Are my eyes really blue?

About five months ago I first kicked around the notion of “distributed servantry.” Then, last week, I heard a couple of very sharp women discussing how the future of retail was in the experience, rather than just the purchase of goods, and they confirmed for me that this was the original department store model in the 1800s. It wasn’t about piling it high and stacking it cheap, it was about the personal shopping and the individual attention to Madame’s interest and curiosity and the refreshments and possibly spa treatments.

And this then kicked me back to the aforementioned distributed servantry. We wouldn’t think twice about trying to hire a cook, a chauffeur, a lady’s maid – but Doordash and Uber and Taskrabbit allow us to do just that. The running gag for years has been “Silly Con Valley invents ways to do what your mother doesn’t do for you anymore,” but the telling bit in that is that in the past, ‘all mod cons’ meant you had assorted modern conveniences to make it easier for you to do the dishes, do the laundry, whatever. Contemporary distributed servantry isn’t about making it easier for you to do these things, it’s about making it easier for someone else to do it for you.

And at that point, we’ve established a split between Eloi and Morlocks. Worse, in a way, because servants had to be housed and fed and generally provided for. Your Fiverr person or Lyft driver is out of your life forever soon as the app closes. No problem. Except they aren’t an employee of the little glowing square on your phone either, so it’s not like they’re guaranteed benefits or even a proper living wage. Permanent hustle, always scuffling to keep up, and the perversion of the Protestant work ethic means that that in America, any leisure moment is a moral fault if you don’t have enough money to enjoy it. 70 hours a week is “worth ethic,” 80 hours a week and loving it gets crossed out for 90, and a woman giving birth in the car-share she’s driving to make ends meet is a story of heroic dedication rather than Dickensian horror.

This all works because of a dirty little secret that a lot of people would rather you did not look too closely at. And that is this: the fundamental ethos of the 21st century GOP is exactly the same as the fundamental ethos of Silly Con Valley, and it’s “I GOT MINE, FUCK YOU.” It is the normalization of the absence of empathy. It’s the moral position that it’s okay not to know there’s other people. Hashtags and pieties are a perfectly good atonement for “we accidentally the election” while the tools of social media continue to feed the Nazis, and “the best cure for free speech is more free speech.” Just like the best cure for a hurricane is more water. Racism and sexism coupled to weaponized ignorance and pushed through the internet as a force multiplier might have bent an American presidential election, but holding Twitter and Facebook to account in any way would be bad for the First Amendment. That’s the kind of thinking that will ultimately cost us freedom of speech, but if it’s not a Y Combinator problem, then it’s not a problem here.

It’s disappointing, because from 1999, it looked like the 21st century was going to be a new and exciting and promising place. Then something went horribly, terribly wrong – and you can see the dry run for glorifying ignorance and dismissing knowledge and experience happen all through the Bush campaign coverage of 2000 – and we wound up with eight years of America being consumed by the stupid, followed by eight years of America fighting like hell to stay consumed in the face of reality. And instead of going forward to the 21st, we’re going back to the 19th. We just have apps now.

Ultimately, the thing is this: at some point the Google Now-like service has to be something that does all its data mining and processing locally on the phone itself. Independent or at least agnostic of service provider, able to get useful info out of your work email without compromising your security in doing so and able to leverage whatever personal email provider you use without relying on Google’s technology.  In a way, that’s already present in iOS – for instance, if you get email with a tracking number from UPS or FedEx and tap on that tracking number, you’ll see “Track Shipment” as an option, irrespective of whence came the email.  Apple Data Detectors – a technology that Apple first rolled out in 1997 then largely ignored until two or three years ago  - can do that right now, already parsing out addresses to be sent to the address book (or soon to Maps) or dates to be sent to the calendar.  So the technology is there and it doesn’t take much to suggest that it could be extended to include things like flight confirmation numbers or  the like.

All of this is a very roundabout way of saying that I fully expect an Apple watch before long, and I expect it to rely on the functionality of iOS 7 to deliver a thin but satisfying slice of data to a glorified wrist-bound FitBit.  And in doing so, obviate the need for the phone itself to do a lot of the heavy lifting that currently makes it difficult if not impossible to use the iPhone itself as your fitness/presence tracker (see: the battery-slaughter of Saga or Human or Moves).  Anything that can be staffed out to something with its own separate battery is good for your phone.

So now we wait.  Every man his own Big Data.  It’s coming.

- 4 Sept 2013

I think I might have been onto something. Four years later, this is more or less what Apple is pitching with CoreML.The promise is that all the processing of your data, all the heavy lifting of sorting through your information to find the patterns and tease out the useful interactions, can be done ENTIRELY on the phone without ever exposing your information to offsite processing. Do I buy it? Maybe. The fact of the matter is, though, Apple is the only vendor in this space explicitly touting the privacy and security of their solution. Amazon pays it lip service, and Google…well, Google has never made any secret of the fact that you’re the product, not the customer. (Another reason I try to avoid their products at all costs, and mostly succeed – except for occasional use of YouTube or text messages to a Google Voice number, or the old Moto X experiment.)

The problem is, there’s just so much that goes to the cloud anyway now. It’s not just storage – Apple had the 100 MB iDisk product as part of the original iTools in 2000, which is probably why Steve Jobs dismissed Dropbox as a feature rather than a product – it’s processing. Try using Siri offline. Doesn’t work. That external processing is mandatory for parsing voice commands. Signal is only slightly above battery in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Modern Needs. And then there’s the whole bit about how the Big Four kind of have you stuck. Only Apple isn’t really doing much with services beyond what is needed for independence from the others for email and music and the line – Google, Amazon and Facebook all have the ability to reconstruct fairly detailed profiles of your interest and behaviors.

And that’s before taking into account the fact that their information is probably not dissimilar to what the big credit bureaus have, and Equifax just demonstrated how well protected that is. The majority of American adults now have their golden-ticket personal ID out somewhere for the use of nefarious types, to the point that we may have to institute credit-freeze-by-default as a security measure. Which they don’t want, obviously, because they make their money providing your information to others. And before saying “that’s different”, consider that the use of Facebook and other social media in credit ranking is already out there.

We’ve poured our lives into the Internet with no thought of security. Facebook in particular got away with the greatest bait and switch in history, offering a walled garden in exchange for your real identity before dynamiting the walls. Throw in the whole “we accidentally the election” and Fuckerberg deserves to be in Gitmo trading cigarettes, not acting like nobody notices him running for President.  Too many companies have spent too much time and made too much money off our data without protecting it. A genuinely populist movement would be pushing back against that. Hard. But we don’t have populism in this country, just redneckery dressed up as populism by the kind of assholes who assume that “people” means “white.”

Meanwhile, get as far off Google and Facebook as you can. Maybe you can keep secure and unprobed. I doubt it, though.

It’s basically impossible to argue that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is past its sell-by date. Written at a time without standing armies, when the militia consisted of a state mandate of authority and training over every able-bodied man with a gun, and at a time when a gun was something you could fire once a minute if you were lucky, when a large city was measured in the tens of thousands – it’s almost impossible to make a case for ownership of military-style weapons in a 21st century urban environment.

After all, what is the point? Sporting use? Most states won’t let you use the NATO-standard 5.56mm cartridge for hunting because it’s too light, so that AR-15 clone has to scale up to something heavier, and besides, how many shots do you need to take at the deer without reloading? Two? Three? Unless that deer manages to return fire, anything over five is bullshit. OK, so how about the ever-popular “bullet box” as last resort of freedom? The United States has a standing army, and it’s huge even before you add in the Navy, Air Force and Marines. Consider things like Ruby Ridge, Waco, and contemplate the words “tactical airpower”. The people who want to need the guns don’t seem to grasp the level of asymmetry a modern government can bring to bear. Don’t forget, at the end of Red Dawn, all the boys were dead.

Yes, there is a case for sporting weapons and certain personal-defense options. The necessary tools for that basically peaked around the mid-20th century, and they’re just as effective as they ever were. (The sidearm of Marine Force Recon, for instance, was designed originally in 1911.) Time was, you could enforce the law just fine with a heavy revolver and a pump shotgun. Probably still could, probably still should in a lot of cases. But in the last fifty years, the net result of the Second Amendment has been to flood the country with endless semi-automatic weapons and bottomless magazines of ammo that have as their intended function the killing of troops on a battlefield. The time to stand up for the Second Amendment was when people were ignoring the “well-regulated militia” part of it and using the rest to legalize M4-geries and SKS imports and 100 rounds in a clip.

This is of concern not because of the Second Amendment, but because of the First.

The First Amendment absolutists are coming out of the woodwork in defense of Nazis. White supremacists, anti-Semites, racists and bigots have somehow managed to become a larger, louder, more cohesive force in American life than in the last fifty years combined, and almost 100% of that can be put down to the use of social media and electronic communication. Infamously, the first email spam I ever received – over twenty years ago – was some sort of white nationalist screed, at a time when it really took some effort to deploy spam over email rather than just saturation-bombing USENET groups. In the ensuing decades – and especially with the rise of Facebook and Twitter – it’s become incredibly easy to find like-minded people, and in a lot of cases, to rally them to attack unlike-minded people with the same tools. 

The “freedom of speech” argument in the First Amendment was made at a time when speech was just that: speech. Or written letters. Or published books or newspapers. You had to go pick up the printed matter and read it, or speak to the person, and if they wanted to force their speech on you, they had to follow you around yelling at you – at which point, things being how they were in the 18th Century, you could probably take a swing at them and be just fine. Now, though, technology means that if you are on social media at all, it is possible for literally thousands of people to bombard you with their speech 24/7/365, and your options are either to get offline or make a career out of blocking them. As it stands, most of these companies – Twitter and Facebook most egregiously – have gone to great lengths to paint themselves as “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” and view this kind of amorphous perpetual harassment as merely the price of doing business.

Which is insane.

Back in the day, that kind of harassment was simply impossible. If a person comes up to you and starts spewing racist invective, they’re right in front of you to confront and deal with and be known to you. Now, the opportunity cost for tens of thousands of people to target you, personally and directly, is effectively nil. If it has been possible for the entire population of Philadelphia in 1787 to materialize in Ben Franklin’s house, masked and anonymous, to abuse him as a Francophile libertine pervert who spent all his time laying pipe on old broads, and vanish as soon as he looked at them only to continue the moment his head turned, I suspect there would have been a slightly different conversation around the Bill of Rights.

If you want to defend free speech, fine. If you want to say the cure for abuse of free speech is more free speech, fine. But you’d better have a plan for allowing free speech without facilitating abuse, harassment, and physical violence, and mitigating them when they do happen. The alternative is the risk that after years and years of a surfeit of utter libertarianism-without-consequence bullshit, the First Amendment will prove itself as obsolete as the Second.

Tweetie was the first iPhone Twitter client worth having. Loren Brichter started out on the iPhone team at Apple, and after it shipped, he started his own company and produced Tweetie – which included a landmark innovation. By scrolling to the top of the page and continuing to scroll, the “rubber-band-“ effect would do more than just be a visual marker: it would actually trigger a reload. All you had to do was keep flicking, and you could constantly reload the Twitter stream to see new content. And just to put too fine a point on it, if you dragged far enough, you got a sort of slot-machine wheel that would pop up three birds.

Loren’s on-the-nose Easter egg has come to sum up the Twitter experience for me. This time last year, I had six distinct Twitter accounts with their own functions and purposes. Of those, one is defunct and another is rarely touched. Two of the others have been deleted outright. I have a “public” account, a “professional” account that links to my real identity, and a “personal” account which is locked down tight.

But more to the point, I don’t use them as much. When I blew away those two Twitter accounts, with them went a couple hundred mutual followers and the bulk of my day-to-day socialization. I rarely do much with any account but the “personal” one, which has maybe two dozen followers, and while I like being able to keep up with people, it’s such a firehose of everything in the world I want to avoid that barely a day goes by where I don’t have to log out and quit the browser to try to forestall going back and looking again and again and getting even more out of sorts.

Twitter really is the slot machine, the gameification of attention – at any given moment, if I load Twitter and scroll through it, I have roughly a 20% chance of seeing something I’ll be glad I saw, a 30% of seeing something I’ll be angry I saw, and a 50% chance of something of no interest. That’s bad arithmetic, and it’s happened even after weeding down two or three times to get to a tightly curated private group with only the things I’m likely to want to see. And the problem there is – you can’t even control for those things, because there’s so much to be outraged about, there’s no escaping it short of tapping out altogether. People speak ominously about a “filter bubble” and yes, it’s problematic when people only get a drumbeat of their preferred propaganda rather than any sort of factual news, but at some point you have to balance being informed against being driven insane. Right now, Twitter is a piss-poor tool for achieving that balance, and that may be sullying the good name of piss.

But then, Twitter – and Facebook, which I resolutely refuse to use on a more than bimonthly basis – have a lot to answer for in general. Of which.