s12e17: ... for the mind?
0.0 Context Setting
It’s a sunny Wednesday in Portland, Oregon on 8 June, 2022.
Today: meetings, working sessions, lots of typing, lots of drawing on pretend whiteboards, lots of thinking on the answers to questions like “But what is the real problem, really?” and “What is stopping this thing that people say is important from happening, and could be done about it?“
1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention
The Usborne Book of the 2020s
Last year in a late-night fit of… doing something, I wrote a cynical, dystopian, five-seconds-from-now-and-sideways version of the future based on the wonderful Usborne Book of the Future, and did it in a Twitter thread because I am of course an adrenaline junkie.
Yesterday, I put it on Medium, so it has two chances of being arbitrarily lost when either Twitter or Medium get closed. I imagine it might be marginally easier to read on Medium. So: The Usborne Book of the 2020s, slightly edited, with some typos fixed.
Usborne: please do not sue me. Also if anyone knows anyone at Usborne and whether they might be interested in clearing the rights to the images for me so I can make this a Real Thing, then… help me out?
What is it like to be an app building
Via The Verge1, Taco Bell opened a Taco Bell Defy in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota2. It’s a press release, right, so I’m taking this breathless copy with the requisite optimistic cynicism. The Verge says “the design of the new restaurant is meant to be more mobile order and third-party delivery friendly”, which includes four (four!) drive-through lanes, which somehow reminds me of the whole “if we build more highways/expressways/motorways, we’ll alleviate traffic!” line of thinking. The… concept? But it’s a real thing? prioritizes app orders, so of the three drive-through lanes, only one is for the traditional consumer food interaction experience where you roll down a window and talk to a small box, or even a person.
Caught my attention because: Taco Bell isn’t a monolithic corporate, it’s a franchise, so this concept is a three-way disruptive innovation, one that makes for great case study copy. There’s Taco Bell, of course, but then you’ve got your Forward Thinking Franchise Owner, Border Foods, and then the thing I was really interested in, which is Vertical Works, LLC (itself “powered by” Workshop, a multi-hyphenate design agency, and PD Instore), from whom Taco Bell/Border Foods licensed the design in an orgy of local partnership aimed at busting, nay, exploding in a singularity of flexible collaboration, the existing paradigm of tired fast food experiences.
Look, it is interesting, okay? It’s a compact, space-efficient food order-taking and meal preparation location optimized for digital orders. It’s got a “proprietary vertical lift to transport iconic craveable Taco Bell menu items straight from the kitchen to fans”2 which is totally not a dumbwaiter. Sorry, I did it again.
The next step of course would be to whack a little vertical farming or whatever on top so you’ve got locally produced processed produce, and then maybe some very now drone landing pads.
Also, fans?
Anyway. App buildings! Architecture for… whatever this is, the shiny, RGB version of ghost kitchens! A branded, shiny ghost kitchen! How interesting.
Pixels
Apple’s WWDC is having a one-bit pixel icon challenge and it is very cute and also, you know, Apple kind of relaxing a bit? Of course it is a social media challenge so there’s always that, but even so, when the somewhat charismatic megacorporation in the room subtly eyes a new design aesthetic, some people pay attention.
… for the mind?
Also at WWDC this week Apple announced Apple Pay Later, which is a bit like if someone decided to make a bicycle for the {bank, credit card, wallet, consumer credit financing industry}. There’s this whole thing about Apple services, and it’s easy to focus on their subscription services because that’s what… everyone else’s services businesses are mostly like? But Apple Pay and all its interchange fees and so on combined with its Very Apple User Experience are also services, albeit kind-of backoffice ones that might not feel particularly excitingly… fintech.
But there’s something in “no, you’re not allowed to integrate a browser into your operating system” (which in hindsight turned out to be a bit wrong, which is that of course an operating should have a browser integrated in it, the question is are you allowed to integrate any other ones) but followed up a good (thirty?) years later with “but can I put consumer credit financing in my operating system”.
I mean it is weird, right? Or at least interesting that a consumer credit financing feature (zero interest, zero fee installment plans) are being announced as part of an operating system update.
It feels like there’s gradual waking up across society to the fact that “computers are how modern society works” whether you like it or not, and that traditional vertical regulation doesn’t quite work for the new General Electric-type conglomerates that do everything? We (in tech, I suppose) talk about building moats and aggregation theory and platform theory and so on, and all the while Apple (and increasingly other companies that look like they want to be Apple, or at least agree that following in Apple’s footsteps/direction is a good idea) is off essentially saying “we put computers in things and use computers to do things”, which is very different from “we make computers that you use to do computer things”. Is this just a size thing? Is it that when you’ve got 1.8 billion active devices (iOS devices), or over 3 billion active devices (Android), and the computing infrastructure to support those things that you start casting around and thinking: hey, we kind of figured out how to build, support, maintain and iteratively improve societal-scale computing, so what else should we do? And that’s maybe the thing, which is that when you hit society-scale, like Facebook did when it hit 1 billion MAU, then is it irresistible to start thinking about “well, what kind of problems can we solve at the billion user level? Or the nation state level?”
This of course isn’t a particularly new observation, it’s another restating of: when you have enough users or, er, subjects, I guess, then what kind of power do you have, and are you acting like a state or a government, which some people have been worrying about for long enough, and fewer people have not been thinking about for not nearly long enough.
I mean, look at it this way. Apple could, I don’t know. Airdrop, as it were, a dividend to active iOS users in the way it issues a dividend to shareholders. There’s probably nothing stopping them from doing this (free money!) because what really stops Elon Musk from doing things? And before you know it, you’ve got Apple Universal Basic Income or you’ve got Android Google Income. It wouldn’t be universal, of course, but that’s never stopped branding or marcomm.
Look at it this way: what’s so different than giving people a bunch of Apple Cash or Google Pay credit that you can use at any merchant that accepts credit card payments, versus something like forcibly inserting the creative output of Bono onto you? Like, here’s your universal basic… media dividend?
Who else can do that to a billion people? The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is underfunded as it is and I’m not saying that our techglomerates do anything like the entirety of what the IRS does, lest you think that I’m about to suggest tech companies start “doing what government does”. But they’re certainly acting like they have the ability (and do!) to perform societal tasks at societal scale, even though the implementation isn’t universal, which is what some people thought their government was going to be, or was supposed to be. I suppose this might be one area in which tech companies are taking a “do it iteratively, bit by bit” approach: solve societal problems piecemeal, for specific audiences, which I feel is somewhat different from the private sector’s version of making sure you’ve got a defined market.
I just realized I forgot to write about the tazer drones. “Tazer drones”. Because right now is a bad science fiction novel.
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Okay, that’s it for today. Just over 20 minutes.
How are you doing?
Best,
Dan
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Taco Bell opens its first ‘Defy’ restaurant that prioritizes ordering via app, The Verge, Jasmine Hicks, Jun 7, 2022 ↩
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Taco Bell Defy™ Concept Opens June 7 – One Of The Most Innovative Drive-Thru Experiences Yet, Taco Bell, Jun 6, 2022 ↩↩