February 24, 2022

s11e02: A certain weariness

0.0 Context setting

It's Thursday February 24th, 2022 and here in Portland, Oregon it's been Very Cold and we woke to a slight dusting of snow. I mean, we woke to screamingly excited children who informed us about the slight dusting of snow.

I've been mainly heads down two different strategy projects for one client, one of which has broadly passed from the "what's the strategy, exactly?" phase into "okay, now do it" phase, and the other one is excitedly nearing the "okay, we're excited about this strategy" mark. All of this is to say that I've been drawing lots of things, making lots of presentations and talking a lot.

1.0 Some things that caught my attention

1.1 A certain weariness

So I use Apple Music because I never got into paying for Spotify for my Streaming Music needs. I think I finally started "paying" for Apple Music when (maybe two years ago?) Verizon, my cellphone provider, bundled it in to my plan for however long, presumably as part of Apple's user acquisition strategy and partnerships. Anyway, acquiring users is not the point of this.

The point is this: I have Apple Music on my laptop and my iPhone and my iPad. I have monthly playlists where I just throw all the stuff I listen to obsessively for that month, and update them month by month. This month's, for example, is cleverly called "2022-02" and in folder "2022", and these folders go back to 2015, back when I guess this was all just "iTunes".

Anyway, the playlists are out of sync now. I added something to the 2022-02 playlist on my Mac and it did not show up on my phone. I think this is because something went weird on my Mac and I had to sign out of the Apple Music account, which is an inherited iTunes account and a different email address from my Apple Account which is also an iCloud Account? I also have an Apple One subscription. That's a lot of Apples. Maybe there is a bad one in there, making them all bad.

Here's what I think I need to do to fix this simple playlist syncing issue, and jesus fuck am I tired about it:

• Sign out of Apple Music on my Mac and then sign back in again, triggering a re-download of every single thing that's on the local library
• Sign out of Apple Music on my iPhone and iPad and then sign back in, triggering a similar re-download

But you know what, that's going to take ages. And I'm not convinced it's going to fix things. And it's a fucking hassle. So I am already awfulizing about how doing those two "simple" things isn't going to fix things and so my future decision tree looks a bit like:

• just give the fuck up and my playlists have diverged (but weirdly, not my library?)
• talk to Apple Support

(Actually, I just remembered that one reason why this happened is because iOS Music.app doesn't support folders (never mind Smart Playlists and so on) and something Weird Happened like a weird conflict or, I don't know, race condition between two seemingly identically-named playlists in a folder, and now they're kind of similar but not pointing to the same thing-slash-underlying-list-or-whatever-on-whatever-abstracted-filesystem-powering-whichever-bit-of-iCloud)

And so what do you think I think is going to happen if I talk to Apple Support? They will, most likely, tell me to sign out of Apple Music on all my devices and then sign in again.

And then what happens if that doesn't work?

Well, I could delete the playlist and/or parent folder and then try again, but I tried that already and it didn't work. So, I don't know, I'll get escalated? And someone will try to debug it? But systems are really complex and who can really tell why this is happening?

And this is why I am tired because there is a thing and it is broken and I don't see how it's going to get fixed, and the Proper Way of fixing it is going to take a very long time and potentially not fix it, and this is supposed to be with Apple, who're supposed to have "good" support? But it is also because I have a fair idea of how stupendously complicated and ball-of-twine all of this stuff is, so why bother thinking it could get fixed? I am but one person amongst the panoply of customers contributing to skyrocketing Services Revenue, so, you know, them's the breaks.

So. I'm tired.

Someone of course is going to tell me: well this is what you get for using Cloud Services and that someone is probably Cory Doctorow (hi Cory) and again I will sigh and say Yes, Cory Was Right And I Should Have Listened To Him, When Will I Ever Learn, I Do It To Myself, I Do, et cetera.

1.2 Other things that caught my attention

40 Futures

Jason Tashea has done a thing called 40 Futures¹, which is "a speculative fiction series about the criminal justice system". Here's Tashea explaining it:

For years, I’ve written about technology and its impact on people ensnared by the justice system. As a journalist, I wrote about stories as they happened. As an opinion writer and researcher, I tried to warn against or promote a particular future. However, writing over the past decade, I’ve watched a generation’s most troubling concerns, like algorithmic bias and consumer surveillance, go largely unheeded as our democratic institutions calcified and novel companies treated our rights and privacy with the abandon of a Bourbon Street reveler hunting for more beads.

Which is to say that Tashea has done something super interesting and decided to actually write fiction about future justice systems. This looks super cool!

Synthetic fingerprints

That Cory Doctorow, he turns up everywhere. Here's a 2017 bit from him on Masterprints², which back then were claimed to in theory be synthetic fingerprints that unlock up to 65% of phones. You can read the paper online³.

What happens when you perform in a public space

John Rogers (Leverage!) has a great thread digging into one of the main characters this week who said some stuff about a tv show you like. It's fantastic because he goes into expectations about public-space-as-sufficiently-large-social-media-audience-reach, what those audiences expect and how they react to utterances, the "job" of being a comedian, the responsibility towards an audience's reaction to an utterance, the responsibility of accepting the consequences of that reaction, the intersection of the "job" of a comedian in terms of "doing comedy" when a bunch of people may not be there for comedy or in a context expecting comedy, and just because I wrote that, a whole bit that essentially also describes social media's habit of context collapse. Whew! Anyway, it's good:

https://twitter.com/jonrog1/status/1496163172549816320

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Okay! That was also fifteen minutes! This is also much more doable.

How are you doing? I am tired but mainly because I made a questionable life choice last night. Oh and for the record: I guess, as they say, it's war.

Best,

Dan