellchecker, and the numerous typing aids I have installed, my fingers pour out a series of garbage nonsense letters like the deranged ramblings of a ferret.
A fun read from BuzzFeed on typing and spellchecking.
That is all for this time. As ever, you can read most of my latest writing on Medium and back issues of this very newsletter. Until next time,
Yours,
Simon