s06e08: The One With The Uneven Mid-Season Two-Parter
0.0 Sitrep
I'm on my way to Toronto to do a workshop for this year's Code for Canada fellowship. I am relatively excited about it! Delta are also very excited about their new high-speed wifi on this plane. I don't know what else to tell you, really. This one is a long one (although apparently still about a thousand words off the record for this newsletter, so we could've done a lot worse) and really is a grab-bag. Sorry?
On with the show, etc.
1.0 Things That Have Caught, Etc.
Corrections, first. A number of people emailed to say that I had the wrong link for the SNES-mini-is-actually-also-the-NES-mini. This is the correct link. We, my society of mind, regrets the error, etc.
* Via Mike Migurski (who is not Canadian!) a blog post about the city public transit data opportunity from Jascha Franklin-Hodge who’s affiliated with Remix. The deal here is that there’s some cities - Portland and Los Angeles stand out from what I’ve learned so far - that have taken a very progressive attitude to the arrival of e-scooters, one that I carelessly (I have been reading Paddington books lately to my eldest son and I am very much a fan of re-invigorating the 1950s meaning and usage of the verb, i.e. casual, not reckless) described as the (obviously anthropomorphised) cities saying:
*AirBnB arrives in cities, cities caught off-guard, are “disrupted”*
Cities: okay fooled us once.
*Uber, Lyft arrive in cities, cities caught off-guard, are “disrupted”*
Cities: jesus christ okay, fooled us twice
* e-Scooters arrive in citie-*
Cities: FOOL US THE FUCK NOT THE THIRD TIME
But even so there is a funny story here which again I observed as being suitable as a TED-level insight, which is this: in anticipation of not wanting to be fooled a third time, a bunch of cities armed themselves by hiring people who would definitively, absolutely be prepared for the oncoming storm of autonomous vehicles. And *while that was happening*, hundreds of e-scooters showed up overnight bringing *actual disruption to literal doorsteps* (ha, also literal: which sounds like litter).
Anyway! It looks like some cities are catching on and are doing super interesting things around scooters, realtime feeds, making decisions about public transit policy and achieving objectives of reaching underserved areas by making data-sharing a condition of operation. This is good! We should celebrate!
* The behind-the-scenes video of the one-take time-lapse scene change from Showtime series Kidding was a) wonderful if you’re the kind of wonkish person who likes to see competent people executing something very difficult and b) reminded me of the description that’s sometimes trotted out about “legacy technology modernization projects”, ie: “like trying to take apart and re-assemble a jumbo jet mid-flight”. Now what I really like about the Kidding behind the scenes shot is that what that production team are doing is clearly VERY COMPLICATED and if you read the interview, the crew spent two weeks working on the shot and spent a whole day choreographing it, and some of the context behind *that* is you’ve got a body of people and a good sixty odd years of institutional knowledge about how to pull this stuff off. If I were being cynical, I’d say that the technology industry *handwave* in general *end handwave* has, like many other industries, the equivalent of people who say they can pull off the Kidding scene-change and then about fifteen seconds into the scene change, the walls fall down, the camera operator bumps into something, a light falls over and then suddenly everything is on fire. This isn’t to say that there aren’t groups of people in the technology industry who can’t do this, just that for whatever reason, customers also can’t tell the difference between people who can pull it off and people who can’t. (Also, the stakes are higher, obviously). (Counterpoint: *are they, though?*)
* Don’t feel bad that the Rethink Robotics, the company behind the deliberately anthropomorphized industrial collaborative robot Baxter and sibling-of-Baxter, Sawyer, has shut down because then you’d be feeling bad about THE END-OF-LIFE OF A ROBOT WITH A FACE and if you want to do that, just watch Moon again.
* I want to call out some really inspired copywriting that I think is only really possible when you think hard about what it is you want to communicate. It’s the preamble to the re-issue of Tom and Jerry cartoons from 2004: “Some of the cartoons you are about to see are a product of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros.’ view of today’s society, some of these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”
That said, in an Instagram conversation about the same, a friend pointed out the use of the phrase “the same” in the sentence “because to [not present the cartoons as originally created] would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed” is a) not true, and b) a false equivalence. If they’re wrong, then presumably it was wrong to profit off them back then, and it would also be wrong to profit off them right now. In which case, maybe don’t sell them and donate them to a cultural institution for the benefit of all society?
* Some people are excited about advances in mathematics that have opened up the field of stochastic non-equilibria in thermodynamics which is the super smart way of saying “what are the laws constraining and describing the expenditure of energy involved in computation” if you work at the Santa Fe Institute. I am excited about it because it reminds me of a conversation I had about AFGAM being very interested in fundamental energy research because at the scale at which we’re building and deploying computing it’s suddenly a significant competitive advantage if you figure out, say, fusion, before anyone else does. (One would hope that something like fusion would not be held back as a significant competitive advantage). This also explains why one of the first things DeepMind’s work was applied to after (during?) knocking out Go was datacenter power management.
* So, the thought process went like this: I upgraded to macOS Mojave and it has this new thing called Dark Mode which is supposedly really cool and, upon trying it, it turns out feels quite unusable for the work that I do, which is lots of typing and looking at documents that mainly have white backgrounds, like Google Docs and PowerPoints and Word Documents. I am not, apparently, a professional who needs a user interface to fall into the background to concentrate on the content I am working on, and this is after having tried Dark Mode for a couple days, both at my co-working space and down in Sacramento in the office. But, what it did remind me of was the original black-and-white NeXTSTEP GUI (I think that screenshot is showing Improv - still the best spreadsheet software ever? - but people who are older and more experienced that me and who were actually there at the time can probably correct me), and before you knew it I was installing OPENSTEP on a virtual machine on my laptop. There are a few things that caught my attention about this: first, installing the OS of a computer system I coveted in my geeky teens (what, I filled out the free information cards in PC Magazine and Byte and got sent lots of free marketing material about everything I circled) on a $3,000-odd dollar laptop in my late 30s feels a bit mid-life-crisis-ish in the whole “reliving what I wanted from my teenage years); second, OPENSTEP out of the box doesn’t include a DHCP client, so you have to set your TCP/IP etc settings manually, which fine, I asked for a late 90s experience and I’m getting one; third, the driver you have to download to get networking working is for an emulated NE2000 network card of which omg total flashback to playing Doom and Quake and so on; fourth, and finally, I really did think “Oh, I could use this unconnected OPENSTEP VM to do my writing in” until I thought: no, i don’t want to do that, that feels stupendously hipstery.
* Instagram is definitely a glossy Condé Nast magazine like Vogue and both the content and ads are, well, the same thing. And here’s the latest evidence: people figuring out that there’s sufficient demand for Instagram-ready locations for photoshoots. With my ad agency background it is totally not surprising that this was done by a new entrant and not, say, by an ad agency or incumbent production company. There is an open question here about whether it was possible for Condé Nast to have created something like Instagram (where clearly I don’t just mean “created”, I mean something successful in the way that Instagram has been successful). In retrospect, there are many things about Instagram that feel like they could be no-brainers for a company like Condé Nast, but they rely on what you might otherwise call leaps of faith. I mean, imagine being in the late 90s/early 2000s and having to listen to your newly installed David Shingy and having to just *believe* these things:
1. People like taking and sharing photographs (since, I dunno, *the invention of the camera*). I mean, I’m pretty sure that you could draw a pretty reasonable inference for this by the late 90s/early 2000s.
2. Cameras get cheaper: in general? This only really happens because of no 1. above, so I’m just handwaving the fact that people like taking and sharing photographs creates a bunch of unsatisfied demand. (Warning: don’t read too much into this otherwise you start to fall down manifestos about how we’re a social species and want to Share Everything)
3. People like looking at nice photographs. This one’s a bit more complicated: Condé Nast magazines certainly have nice photographs in them. But they’re normally photographs of people or things that the average person does not have contact with, which is another way of saying that they’re aspirational. I mean sure, they could also be full of photographs of things that people do not have contact with that are not aspirational but… that doesn’t feel like a great use of leisure time?
4. What if… more people could take photographs? Sure, you’ve got Proper Photographers but maybe the number of Proper Photographers who can reliably take and make photographs worthy of an august publication is perhaps limited by the availability of photography equipment? I mean sure, many of those photographs may not be Good Enough for a Condé Nast publication, but… some of the might be? And (dirty secret) maybe some of them are just about good enough? How elastic, exactly, is demand for premium Condé Nast type conte? I get that limited supply is good for the entity that’s doing the supplying, but that presumes that the entity is in such a gatekeeping position that they’re able to restrict supply. Hm, I wonder what could happen if that gatekeeping position were suddenly, er, disrupted.
5. Screens will get better and can be convenient: it’s important to remember that the retina display - just over 300 pixels per inch at around 10-12 inches from your eyes - was introduced as a mass-market product in 2010 (just 8 years ago!) with Apple’s iPhone 4. This one was a big deal! For the kids, looking at pictures on the interent before you people were born was really different. It was basically all pixel art. It wasn’t an aesthetic, that’s just how everything looked before 2010. The only place you could really see high-resolution imagery was at specialist “stores” that would print out images for you at quite frankly unheard-of resolutions, like more than 600 dots per inch.
6. Mobile data becomes a utility: I get it. It’s the early 2000s and this excited person comes over to you and they’re holding their Palm Pilot and it’s plugged into their mobile phone (you are not that impressed by their mobile phone because the Blackberry, which you only just got issued, is the best mobile phone because it lets you send emails) and they’re showing you some of these “photographs” on their Palm Pilot or some other dorky thing, like being able to access NASA’s website for the Shuttle launch schedule. (This last point is funny to you, because you remember a long time ago when you were more comfortable with your geeky, techno-curious side being at a friend’s house and dialing up to a BBS to download NASA Shuttle launch schedule over zmodem.) Anyway! This person is super excited about their PDA that’s plugged in to their phone (or it’s using infrared, which is even more eyeroll inducing because every so often they get so excited they nudge their PDA and the whole thing loses the connection) because, you see, this is The Future and soon everyone will be looking at our magazines on their phones, and you look at this stuff on the desk and you think: yeah, no. And the person showing you this stuff gets really distressed because, seriously, this *is* the future, don’t you remember that scene in 2001 when that guy does the video call and those AT&T adverts, look, they plead, you’ve got to fund this project because it’s coming and soon everyone you know, *even your mum* is going to have this in their pocket and we’re going to get screwed. And you look, again, at the IrDA-connected gadgets on the desk and you shake your head. (Over the next few years, you end up reporting to this person. Millions of local currency are expended to no appreciable return.)
And then, somehow, all of those things happen. And it feels strange: they don’t happen as quickly, or as early, as that wild-haired person proclaimed they would, but they happen nonetheless. Phones got cheaper and smaller, displays got better. Cameras got really good. Data got cheap and easier and now, if your mum isn’t the one with an instagram account (“they’ll want to see photos of their grandchildren! The iPhone is the number one camera on Flickr! (“Who cares about Flickr?”)), then everyone else’s mum has an instagram account.
And now, this. There’s studios opening up catering for “moments” and “feelings” and “vibes” which you’d otherwise scoff at but then you remember what the conversation sounded like the last time you hung around some art directors and you think: we totally missed the boat.
Was there any way to do this, for an institution to have built an instagram? When was the right time to do it? Is it the right time to do something now? How would you know?
This is, of course, the exact moment where someone who’s heard of Wardley Mapping would crash through the wall and say: well, if you’d *bothered* to do any strategic mapping, then you’d have a buch better idea of how to stave off having your lunch eaten by what you thought was a tiny blip on the horizon and no, it doesn’t even involve doing a bunch of focus groups.
Because, I think, part of the point is if you’re Condé Nast and you’re trying to figure out what the next Instagram is before both your capital and brand goodwill disappears, it’s probably quite important to have a think about and understand all the pieces that needed to come together and yes, luck probably came into it as well.
There’s a couple big pieces that feel trite, but it feels like it’s important to really understand them and what they mean, rather than the high-level understanding that “mobile” is the opposite of “fixed”. I mean, books are mobile, right? Magazines are mobile?
There’s all the technical aspects: for something like Instagram to be successful in the way it’s been, you’d need:
i) a pocketable device
ii) with a good-enough screen
iii) probably unmetered access to data
iv) a good-enough battery life
v) that’s cheap enough
vi) that does multiple things (otherwise it needs to be *really* cheap, and anyway, did you remember that half the population DOESN’T EVEN HAVE USABLE POCKETS)
vii) has a camera
viii) can piggy-back off a network effect
These are a lot of things!
Now, this is all well and good if you’ve figured out that all of these things are an opportunity to do… something. And the easiest something is going to be “Vogue, but on an iPhone” and no sooner than you issue an edict to deliver forth “Vogue, but on an iPhone” does the person who you used to report to (who now reports to you, thankfully) come scurrying back bleating something like “But Vogue on an iPhone doesn’t make any sense, we’ve got be native!” and you’re wondering if you haven’t just been present at a horrific HR violation.
You end up having a long, protracted argument about what “Vogue on an iPhone means”.
Meanwhile, one other aspect that you’ve been laboring under - that it’s *expensive* to make something like “Vogue on an iPhone” due to things like needing Data Centers and Servers and all this CapEx investment in Digital Infrastructure - has completely disappeared. I mean, all your competitors are thinking the same thing, they’ve got colocated servers that they’re running somewhere ever since management came in and did something about those pizza boxes that were in a cupboard in the late 90s (they turned out not to be literal pizza boxes).
Instead, a whole bunch of people who don’t have IT departments are busy buying their servers from Amazon, which… makes sense, I suppose, you’ve heard that you can buy anything from Amazon these days, and presumably they just get a better deal on them because Amazon sells in bulk and you just plug them in somewhere. But it isn’t quite like that, and all the while you’re having this fight about what “Vogue on an iPhone” means (your competitors are having this argument too, so you’re somewhat relieved that this isn’t going to be resolved quickly), a bunch of college kids go out and actually make goddamn Instagram.
But even then, it’s not so bad, right? Because Instagram is just this thing young people are using to, I don’t know, take pictures of their food, which fine, their photos of their breakfast and dinner aren’t that great and they’re using these weird hashtag things and everyone knows that anyone who wants to know about food *really* should be reading Bon Appétit or something, and okay sure, Google bought Zagat but it’s not like you’re going to be looking up restaurant reviews on your phone…
Food. Cats. Sunsets. The whole thing is a mess. But… more people keep using it? And then Facebook goes and buys it and everyone gets a bit confused because why would Facebook buy it and the prevailing argument is that Facebook bought it because they were afraid, which is good, because anything that makes Facebook afraid is good for legacy/traditional media organizations. But what just happened was that your competitor bought its competitor, and they didn’t buy you, which means… they’re not worried about you? (Of course they’re not worried about you, you’re stuck with Facebook now, ever since that whole Upworthy thing and now you’ve got all these social media interns.
Look, this is probably very offensive to people who work in media. I have not worked in media! Hindsight is stupendously cruel.
The flip-side to this is that it’s very easy to be right, but *too early*, and one of the things to be careful about with a certain kind of technologist is that they’ll be super excited (like me, for instance) about the potential of some technology which is *just around the corner* and is actually a few years away and that there’s a difference between being a) right *in general* but too early and b) wrong and, well, I guess wrong is time-invariant.
I was just thinking that this was a long way of re-stating Gartner’s Hype Cycle, but then I thought to myself: nope, I’m convinced that this is more than just Gartner’s Hype Cycle and, see, here’s where this is different. Gartner’s cycle only has three axes and one of them isn’t really an axis. The Y axis is expectation and the X axis is (helpfully, ha) an undelineated time axis. But the chart itself is typically for a specific technology and, I think, this underlines why someone like Simon Wardley feels it’s important to yell about mapping and (inevitable reference coming) why it feels like Apple is one of the easier examples of getting this (where “this” is “a technology hit”) right more often than wrong. (Also: Apple also get it wrong, and every success takes time)
A Gartner hype cycle for “retina screens” doesn’t really tell you much. I mean it does, but just… for display technology? If you don’t add other axes like unmetered mobile data and cameras and so on, then you’re left having to think much harder about what, exactly, those screens are going to be doing. The point being that all of these individual attributes are are at worst merely additive (or, even a financial drain and a distraction) and instead when they’re taken together in some sort of critical mass are multiplicative.
There is probably a reference here about how this thinking is much closer to, say, something like systems thinking, rather than “how will technology x affect industry y” and it’s easier to think on the primary technology x axis because, well, our brains.
I think some of these thoughts are prompted by the work I’m doing in prepping for programming next year’s Code for America Summit. There’s an argument to be made for covering “disruptive” technologies (all the buzzword ones: blockchain (still), data (still), machine learning/deep learning/A.I. (hot?), cloud (still - remember, everyone’s using mainframes in government), voice assistants (maybe?)) because there’s presumably a bunch of people who want to understand them or who are being asked What Do We Think Or What Are We Doing About X. My semi-facetious reply is: We Don’t Care About X New Technology, We’ve Got Other Things We Need To Worry About.
There are some that I feel pretty comfortable about, still: I have yet to be persuaded about distributed ledgers (but if someone from IBM *really* wants to persuade me why their food thing *needs* a distributed ledger that right now is only being run inside IBM’s private cloud sure, hit me up), but it’s more the application of multiple technologies to *actual needs* that matters more. Deep learning - to the degree that it produces “results” (note that I didn’t say whether those results were useful or accurate), depends on whether you’re allowed to use other technologies like cloud (what, you’re going to spend all that capex again on building a training and inference farm?), data (are you allowed to use it? What do you have? How are you collecting it? Where are you storing it?), sensors and so on.
Anyway. That was a long digression. I guess I was in the middle of doing Things That Have Caught, etc:
* I have two projects that I’m playing with at the moment: one is building a roguelike using the rot.js toolkit because I have an idea for something I think would be Very Funny, and maybe it’s incentive enough to actually do some coding again, and the other is writing some dystopian-ish/satirical/William Gibson-esque fiction, but in Twine only when I last looked, holy crap there’s some weird stuff going on between Twine 2 and Twine 1 and neding to know what kind of story format you’re working in which feels like it got Just Complicated Enough to feel like programming again instead of Just Writing.
* (cw: rationalist) Scott Alexander writes a thought-experiment trying to reconcile libertarian ideals with liberalism about a community where people really don’t like drums and what happens when, inevitably, some people want to drum, i.e. what happens when a bunch of people get together and incorporate and form a very strict community/city where drumming is not allowed. Are drummer allowed to move in? When A Drummer Is Born In Our Heretofore Peaceful Non-Drumming Community, may they drum, or must they leave?
What caught my attention in Alexander’s post was the idea that sure, fine, you go form your community with your own rules (all the way from disallowing drumming to, say, white supremacy) provided that exit rights (leaving to another community) are as low as possible and exit transaction costs are also as low as possible, because what’s the point of an in principle “easily exercisable exit right” if the practical costs of exercising that right in fact deter exiting? (Note for people working in government: this is why policy cannot be torn asunder from delivery). Combined with the exit rights issue, Alexander also raises that there need to be things to exit *to* - this is pretty linked to the transaction cost of leaving - so the cost of forming a new community needs to be pretty low, too. Anyway, in a previous blog post, he argues for something called Archipelago and Atomic Communism where everyone gets what they want *provided switching costs are low*. Which, it strikes me, is *one of* the issues we’re concerned about as a society with social platforms and, in a related way, platform economics.
This is part of the reason why Mastodon instinctively appeals to me, over our current divine-right, monarch-based networks in Facebook and Twitter. With something like Mastodon, you have the freedom to set up a community in pretty much any way you want in a way that you don’t with Facebook or Twitter. To be clear, this means you can absolutely have a Nazi Mastodon instance. You cannot - well, citation needed, I guess - have an explicitly Nazi-oriented community on Twitter or Facebook. OK, more accurately, I guess you probably could have one (no doubt some exist), but as soon as it gets discoverd by the reigning monarch, it’s guillotines for that group. Maybe. See, that’s a problem right there.
And, switching costs are lower, with Mastodon. You can leave. You can choose what you federate with. But, in a way that doesn’t quite exist with Mastodon and what illustrates the sticking point with Alexander’s Archipelago concept, wherein individual communities are free to exist provided they don’t break certain basic rules: enforcing the ability to leave a community at any time (to the extent that any community that prevents anyone from leaving is met with, let’s say, Overwhelming and Lethal Force - because that’s exactly what happens when a drummer is born to a non-drummer family. The dream of this, from a computing point of view, is to have some sort of top-down overall enforcement that can effectively prevent that type of coercion. But… that requires monitoring? And that requires being able to salt the earth because you want to emphasize to *all* communities that rule zero is: never prevent someone from leaving. In theory, this feels like wanting something that would exist in a perfect universe but would be difficult if not impossible to implement in practice. Mistakes would be made, etc. Which is not to say that something like this shouldn’t be striven for. But again: it points to one of the criticisms of Mastodon - that there isn’t a protocol or a ruleset for dealing with cross-instance behavior. Is there an ur-ruleset for Mastodon? There isn’t, really, because on the one hand people want to say it’s just a tool and on the other hand people definitely have opinions about how that tool should be used. This should not be a surprise, because people are involved and whereever ther are people there are going to be opinions, and thus any tool created by a human is going to come with a lot of baggage. Which is to say: software is opinionated and you need to have some degree of control and Alexander is being very specific when he says: look, the enforcement of the right-to-leave is met with unconditional, violent, physical force. (At least, it is until we can’t re-instantiate from backup). It is becoming increasingly clear that no matter the early idealism of cyberspace, it is nonetheless a human construct and whether we like it or not, our power structures apply to it. To the extent that nation states exist and are able to exert the last resort of power, China gets to, ultimately, say what it wants done with the internet, and networking inside it. It may choose to fight a losing battle, but it’s that nation state’s prerogative to choose such a losing battle in the same way that the FIVE EYES can choose to just make the world’s technology companies implement government backdoors in case negotiation doesn’t pan out. They are, after all, the ones who make the laws and impose physical sanctions if or when they’re not met.
So, the deal is this. A bunch of people need to get together and, in essence, write some sort of manifesto about an opinionated social network *as if it’s a nation state* when it clearly isn’t quite a nation state. The good news is, there’s quite a bit of precedence about how to go about doing this, and there’s some good examples as well as not-so-good ones. There are even a bunch of trials going on, though I’m not entirely sure if you could call them RCTs right now. But, and this is an important point, I think the interesting thing here would be to point to a set of basic, level zero considerations and then figure out how much of what individual communities do, on that federated platform, can be individually determined.
Wait, there’s a giant hand-wavey bit of Alexander’s that I forgot. It’s the last point in the rule zeros. After enforcing the exit policy, the benevolent dictator enforces three more rules: 1) nobody gets to declare war on another community, 2) negative externalities are stopped from the top down, again with the threat of military enforcement and lastly, the hand-wavey one. The hand-wavey one is “preventing memetic contamination”. The exact example is this:
“If one community wants to avoid all media that objectifies women, then no other community is allowed to broadcast women-objectifying media at it. If a community wants to live an anarcho-primitivist lifestyle, nobody else is allowed to import TVs. Every community decides exactly how much informational contact it wants to have with the rest of the continent, and no one is allowed to force them to have more than that.”
Now we get to the crux of it. There is no technological means of ensuring such a memetic/information firewall. I firmly believe that there *will* be no means of achieving this sort of separation until, I dunno, strong AI is achieved. This is strictly a human problem, and it’s one that’s also subject to a red queen race.
Or, we could do it the other way: you, the white-supremacist Nazi community, are not allowed to broadcast or send white-supermacist Nazi information to anyone who’s put you on their blocklist or you will literally get nuked off the planet.
Some people are probably going to get nuked until the message gets through.
Or until enough Nazis understand that, on balance, it’s probably better, if you’re a Nazi, to at least have your Nazi community and not be allowed to talk to people who really don’t like Nazis, rather than to be nuked off the planet.
Put this way, it sounds like I’m advocating for the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a community moderation strategy and to be honest, I think I might be? This seems like an extreme situation! Obviously we would prefer not to use nuclear weapons to actually kill people who violate what’s essentially a code of conduct but (emoji thinking face) what *is* a society’s laws other than a code of conduct anyway? (emoji thinking face, again)
I mean, maybe there’s a sliding scale. Maybe not! There is a reasonable argument for talking Nazis down and persuading them not to be Nazis, rather than killing them all. I mean, this would give them a lot of the benefit of the doubt which and assuming that they are capable of redemption and, to be fair, they may not be considering reciprocating, given history.
Which is just a long way of saying that content moderation is a human problem and not a technology problem. And that our attempts to design technological solutions to social issues can certainly be helpful and inform because tools shape users, but also: we’re the ones who decide and, hey, how can we deal with pluralism and liberalism and what would it take for us to be able to have a workable principle of harm. I mean, does it really require us to threaten to imprison people for bad behavior? (Spoilers: yes, it does *in our current context*, and we do that right now).
Well. That was another long, inadvertent digression.
* I am sitting here on a plane to Toronto typing this into Apple Notes. All I have open is Safari, iTunes, Slack, Terminal (I have a habit of pinging example.org every 2 seconds whenever I’m on a dodgey connection so I have an idea of what to be annoyed at) and Activity Monitor for reasons that shall become clear. I bet you can’t guess what the menubar says is the application “using significant energy”.
Haha, you guessed wrong, it wasn’t Slack, it was Apple Notes and this entire thing is a tire fire.
* I plan on reading SB-327 Information privacy: connected devices, the legislation recently passed by the State of California, which was described in the press as variously outlawing crap passwords or as an Internet of Things cybersecurity law. I find it interesting reading this stuff because a) ha, I used to be a lawyer and found (continue to find?) this stuff interesting, and b) it’s a primary text for What Do Lawmakers And Their Aides Understand About The Internet.
—
Well, that was a lot of typing. Maybe some people actually finished reading this one. I don’t mind! (This is a reminder that I write this mainly for me, to do thinking, as opposed to strictly for you, to get external validation and, I don’t know, Build A Personal Brand). I write this for thinking and for practice.
I also still like notes, even the ones that just say hi. How are you, anyway?
See you next time,
Dan