s12e32: We choose not to do the harder thing
0.0 Context Setting
It’s Friday, 1 July, 2022 in Portland, Oregon, and we’re about to head out for a camping trip, so I’ll be back next Wednesday.
1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention
1.1 Shorts
SummerFest 2022 is this year’s artisanal Mac software festival, which caught my attention because a) artisanal software is still a thing (I approve!), b) Mac software is still a thing (for what it’s worth), c) there’s a few things in there that look moderately interesting, mainly variations on the “capture your ideas and organize your thinking”, because when will I not want to do that.
Here is a Garfield phone, cleaned up by elicia donze, who does wonderful magical realism art that I super like. Anyway, the thing that caught my attention about the Garfield phone was that apart from having the world’s most useless Garfield phone in the 80s (see, it was from Hong Kong, which uses a different kind of phone wiring from the UK, where we lived, so it was a sort of totally non-functional pop culture objet d’art), it’s also… frivolous? Phones don’t get to be that frivolous these days, it feels. You get a bit of customization with your case, I guess, but until recently, and only at Apple’s allowance, do you get to show a bit of personality with your phone, and by personality, I mean show exactly what kind (not how much or little, but what kind) of taste you have. I don’t know if we’ll ever get, say, the ability to stick Oscar on your iOS homescreen, for example.
One thing, just one thing that would be interesting about, say, a Star Trek Show That Isn’t Set In Starfleet And Is Mainly About Civilians, But Isn’t That Picard Show is the potential for seeing, well, the rest of the universe. The costume designers for the new shows have been knocking it out of the park, especially on Discovery and Strange New Worlds (the latter of which I recommend unreservedly, and would go so far as to describe the latter as a sort-of Space Ted Lasso, such is the extent of the characterisation and acting we’re getting from Captain Pike and the frankly dreamy Space Dad Anson Mount), but come on. Space fashion. Star Trek, if it wanted to, could totally be a place for super awesome fully automated gay space socialism fashion which would be sublimely wonderful, and in a way, just one of the things we’re (possibly wisely) missing out on by not having an adaptation of something from Iain M. Banks’ Culture series. Anyway. Fashion. You get a hint of this in Picard with a bunch of non-Starfleet combadges, which are essentially what phones are now, but super small and with no display. But when tech can be any shape because it can be so small, then those combadges start looking like brooches (which they should!) and, come on, let’s see some awesome accesorising? You don’t get to see this with your Regular Space Military Based Show because duh, it’s in the Space Military and they have rules and standards, goddamnit, like “let’s invent a new uniform for each season of each show”, which we should be totally fine with, because it’s all made up.
1.2 We choose not to do the harder thing
I was trying to figure out what to write about and accidentally came upon something which, on thinking about it, I quite like as an example of what it’s like to be a person with technology.
I am at a car place today. It is a specific kind of car place where you get hitches and stuff installed to your car, or your truck, and it is a super stereotypically male environment. I’m here because we’re getting a hitch installed to our standard issue Pacific Northwest Subaru Outback so that we can put a bike carrier on it and load up our car and cargo box with stuff to go camping, which is all still very new to me because I am British, and my opinion of camping is roughly: but why would I want to be outside, cold, in the rain. This is why we moved to the Pacific Northwest, where for a lot of the year, it is cold, and there is rain. Apart from in the summer, which is now, when it is quite hot and sunny, albeit sometimes tempered with literally poisonous air.
Anyway. I am at this place and I am getting this hitch installed so we can put this bike carrier on, and what would make sense is that I ask these manly men, who all work here and are all friends with each other (you can imagine the scene), that if, after they’ve installed the hitch, whether they’d be able to show me how to stick the bike carrier onto the hitch, because I’ve never done it before. I mean, I’m here, they do this stuff, I could take it all home and try and do it myself, which I have no doubt I would also be able to do.
But, you know, it’s quite hard to ask them? I don’t want to be laughed at, I feel to be honest a little bit uncomfortable in this environment — there is a whole tiktok about I think a guy with a truck and he’s all YEAH TRUCK or something and then his faces crumples and he’s all did I do it right? and it’s obvious that he’s probably not in MAN DUDE box, he’s in LOVABLE MUSIC THEATER GAY box (do not take this as endorsement of boxing people, or even value judgments of those two respective boxes). There’s this whole performance and this whole expectation of expectations laying on here. All of which is to say that I’m quite nervous to ask for help, and ultimately I do end up asking for help by putting on my bumbling British person act. (To be fair, the bumbling British person act totally works, and has totally worked in the midwest. That said, all I know is that it works for me, and I don’t know the counterfactual, which is: does the person I’m talking to even give a shit? See, that’s where this is going).
The tech answer to this, of course, is somewhere along a continuum that includes “watch a YouTube video”, and one extent of which might be near “stick on your AR glasses and watch an animation of how to attach the bike carrier to the hitch”. I am, clearly, overthinking all of this.
But this whole thinking that if I had an app, I could do this without talking to someone is clearly problematic. It would help me avoid an anxious situation, but worst of all, over time, it means I have no opportunity to disconfirm or invalidate my assumptions about other people, in essence allowing fear to keep growing unchecked about the capacity and willingness of others to be altruistic, or even, you know, polite. There is part of me that would rather (of course, why not? An alternative involves a short-term pain of, say, possible rejection/embarrassment) cut a human out of the loop and try to do this on my own.
The thing is, this isn’t completely bad either. Learning how to do things on your own is great! Things that help people learn are also great! I suppose what I’m getting at here is that while there’s tools for removing humans from the loop and increasing self sufficiency (i.e. watch YouTube videos instead of asking for help, use an AR app instead of asking for help), it feels (citation needed, etc) that there aren’t many apps or tools for… the opposite?
I’m going to disagree with myself there and say, ha, no, there are totally tools for the opposite. I could post on NextDoor (ha. ha.) and ask if anyone wants to come around and help me install my hitch. I could join a local Facebook group (ha. ha.) and ask someone there, too. Or I could post on my frankly ridiculous Twitter account on the off-chance that someone in the PDX area who happens to be looking is up for meeting up and having, I don’t know, a hitch-install-party, in the same way that my friends and I used to have OS X install parties when the damn things came on CDs and DVDs.
I suppose another axis of looking at this is that technology right now — consumer technology, stereotpically VC-funded, west-coast mindset, get big and grow technology — is aimed at reducing friction and increasing speed, which I’ve written about before. Reducing friction in general is fine, if you take it to its extreme and reduce it to zero, then nothing in the universe works.
But now I’m thinking about uncomfortable and yet useful friction, or maybe another version of that is long-term useful friction. There are the opportunities for apps to make the thing you’re doing right now faster/easier, and they may well (often? mostly?) involve removing someone else, or other humans, from the equation and implementation. But I don’t think this will work in the long-term, because, like I said, there aren’t really apps that solve a long-term problem or growth issue of “hey, practice talking to people and build connections”. Building connections isn’t a persistently visible user need, say, unless you’re, I don’t know, chronically, debilitatingly, intervention-requiringly severely depressed. At that point, you do get your screens taken away from you.
But task-focussed, outcome focussed apps aren’t going to ever (citation needed) prioritize doing-it-with-a-human-first, because… that’s going to take longer? I mean, what do you want, a background process that continually monitors your foreground apps and pops up and say “it looks like you’re about to disintermediate a human and lose an opportunity to practice making social connections, would you like help with that?” while you’re about to activate an AR view when you happen to be near a bunch of experts in attaching bike carriers to hitches? No, what happened here was that I was able to reflect in the moment and decide to do the slightly more painful thing, which was to value, you know, talking to people, and seeing if they would help me.
Gah.
Obviously this is a matter of degree. Obviously nothing is completely bad and nothing is completely good. But again, the algorithm isn’t neutral, it does what humans want it to do, and if humans are good at taking the path of least pain (which again, a bunch of people would argue makes sense, from that sometimes questionable position of evolutional psychology), then we’re going to keep doing the least-painful, least-growing thing, and make that easier and easier and easier, until…?
Okay, that’s it for today, and that’s it for the long weekend. I’ll see you on the other side, on Wednesday.
I hope you have a great weekend, and in America, at least, I hope we find a way to celebrate what it means to have independence, and how to protect it.
How are you doing?
Best,
Dan
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