Are my eyes really blue?

What the FBI wants Apple to do isn’t so much opening the back door as it is deactivating the alarm and taking the deadbolt and burglar bars off the front door.  They are asking to disable the functions that wipe the phone after 10 bad tries with a password, and make it possible to enter the PIN via electronic means (currently you can only enter the PIN via the touchscreen, not via any sort of external keyboard or other device). Basically they want to make it easier to brute-force the phone, which – if the suspect used any sort of complex password rather than a 4- or 6-digit numeric PIN – may or may not even let them in anytime soon. 

More to the point, despite the FBI’s disavowal of any interest beyond this one phone, other law enforcement agencies in the US are lining up to have Apple do that voodoo to phones they have. And so we go sledding down the slippery slope. You don’t want to know how many demands like this China or Russia are likely to make. And even so, a bare majority of the American public is siding with the FBI, because A TERRISS. It’s the same reasons that Fast Eddie Snowden’s revelations made no impact outside of the EFF offices – the public takes for granted that technology companies can do whatever they want and cares about privacy not at all, especially so long as law enforcement jumps up and down yelling LOOK A TERRISS.

Apple’s going to take this to the rack – they have the money, they can hire the best and bloodthirstiest lawyers (and have already retained master criminal now trying to get into heaven Ted Olsen), they can pay contempt fines and legal fees with what Tim Cook found in the couch cushions at lunch – but ultimately it may not matter, because Uncle Sam has got the hydrogen bomb and nobody’s going to privilege privacy and personal security over O GOD A TERRISS, not in this administration or any one to come – simply because Republicans don’t believe in it and Democrats are terrified of what would happen if another 9/11 happened on their watch (not that having violated the privacy of a million people would buy them an inch of slack with the GOP, but so it goes). 

And of course Donald Trump is now advising people to boycott Apple – even as he continues tweeting from an iPhone. Personally, this makes me want to run out and buy the notional so-called iPhone 5SE the day it ships, whether I need it or not. But that’s for another time.

The last couple of posts have led me to think about a few things.  For one, just how godawful the current crop of tech bros are – I haven’t decided yet whether this generation is godawful or whether social media has made it easier to see how godawful they are, but you can check out this quiz and see for yourself how it’s been lately.  Note especially that this is all more or less since 2013, which is about the time I started to feel like there was something very wrong with this place (actually that was more toward summer-fall 2012, but anyway).

Now consider my oft-repeated remark about how the smartphone crossed the finish line in 2013 with the original Moto X and the 64-bit, TouchID-equipped iPhone 5S. I hadn’t really thought about it, but how many of the tech things I rely on in my normal life have come along since then? Stuff like MarsEdit and WordPress for this very blog. Or Twitter and Instagram, the principal tools of my social media. Or Facebook and Tumblr, equally important to other people. Or iTunes, or the iTunes Music Store, or podcasting, or podcasting apps, or RSS (which has arguably gone backward, no thanks to Google, of which yadda yadda), or DVRs, or WatchESPN and HBOGo, or tools like Evernote or Foursquare or the like. In fact, I would argue that the only truly new thing in the last three years that I rely on, on a daily basis, is Slack.

What are we waiting on? The Apple Watch and its Android-based counterparts exist, yes, but even after six months I could certainly get by without it on my arm. Handy? Sure. Useful? Sometimes. Necessary? Not at all, and it’s one more thing to worry about charging. Wearable technology topped out with the Fitbit and hasn’t budged that much. Internet of Things? Not happening yet, for obvious reasons – who needs a thermostat or home security camera that keeps calling back in to Shenzen? If I had to guess, the biggest innovation to come down the pipeline in the last couple of years is that the United States has finally separated hardware from service in mobile telephony (largely because the phone part is ancillary and the “cell companies” are now mobile data companies).

But Apple is largely doing incremental stuff.  Google is doing even less – all the money is going on pie-in-the-sky moonshots whose principal purpose is to clog traffic around El Camino Real and Shoreline. Facebook has only become more annoying, Twitter has only become more like Facebook, a new social media app washes up on shore and out to sea again in a single afternoon. Uber has blown up – as you would expect of any company that gets literally billions of dollars shot out of a cannon without showing a profit or going public – but still exists in regulatory and legal limbo that could decapitate it before it even has to mark its valuation to market (and no, I don’t think Uber is more valuable than General Motors), while a million other companies try to be “Uber but for X” and hope against hope that they too can scoop pots of Y Combinator-flavored subsidy capital via regulatory arbitrage.

Maybe that’s why this current crop of tech bros makes me see purple with rage and want to walk up and down Market breaking teeth with a ball bat. Steve Jobs succeeded despite being a dick. Larry Ellison became a billionaire in spite of a defective personality. Tony Stark is a fictional character. None of those guys put a dent in the universe because they were assholes, they did it even though they were assholes. These assholes are making a post hoc ergo propter hoc error, and never mind a dent – most of them can’t make a scratch.

The FBI wants Apple to backdoor the phone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple doesn’t want to. The tech industry is (slowly, reluctantly) lining up behind Apple. Various elected officials are, predictably, lining up behind the FBI because A TERRISS. And the whole thing is being driven by the All Writs Act of 1789, about the bluntest possible instrument for such a thing, because there doesn’t appear to be any governing black-letter law (not that there wouldn’t be given the opportunity, because A TERRISS).

For starters, read Ben Thompson’s take, which covered everything of consequence about this. What Apple is being asked to do is rewrite the operating system to remove security features – they are literally bring asked to remove the erasure failsafe and more easily facilitate brute-force attacks. And the judge – who gives every appearance of being another technological illiterate – thinks that you can somehow rewrite a phone’s OS in such a way that it only works on that phone, which is risible at best and disqualifyingly stupid at worst.

Here’s the problem: Ed Earl Brown doesn’t get this at all. Ed Earl wants Apple to do like Donald Trump said and cut the phone open so we can get THA TERRISS.  Ironically, if the FBI had said anything about unified national serial-number tracking for semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the shooting, Ed Earl would be pissing peach seeds and screaming about his freedoms, but then, we don’t look in on Ed Earl because he’s bright, we look in on him because he’s typical.

Apple has been building its brand over the past year on security. In a world where the Google model reigns, and everything is free at the point of use in exchange for being data-mined and advertised against, Apple is committed to an obscure and archaic business model in which goods and services are exchanged for cash on the fucking barrelhead. What the FBI is asking Apple to do amounts to an uncompensated taking: weaken your system and expose it to vulnerability, thus undermining your unique selling point, compromising your goodwill in the marketplace and forcibly gainsaying your previous commitments around security, in exchange for…well, as far as I can tell, in exchange for fuck-all. 

And it’s the purest essence of slippery slope.  Once Apple can be made to cut the phone for the FBI, they’re exposed in any country in which they do business, most especially China. Once the technology exists, they will be asked to exploit it – repeatedly. That’s why the FBI is doing this now, off the back of San Bernardino – getting any more information is a bonus; the real point is leveraging A TERRISS to get them the precedent of a back door into iOS, or anyone else’s mobile operating system, whenever they require it – and thereby to possibly prevent Apple from locking the back door in future.

I think the best hope for Apple is that this goes to the Ninth Circuit, where a judge with no fucks to give tells the FBI to go shit in a hat, and a divided Supreme Court defaults to letting it stand. In most other respects, I don’t see a win here for Apple, because we have established over and over and over again that Ed Earl Brown doesn’t give a flying fuck about privacy or surveillance or anything like it because THE TERRISS, just as long as they don’t touch his cheap-shit Chinese AK clone.

Fortunately, when you’re the biggest country in the world, the money and the resources are there to fight this thing as far as it can go, and I have no doubt Apple will do so. Donald Trump can say anything he likes, but Apple could buy and sell Donald Trump with a fraction of its cash reserves and have enough left over to buy all 32 NFL teams, so this fight will go as far as Tim Cook feels like taking it. And if there’s one thing you should never underestimate, it’s the caliber of bloody-mindedness an Auburn fan who grew up gay in Alabama is capable of.

War Damn AAPL, Tim.

Yet another young white startup founder has reacted in horror that a modern urban environment has a problem with homelessness. And reacted in horror that people somehow found his remarks objectionable, as if begging for capital on Kickstarter was somehow morally superior to begging for subsistence on Market Street and not just a matter of degree and Maslow. It’s of a piece with the other shitbags who seem to surface once a year – the Peter Shih and Greg Gopman types who are appalled that their hip downtown Disneyland is actually a real city with real problems that aren’t solved by companies that get tax breaks so they can come up with new ways to try to get nudes from coeds.

Honestly, I wonder if the continuing tech bro problem isn’t the inevitable result of kids who never have to face real problems. Grow up in a nicely-coddled bubble, head to Stanford (but I repeat myself) and then have money dumped in buckets on whatever stupid idea you have…and when it goes bust, get more buckets dumped on you, because failure is now some kind of badge of honor. Ten years ago, I defined a charmed life as “freedom from the consequences of your actions” and in a world where your mother will descend like a fucking Navy SEAL on a fast-rope to argue that you deserved better than a B+ in handwriting, it’s easy to see how the bros get like this in San Francisco, or on Reddit, or in any sort of shared environment (looking at you, Twitter).  When nothing bad can happen, and the worst is that you’ll have to work for someone instead of gulping down sweet sweet Y Combinator money, you don’t even have to acknowledge that other people exist.

That’s probably why I see that thing about “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” and want to throw a brick through the window. Because I’d teleport to London and drink a Guinness. But guess what? You can fail. Failure is a real thing that real people have to content with, and sometimes it means worse things than having to get your friend’s frat brother’s dad to cough up another angel round. Sometimes it means changing careers, sometimes changing states, sometimes losing your car, or your house, or your loved ones. Fear of failing – fear of real consequences – is how you keep from doing stupid shit. It’s how you achieve self-reliance. It’s what you do when your folks aren’t holding a net under you in case you go boo-boo.

This sort of thing is the result of permanent adolescence (and it’s not lost on me that this clown’s essay was written at about the sophistication level of a ninth grader writing a theme on What I Saw In The Big City). Maybe the biggest part of growing up is knowing that there are other people, that there are rules and limits in a society, and that getting along means not taking a huge public shit on people less fortunate than you. It means that we have to stop treating “founder and CEO” as if it means any more than “President of the Backyard Mutant Avenger Club,” because it doesn’t. The guys behind the counter slinging pizza or tacos, the bus and train operators keeping things moving, the woman who makes sure the trash isn’t overflowing your shared kindergarten table after hours when you’re not there – these people are every one of them far more important to the function of this society than the “founder CEO” of an investor-owned pre-IPO server management company that doesn’t clear seven figures of revenue a year.

These swine think this town and this valley rightfully belong to them. What are you prepared to do?

Twitter was born on the phone. The shortcode was 40404 to text in a tweet, and the very 140 character limit was based on the 160 characters available for SMS so that you could use commands like ‘d username where the hell are you’ (why you wouldn’t just text in that situation, I don’t know). In fact, when the iPhone first arrived in 2007, it’s arguable that Twitter was one of the original killer apps, not least because it’s something that translated easily to the simplified web interface of a 480×320 screen. For the longest time (read: before they artificially limited access to the API), Twitter apps were the playground for new iOS developers; features as important as pull-to-refresh had their start in Twitter apps.

And all the while Facebook foundered. There were SMS features with Facebook, there was a rudimentary web interface and a succession of horrible apps (to this day, deleting the Facebook application from your iPhone is generally regarded as an easy way to recover 10% of your daily battery usage) and the abortive Facebook Phone (a cheap Android with Facebook as its US and horrible pricing).  I’ve seen people refer to Twitter more times than I can count as “the friends who live in your phone”, something I’ve never ever heard said of Facebook.

And yet.

Facebook might have won in the long run because it went for people who didn’t have smartphones. While Twitter was on a growing mobile platform, Facebook was on the PCs of everyone’s mother. Everyone was using it at work. It’s been almost six years ago since I argued in this very space that Facebook was the new AOL and wanted to be, and sure enough, it’s now famous for AOL-caliber penetration and discourse. Facebook is shorthand in the Valley for “your racist aunt sending you Donald Trump graphics with lies Snopes debunked two years ago”, but out there in the wider world, Facebook may as well be the Internet.

And this is what Twitter is chasing, to its detriment. 140 character limit originally defined by SMS? About to go. The system of shorthand that evolved from within the user base itself (RTs, dot-cites, the very @ itself)? Now built-in, in a fashion that isn’t even consistent from website to mobile site to mobile app. Even the straightforward linear timeline is going away, no matter how much Jack Dorsey protests, because just giving you your own personal firehose in order is less ad-friendly than mining the stream and percolating up things that make for better traffic and ad impressions, never mind the loss of a linear narrative.

Twitter is brilliant in its simplicity, because it was a dumb app and a dumb protocol. I described it at the dawn of time as “blast texting” and given that SMS/iMessage is my primary social network these days, that isn’t far wrong. I’ve been making use of it since 2007 and in the simplest form, with the fewest followed people, it’s quite handy (even if my more populated accounts always seem to make things worse at some level; the Vanderbilt-related one…but that’s another story for another time). But the more they make it like Facebook, which I abjured the regular use of years ago, the less valuable it becomes.  Once again, not everything has to be the market leader, but in Silly Con Valley in 2016, nobody knows how to do anything else.

And so Twitter chases the least common denominator, while I try to figure out how to persuade my friends to consider alpha.net or Peach.

Antonin Scalia was the intellectual firepower of conservatism on the Supreme Court for thirty years, for better or worse. The phrase “evil genius” springs to mind, as his jurisprudence and perspective reflected both in equal measure; while he could be surprisingly forward thinking on issues of net neutrality and castle-doctrine privacy, something – perhaps the intense Catholic devotion, perhaps just age – prevented him seeing the individual lives behind sweeping arguments against women, against gay people, against the criminally accused (not to deny him his scathing and correct judgement in Hamdan). Ironically, his closest friend on the court was his ideological foil, Ginsburg – perhaps because game recognize game, possibly because when you’re one of nine demigods up on the Olympus of American jurisprudence, there are few others who understand what it’s like up there. 

But he’s gone now, and as predicted, the GOP is closing ranks to argue that Obama should not be allowed to send a nominee to the Senate, despite years of precedent to the contrary. If it were the day after Election Day, and a new President was already elected, then absolutely, sit on things for the two months and change until the new candidate is sworn in. But we are almost a year out from Inauguration Day for the 45th President, and the idea that Obama should be obligated to shut his administration down early is beyond risible. Then again, in a word of perjury-trap impeachment and government shutdown over the debt ceiling and potential default and a President elected when another candidate had more of the popular vote, it’s pretty clear that precedent and norms mean nothing to the modern GOP. That the party of the Confederacy should argue that the first black President deserves three-fifths of a term, to quote numerous Twitter wags, is hardly suspending by this point. 

Because this is a huge pivot point. If Obama gets to do his duty, any candidate who gets through will replace Anthony Kennedy as the pivot point, and for the first time since God knows when, the Court will have a majority of Democratic nominees. (Thurgood Marshall joined in 1967 and no Democrat President got a nomination again until 1993; since 1980 Republicans have named 7 members to Democrats’ 4). The stakes for this election have just skyrocketed, and that may not be to the benefit of the GOP if the Democrats can make their voters aware of the consequences. 

House rules: everyone gets safe passage across the river. There will be plenty of time tomorrow. But for today, I would note that in 1986, Scalia was put on the court by a 98-0 vote after hearings that went like shit through a goose, largely because of the lengthy and rancorous elevation of Rehnquist to Chief Justice immediately before. I would argue that putting Scalia on the court was a substantially more consequential move, which as Chuck Berry would say goes to show you never can tell. 

As it turns out, driving an iconic Silicon Valley heritage corporation into the ground and then running a spectacularly incompetent GOP campaign for Senate that loses during a Republican wave election doesn’t rally voters to support your candidacy for President of the United States. So Carly Fiorina is out, along with Chris Christie (too Yankee) and Rand Paul (too glibertarian and too weird) and…who’s left at this point? Kasich (too unknown, too occasionally not nuts), Carson (too hopelessly unqualified and weird), Gilmore (one term as governor which ended in 2001 and you’re going to run for the White House NOW?), Bush (too Bush), and of course the Glimmer Twins, the beautiful duo, Trump and Cruz.  A hairdo like an onion loaf and a face like a fist. One tabloid star who thinks the White House is an entry-level job and has not the faintest idea how politics works, and one God-bothering Texan  who is universally reviled by his elected peers and has not the faintest relationship with the truth. 

Normally, this would be a layup for the Democrats, especially with the economy in not utterly ghastly condition and gas prices creeping down.  But on that side, it’s either a seventy-something self-described socialist who gets the kids fired up with things that are patently impossible to pass, or…Hillary.  I feel better about Hillary than I did eight years ago, but not much – I do think she learned from some of her mistakes (although with Mark Penn supposedly in the mix again, I think the ones she didn’t learn from will be more telling) and I think she has one big advantage (if you can call it that): she has been the most reviled, hated, slandered, and thoroughly put-upon woman in politics for the last twenty-five years, and it won’t make a difference if her enemies double-dog hate her, everything is pretty much out there already. The downside is that the Washington press has never liked her (or her husband), which is a big part of what helped Obama along, and the fact that…she’s been around for a quarter-century, which is how an old Jewish dude from Vermont can suddenly be au courant with the youth vote.

My big fear, as always, is that like Occupy Wall Street, Bernie will bring out a tidal wave of youth support…and when he doesn’t win the nomination, the wave breaks and his followers go back to whatever they were doing instead of getting behind Hillary. Look, this isn’t like the old days. The worst candidate the Democrats can put up is still better than the best one the GOP can offer, because if the GOP wins, they have the White House and Congress and there is no safety catch on the United States of Alabama. And a lot of people are saying “well with a GOP Congress Hillary won’t be able to get any more through than Bernie!” It’s not about that anymore.  It’s not about bringing around the progressive Jerusalem. It’s about keeping the Confederates from working their will.  At this point, we’re voting for a Democrat to be the finger in the dike, preventing the redneck flood. You can’t expect any more. That’s all they can be, until redistricting and demographics and hopefully the long slow arc of the universe bend things back around toward a vision of politics that isn’t grounded in Dixie in 1968.

So all I want out of a Democratic nominee is simple. I don’t care about the student loan stuff, because they can’t pass it.  I’m not interested in single-payer health care, because they can’t pass it.  I care about the Supreme Court and the veto pen, and that’s all I can care about. I need one thing and one thing only out of a Democratic candidate for President: victory in November, because the alternatives are too horrifying to contemplate.

So whoever, fine. Clinton, Sanders, I honestly don’t care which one gets it. As long as they fucking win.

 

ETA: did I forget Marco Rubio? Maybe, but as one Twitter wag put it, he failed his Turing test. In a world where anti-immigration sentiment is the driving force of the GOP primary electorate, Rubio fucked up by going along with the GOP’s postmortem in 2013 and trying to actually accomplish something on the immigration front. Bad mistake. You can’t really do that when a huge chunk of your base is voting solely on the basis of “who will shit on brown people the most” and if you don’t believe me, watch the numbers come in on March 1.

The car has a bad transmission, which is a sealed unit and will cost $6000 to replace. That’s bad arithmetic in a car that’s going on ten years old and over 100K miles and barely gets 23 miles per gallon at the best of times, and that’s before you consider that the speakers are randomly static-laden and the sunroof occasionally goes half-up of its own volition and the car stereo is iPod-era and doesn’t work well with the iPhone.  It’s one of those things where there’s so much to fix and straighten up that you despair of fixing it at all – and the promise of being able to find something at least partly electrical is very attractive.

Right now, the three contenders are the Prius V, the newest Chevy Volt, and the Ford Fusion Energi. The Prius is just as it says: big hybrid wagon, proven technology. But ultimately fuel-burning; there’s no all-electric option there.  The Volt will go all-electric for 50 miles, which is enough to get to a Cal game or up to the city – and if you don’t find a charger, you still have the gas generator charging you back up, with an ultimate range far enough to drive to Disneyland on a tank. Splitting the difference is the Fusion Energi – only about 20 miles all-electric, but enough for me to go to work and back or for us to get groceries or run the quick errands without having to dip into the gas motor. 

Personally, the Volt is at the top of my list, but I haven’t sat in one or driven it or anything – but I do really like the idea of an American-made electrical vehicle (and a Chevy at that, given that my family literally bought nothing else from 1969 to 1993) without the complexity of a six-speed transmission to deal with and with support for Apple CarPlay and modern phone integration. But with the others, I also like the idea of a car that I know I’ll have room to sit in and have a grown-up midsize ride.

And that’s the thing – I’m starting to get like that with the house. The facing on the cabinets is peeling, the carpet on the stairs needs to be cleaned if not replaced outright, one of the toilets makes a noise and another has a rickety seat and has to have the handle held down to flush, and the whole thing needs a massive allergen flush to get the dust out so I can start breathing through the night normally. (Maybe.) Things being how they are, though, it’s not like we can sell the house and start over somewhere else; unless you bought AAPL at $15 in 1997 and sold it all six months ago, the only way you sell a piece of property in Silly Con Valley is if you’re leaving for good and never coming back.

And in a way, I suppose I’m a little like that about myself. I’ve been dealing with this sleep study and its aftermath for months now – what started off as a “am I sleeping wrong on this shoulder and causing my neck/shoulder pain that way?” turned into claustrophobic masks and allergy shots and a million wires in my scalp, and even now, when I can finally just barely make it through the entire night without ripping the BiPAP mask off my face, I’m not sleeping any more soundly or waking up any less, which begs the question whether the sleep clinic knows how to do any more than “positive air pressure”. I genuinely suspect they don’t, which makes me wonder how I’m ever going to property evaluate things like posture and head elevation and whether I need a different pillow or mattress or God knows what. The shoulder still hurts, by the way, and there’s been a recurring pain in the left hamstring for a while now and we haven’t yet sorted out what the deal is with the dust allergy and whether that’s helping or not, and my heart rate and blood pressure and cholesterol are all elevated from even four years ago and only respond sporadically to changes in diet and exercise, if at all.

As with so many things, the problem is that when there’s too many things to fix, you despair of ever being able to get them all fixed, which in turn leads to despairing of getting any of them fixed.  And it’s often tough to undertake a new approach when it’s going to be a long time before you see results, if ever, and then ask why you gave up this food or that drink or did this much extra exercise only to see your LDL or triglyceride numbers budge not at all. It’s not just energy of activation that’s tough to overcome, it’s the willingness to try something new that’s going to take take a lot of time and effort and isn’t guaranteed to pay off in the end.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have any hobbies. Or why I’m not a gamer. Actually there are plenty of reasons for that, but we’ll get to that later.

It’s strange how some things (take, as a completely random example, all American football) can put you in an incredibly shitty mood for no apparent reason (okay, because it strikes at deeper emotions about your place in the world and the state of our civilization, but bugger all that for now) and some other things (like, say, the right pair of boots and the right jacket and the right song randomly coming up on the iPhone) can put you in a good mood…and what do you do? You question WHY you’re in a good mood all of a sudden.

This, bluntly put, is incredibly fucked up. If there’s one thing I like to think I’ve figured out in the last ten years, it’s that life is poor, nasty, brutish and short, tomorrow isn’t promised to you, and you need to indulge in the things you enjoy and stop doing the things that make you miserable. So if some combination of Aldens and second-hand Navy peacoat and a random Irish song combine and put a smile on your face, the thing to do isn’t to mourn how that public house isn’t there any more and you haven’t seen most of that gang in person for years and there’s nothing like that here…the thing to fucking do is to bathe in the warm glow of your memories and take that energy and point it toward laying waste to all in your path and bringing honor and pride to the memory of the rifles of the EUS.

If you’re happy, stop fucking asking why.