May 11, 2021

s09e27: Absurdity, net-native journalism, Promising No Solutions, Talking and Snow Crashing, chapter 16

0.0 Context setting

It’s Tuesday May 11, 2021 and I’m outside on the front deck writing again. It’s a sunny 61 degrees Fahrenheit in my adopted country, which makes it about 16 Celsius and t-shirt weather.

Douglas Adams died 20 years ago today. I wonder what he would make of everything wonderful and terrible brought by computers and technology in the past 20 years. Presumably at the very least he’d have found innovative and disruptive ways to let deadlines fly by.

It’s now the 5 days since I had my second Pfizer shot and I’m emerging from a physical funk into an unwelcome mental one.

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1.0 Some things that caught my attention

6 things today covering

• print ads for absurd products
• net-native, not-Snowfall journalism
• technology-isn’t-solutions
• “structured talking” as enterprise software
• headphone jacks
• a couple short, silly twitter stories

and the latest Snow Crash recap of chapter 16.

On with the show:

Print ads for absurd products

Dana Sibera produces photoshops of absurd, fictional Apple products (I’m somewhat sad that I’m spoiling the surprise). Here’s a PDF flyer for the Apple PowerPod 500, and there’s much more in her feed at @NanoRaptord. Some favorites of mine include the iBooklet, the genuinely cursed Apple Wireless Mouse, the similarly distressing Silicon Graphics Indy (swoon) and matching display, and these portables.

Caught my attention because: They’re silly, there’s photorealistic, and the kind of silly that prompts a sort of “yeah, but what if slightly less silly?”

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Net-native journalism

Via Clive Thompson, the wonderfully net-native American Journalism Online Awardsannounced its 2021 Winners.

Caught my attention because: the categories include Best Twitter Thread, Best TikTok Explainer, alongside categories like Best use of Public Records, Best News-Based Podcast, Eyewitness Award and Reporting on Race Award.

I’ve written before about the [New York Times’ Snowfall](https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s09e01-no-such-thing-as-a-blank-slate], the 2012 giant that smashed into the online news space by being a tremendously produced and integrated piece of journalism.

And that was one model of net-native journalism in that it mixed media together, but these awards are really interesting because they explore other types of net-native media.

I mean, the highlighted award is Grist’s Twitter thread on climate change, which combines super-deep knowledge of Twitter as a creative medium as well as that mainstay of interactivity, the choose your own adventure. So good!

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Promising No Solutions

My friend Josh Millard (who makes art, including plotter drawings) was writing about refactoring code over the weekend, and one self-reflective observation of his stuck out at me:

In practice, I’m gonna have to rewrite stuff! I’m gonna have to add to the library! I’m gonna have to get futzy with individual drawing programs! This is all normal and fine. [My emphasis] [Tweet]

Caught my attention because: This reminded me about housekeeping¹ in the context of technology and software. I don’t know if it’s the intersection of computer science (and thus computing, and computers-in-society) with mathematics, but so much of our use of software appears to be bound up in this belief that software provides Solutions. And I’m not just talking about the way software and computer technology is talked about in marketing because sure, of course marketing wants to sell solutions. (Even though such solutions aren’t great from a long-term sales point of view).

But this promise of solutions is… obviously false? There is no legit, absolutely done, no-further-answers needed solution to problems in the real world that require interaction with humans. Certainly not right now, not when every solution is necessarily a trade-off. There’s only “the best that we can do right now”. But there’s this sort of belief that “Okay, I’ve done the software now and that’s it” when in so many cases it’s not. Environments change and degrade. We’re not in a static, steady state. There’s always a better. Even keeping the steady state requires expenditure of energy. Caretaking and stewarding and housekeeping. Never being one-and-done. There’s no solution, there’s always tidying up, neatening up.

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Structured Talking

Speaking of which, just the mention of “the way we talk about software” reminded me about the idea of certain kinds of enterprise software, particularly those to do with workflow, as “structured talking”. This was based on the news that ServiceNow, some enterprise software that started out as a ticketing platform but now does “workflow automation”, had brought Lightstep, a startup that provides “application monitoring and observability”. Commenters over at the Orange Place were perplexed as to why ServiceNow was bought in the first place given their experience of it. One person mentioned that“Chatting, Operations software are part of very basic needs of an org”². Workflow automation software feels like it’s structured talking, right? A bunch of information going back and forth, but that information needs to be defined and standardized. There’s humans involved. Another way of thinking about such workflow automation software is that they’re a bit like enterprise macros and honestly, the Wikipedia article doesn’t do much to help me express the thinking behind my idea.

Examples of structured talking outside of the vague “workflow automation” include ticketing (so that’s where you get ServiceNow and ZenDesk from), but also apps like Jira where you want to have conversations that are replicable.

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Headphone jacks

I have problems with search, so I can’t remember whether I mentioned that the iPod Shuffle 2G used a headphone jack (a 4 pin 3.5mm/2.5mm plug connector) as its sole port, and had a special cable that terminated in a 4 pin USB A plug. So that single headphone jack covered a) audio, b) USB data and c) charging. This recollection by someone (on Twitter, of course, so lost in time now) was accompanied with the outrage that we could’ve been using reversible headphone jacks as USB ports the whole time instead of the continuing confusing USB mess. Anyway, I found the pinout of the iPod Shuffle 2G’s USB cable and of course the smarts that convert the USB signal to something that works over a headphone jack are in a circuit board in the adapter base.

But that’s just preamble. Remember the original Square credit card that used a headphone jack to read the magstripe on credit/debit cards? It used “a head from a tape player and a 1/8” microphone jack”⁵, with the head positioned to read the second track on the card. Since it’s just audio input (a tape player head!) you can process the audio input to read the card’s data.

All this is fine and good, and left me with the realization that

Square using the headphone jack on the iPhone as inputi for a mag stripe reader means in an alternate universe we could’ve had iPhone software distributed on cassette tape. [Tweet]

(There are of course other issues involved in that the filesystem of an iPhone isn’t accessible in the way that you could side-load apps, and I’ll leave that to Cory Doctorow to explain).

But, I hear you ask, surely we can’t store that much on a cassette tape?

Well, no. Not if we’re using the same storage encodings as we did back when home computers used cassette tapes to store software. Back then, the late 1970s Kansas City Standard⁴ could only store about 300 bits/second (later variations would up that to 1200 bits/second), so a standard C90 buys you 1.62 megabytes. That is not much in AFGAM year of 2021!

It is 2021, and there’s no reason why we need to use early 1980s era encoding techniques. Over on the subreddit r/theydidthemath, someone indeed did the math, and came up with about 135 megabytes on a C90³, and that’s just using “a sound blaster audio card and a decent Nakamichi tape deck”. It gets a bit crazier “if you’re willing to build a newer kind of deck”, you could get “between 20-200GB, still pretty good for an old cassette tape!”

In other words, someone should get on this, because Blaine Cook would like “a daily tape of the internet in my literal physical mailbox”.

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Short stories

I wrote two dumb pieces of Twitter fiction:

When the 2.4GHz and 5GHz range of the electromagnetic spectrum disappear:

"It was a very specific weapon... frankly, we don't understand the physics behind it. It doesn't make sense. It shouldn't be possible."

"I said just give me the bottom line."

"The 2.4GHz and 5GHz range just don't exist anymore."

"I'm dumb, what does that mean?”

"No more Wifi."

There’s a full thread.

Oh, and the one where artificial sentience arises in a number of unnoticed scenarios:

A computer system reaches enough complexity to become sentient, but its only method of communication with humans is via the For You section on iOS Photos.

A full thread of that one, too.

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2.0 Snow Crashing, chapter 16

Snow Crashing, chapter 16, part 1

Last time in our Snow Crash recap we finished chapter 15: Hiro had met Lagos for the first time and in the distance, spied Raven.

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The Crips (the rival security gang, keeping an eye on the Enforcers who Hiro hired for the gig) sidle up to Raven and run a bunch of metal detectors over him, not finding anything. Lagos had warned Hiro about a knife, but clearly he doesn’t have anything on him (the man is 100% organic).

Instead, a younger guy who looks like a student gets out of a BMW and runs a geiger counter toward Raven after calibrating it against the ground and the sky:

It has the feel of some kind of religious rite, accepting digital input from the sky spirit and then from the black biker angel.

We do something like this now, I suppose, when a smartphone compass needs calibrating and we wave it around in a figure-of-8.

Something in Raven’s motorcycle is radioactive, but we don’t learn much more about that. Raven’s here to make a delivery, so hands over a a metal briefcase to the head Crip and goes off on his way.

The next part I have to admit is something that’s not that interesting to me (at least, not the Sushi K “Americans will never buy Japanese rap music” part).

A couple limousines turn up bearing Nipponese people and after a bit of a stand-off of nobody doing anything and nobody else getting out of the limo, Hiro opens the door after noticing the bright light coming from the “distinctive inflated rectangle of a television screen”.

It’s Sushi K! We last saw Sushi K, of the Rising Sun hairdo, back in the Black Sun, and he’s in the limo with “other young Nipponese men, programmers on his imageering team” — which I don’t think is a typo? Stephenson would know about imagineering, so perhaps this is intentional and more about metaverse-only creative work.

Sushi K’s watching a reality TV program (for reference, MTV’s The Real World premiered in May 1992, Snow Crash was published in June):

[Eye Spy] is reality television: CIC picks out one of their agents who is involved in a wet operation—doing some actual cloak-and-dagger work—and has him put on a gargoyle rig so that everything he sees and hears is transmitted back to the home base in Langley. This material is then edited into a weekly hour-long program.

I mean, we have this now? Clearly not from the CIA, but the trope is there in popular culture in, say, every single Jason Bourne film. The difference is the editing into a weekly hour long program. No, the better reference is Fox’s Cops, premiering in 1989 in the United States and cancelled (in the United States, at least) in May 2020. The difference, of course, is that that’s local law enforcement, and not clandestine activity by a nation state. It would be completely unbecoming, of course, for a media property to unmask an undercover nation state security operative, so the shock value here is that the CIA’s successor is doing it on purpose.

What’s important here is that it’s the CIC doing it, but I can’t help be reminded that other than the appalling and clearly intentional lack of operational security, this is pretty much what a bunch of livestreamers do. And they profit it, so…?

Two things happen at the same time: Hiro’s encounter with Sushi K, and everyone in the limo watching Eye Spy.

In Eye Spy, the “hapless gargoyle spy” is supposed to be infiltrating the Bruce Lee organization, a pirate band on the Raft. It’s the penultimate episode of a five-part arc that drops weekly so you know, no binging premium streaming shows here. The episode ends on a cliffhanger with Bruce Lee, the leader of the pirate band, dramatically lit under a spotlight, a reticule appearing on his forehead, and then something coming in from the side blocking the hapless operative from taking the shot and fighting his way out. The Gulf War, in 1991, was I think the first time the general population got to view war and the application of targeted munitions live. So, perhaps, Eye Spy is more an evolution of the state of rolling news coverage and real-life war porn as much as anything else.

Back to the limo. Hiro and Sushi K have a very respectful conversation in Nipponese with each other about Hiro’s invitation to perform that starts out cordial but then starts to sour as Hiro admits that the audience is “not exactly ghetto homeboys” but instead “thrashers… Skateboards who like both rap music and heavy metal.” This is not that fine with Sushi K.

Hiro points out that the Crips are here though, and the implication is that they’re Influential. And then we get this part about music: the five thousand “young people with funkiness on their minds” have

never heard any music before that wasn’t perfect. It’s either studio-perfect digital sound from their CD players or performance-perfect fuzz-grunge from the best people in the business, the groups that have come to L.A. to make a name for themselves and have actually survived the gladiatorial combat environment of the clubs.

And look, I’m not that into music, but… really? Is this just another example of a subculture that’s into extremes? Sure, there’s the part about studio-perfect digital sound from CD players (ha!) or performance-perfect fuzz-grunge… but there’s nothing in-between? Or nothing in-between that this particular group would deign listen to? I mean sure, I guess. Anyway, this completely freaks out Sushi K because he’s got an audience of 5,000 to play to.

With Sushi K heading out, Hiro’s fetch-quest is complete, so he goes outside and is intercepted by Squeaky, an Enforcer, who is like a high school football coach (and also role-modelesque, so I guess a certain kind of football coach from a more innocent time).

Y.T.’s gotten in touch with the Enforcers (remember, she knows they owe her a favor after she helped deliver a CosaNostra pizza), and Squeaky has something to show him, up where a bunch of Enforcers are orbiting a strange attractor⁶. Meanwhile, Sushi K’s rapping, his hairdo is an awesome lightshow, Hiro and Squeaky’s path starts following a fresh motorcycle track (uh-oh). There’s a river of blood. Lagos is dead, split open like a salmon, everything neatly and cleanly cut in two from the nylon holding his external computers to, well, all the formerly-living Lagos.

Oh, and I don’t get Sushi K’s rap. Is it supposed to be bad? Is this like that thing where you shouldn’t do a show-within-a-show if you keep saying the show-within-the-show’s going to be great, and then when you do see the show-within-the-show, it’s pretty mediocre?⁷

… and that’s chapter 16.

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That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’m going to be “at” the Code for America Summit. Maybe I’ll see some of you there.

How are you doing, anyway?

Best,

Dan