s2e08: 2015 (1); A Manifesto Walks Into A Website; Stuff About The Web And Post Capitalism Again
by danhon
0.0 Sitrep
1.0 2015 (1)
It’s 2015.
[0] Skipping church? Facial recognition software could be tracking you – The Washington Post
[1] Churchix Facial Recognition Software for Event Attendance
[2] After Jeep Hack, Chrysler Recalls 1.4M Vehicles for Bug Fix | WIRED
[3] Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It | WIRED
[4] State Of Georgia Sues Carl Malamud For Copyright Infringement For Publishing The State’s Own Laws | Techdirt
[5] Brock Winstead on Twitter: “So is Amazon basically a server farm with a gift shop now?”
[6] Amazon Crushes Q2 Results as AWS Growth Skyrockets | Re/code
[7] The Verge’s web sucks – blog.lmorchard.com
[8] News | NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
[9] Is This a Selfie? – The New York Times
[10] Q: So, Andy, who owns the copyright to DeepDream images? A: Uh. That’s a good…
2.0 A Manifesto Walks Into A Website
Okay, first: hey, guys! Let’s do a manifesto ad but instead of making a :90, let’s make a website!
And: Hey, what if we did a Snowfall[1] but for saying how awesome the iPhone was?
(Note: Snowfall is now two years and seven months old.)
I’ll just do those two. I’m sure you can come up with more amongst yourselves.
Oh wait. Here’s one more, and a rare instance of me in-lining an image: why there’s nothing quite like responsive design (and I even changed the user-agent to Safari iOS 8.1)
And let’s not talk (ok, total lie, we’re talking about it) the weird tone of voice in the calls to action at the end of the experience. Yes, I said experience, because people will totally talk about this as an Experience with a capital E in just the same way that Snowfall was an Experience with a capital Snowfall. No, let’s not talk about “Awesome, I want one” or “So, how do I switch?” let’s just talk about the fact that the buttons are weirdly sized.
Ngggggh brand advertising on the interwebs. You know what was good? Shot on iPhone. That was good. This is just masturbatory copy. It’s annoying because it’s not the *worst* manifesto, it’s annoying because it’s a mediocre manifesto. It’s annoying because it’s long where it doesn’t need to be, because it’s Apple experimenting with a tone of voice that it hasn’t really used before that feels more like someone trying to be down with the kids and showing how cool they are by launching a worldwide always on radio station or giving everyone a free copy of the new U2 album. This, I think, is squarely and firmly in the uncanny valley of manifestos.
But, you know, we’ve got a new Apple now. Steve’s gone, everyone’s getting to try new things (which is good! Trying new things is good!), but let’s just say that it’s my humble opinion that by increasing quantity (which demonstrably has happened – Apple is now running campaigns when it doesn’t have anything *new* to say, which means they’re advertising and producing communications outside of relevant product launches or updates) they’ve missed the bar on quality.
And what was the brief, anyway? Find a really long-winded way to talk about *everything* that’s in the iPhone and why only the iPhone can be the iPhone?
Really, I think they should’ve just made a :90.
Meanwhile, my Apple TV feels like it’s getting alzheimer’s and I’m having to reboot it more and more often.
[0] Apple – iPhone – Why there’s nothing quite like iPhone.
[1] Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek – Multimedia Feature – NYTimes.com
3.0 Stuff About The Web And Post Capitalism Again
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know how we get from here to there. One of the devil-in-the-detail questions is always: yes, well, it would be *nice* to live in a socialist utopia like the Culture or (if you ignore some/most of the more troublesome bits) the United Federation of Planets during one of its peacetime eras, but there does seem to be a remarkable lack of detail in the plan for how you get from here to there, almost as if there are gnomes and underpants involved. Sure, it’s nice to say that the Culture is decentralised because every Ship and Orbital contains everything that’s needed to make the Culture again, but that’s a bit handwavey. Also, it’s fiction, so it doesn’t count. A fictional socialist utopia.
—
ANYWAY.
It’s 9:20pm on a Friday and I don’t have to go to Washington, DC next week, which is good, because I have other things to do.
Have a good weekend,
Dan