Rich Mogull, over at Macworld, wrote a great piece about how Apple actually cares about users privacy. It's a great read, and Rich pulls together a few solid facts to support a theory I've had for a while about trusting my data to Apple. Namely, that Apple doesn't make any money from selling me out (iAds excluded). They're making enough money on hardware that services like iCloud can be included gratis, without paying in data.
It's also worrisome. Apple is very much a luxury brand. The Apple Tax is a real thing, and even with the recent price drop on the 11" MacBook Air, you can get a full-featured Windows laptop for less, with a bigger screen. While the security conscious smartphone Blackphone may not occupy a luxury niche, and is a bit rough around the edges, it's not available through any carrier with a subsidy. This means a privacy-minded user would have to cough up $629 minimum for a secure phone.
In other words, if you're cost conscious, you can't afford to be privacy conscious.
Competing with free is always a difficult proposition. You can push on the privacy aspects like with Microsoft's “Scroogled” campaign, but that $0 price tag is so awfully tempting. People will sign on that dotted line without a care in the world what they're giving up, so long as it's free. Google and Facebook are masters of consumer psychology in that regard, offering compelling, quality web services for the price of data. Which, if you understand the Faustian bargain you're getting into, isn't so bad.
We already know, however, that most people don't know. Or, if they do, they don't bother to do anything to limit access. Part of why Windows PCs are often so much cheaper than comparable Apple hardware is not just cheaper components and volume pricing, but because they often come pre-loaded with privacy killing crapware that hardware manufacturers are paid for. Short of reinstalling the operating system as the first step in setting up a new machine, there's little that can be done to stop this practice.
I worry that we're heading for a new class divide in technology, where the poor, the cost-conscious, or the apathetic are surrendering more than they think. Meanwhile, those of us in our high-price luxury computing world—centered around Apple—can avoid the privacy crushing juggernauts. Are Apple users going to be the digital Eloi to an Internet of Morlocks? Not any time soon. There's enough Apple users who happily tie into Google's web services (author included) that it's not going to change overnight. But Apple making the slightly more privacy conscious Bing the default search in Yosemite and iOS 8—and adding the private search engine DuckDuckGo as an option could be the start of a trend.
Facebook should have made it impossible for someone who loves me to have unknowingly put me at such risk. Facebook should have made it impossible for me to unknowingly put myself at such risk. But that wasn’t a priority. What I was taking for granted as just the way things were was actually just the way Facebook wanted things to be.
With all the fuss about Facebook’s experimenting on users emotions—an experiment that’s not even an original idea.—it’s easy to lose sight of the other ways Facebook screws with us. Of course Facebook removed the ability to keep your friends list private in 2009. It did this because the more connections you make, the more data you give Facebook. The Facebook algorithms don’t care if you’re connecting with your best friend from Kindergarten, or an amoral stalker. It just cares that you connect.
I’m as much of a sucker for the personal productivity game as any other geek enraptured by systems and organization while suffering from ADHD symptoms. In my procrastination reading, I’ve read a fair amount of pushback on complicated task management systems. I don’t think it’s indicative of a trend, just different people coming to the same set of realizations at different times. The latest for me is Seth Clifford’s “The sickness of efficency”, which makes a lot of great points about workflow tweaking.
All told, it’s harmless if all your tweaking and playing with workflows and apps doesn’t get in the way of doing stuff. After all, isn’t the whole point of this personal productivity stuff is to give us more time to do the stuff we really want to do? When personal productivity becomes a goal in itself, we miss the point. If we can get our work done in six hours, instead of eight, that’s two extra hours to live—or at least work on something else we want to do.
I’m reminded of the great John Cleese talk on creativity. (Transcript] In it, Cleese talks about “open” and “closed” modes of thinking and working—how we need to be an open mode to be creative and create new ideas, but a closed mode to implement those ideas. And also tells a bunch of terrible lightbulb jokes.
Part of the push back against systems and heavy task management is that is far too easy to put yourself in a straightjacket. We can get so caught up in the act of productivity to enter that “open mode” of thought that makes creativity possible. Something I’ve banged my head against multiple times in figuring out just how the hell to keep me on track with creative projects is how to fit them into my system. The trick for me, it seems, is to fit the time to be creative in my system, not the act.
Systems are great for putting everything in place to clear up the time for that “open mode” thinking. Though, no matter how good we get, we can still sit in our creative space and get bupkis. Or worse, get distracted. As John Cleese says, “…[A]s we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking.” And, for us geeks who get off on systems and organization, and all that jazz, we’ll probably end up thinking about our systems, and how to tweak them for optimal efficiency. So, the cycle continues.
There’s a happy medium somewhere for all of us. Some of us will use OmniFocus, some of us will write stuff on a 3×5 card, and some of us will just be able to keep all this stuff in their heads. If there was a real, one-size-fits-all solution by now, I think we’d all be using it, and there would be no more of this hand-wringing about systems. Certainly, there’d be fewer apps in the App Store with checkmark icons.
I love reading about people’s journeys to that happy medium, and sharing my discoveries. If we can avoid prescriptivist nonsense, and avoid tweaking our systems to the detriment of actual stuff we both need and want to do, we’ll be halfway there. To be honest, I think the only real solution is to find the people who don’t need lists or task managers and eat their brains to gain their powers.
I have a startup that I plan to launch soon called LiveIn that combines all the best features of TaskRabbit, Lyft, Zaarly, and AirBNB. It’s a sharing economy enabling service to end all others—we match people with empty rooms with people who can fill them. However, instead of paying money, our LiveIn Chore Monkeys pay for their space by performing chores for the space owner. The responsibilities are negotiated up front through our iOS and web apps, along with terms and length. A LiveIn Chore Monkey could cook meals, do laundry, clean house, drive people to work or school, or other “unspecified services,” and are compensated with the ability to live in some of the hippest communities in America. We’re currently in private beta in Brooklyn and the Bay Area, but planning a public launch in 2015. LiveIn also collects a small listing fee to help keep us sustainable.
Okay, this isn’t an actual startup, but it seems like live-in help is the inevitable endgame of the “sharing economy” promoted by Bay Area technologists and Venture Capital types. The premise at least makes sense on the service: you have something you can provide: a spare room in your house, the ability to mend clothes, a car with a back seat, and you offer it to anyone who is willing to pay your price. Of course, anyone can tell right away that this isn’t actually sharing. The “sharing economy” is a wonderful piece of doublethink that hides the truth that these companies are just enabling a new form of a “freelance gig economy” with more middlemen to take your share. Even the marketing for some sharing economy apps pin it as a side hustle. Lyft promises drivers that they’ll make up $35 an hour as a taxi hack.
What is the real sharing economy? It’s tool libraries, material exchanges, carpools, and food pantries. It’s New York’s shadow transit system. It’s services where people give as well as get, and where money rarely changes hands except perhaps a membership fee. Food pantries are in serious need as donations drop and need rises with cuts to government assistance. Of course, there’s no money to be made by venture capital in those spaces, which echoes a statement I’ve made before: there’s no money in solving real problems faced by real people. Once again, we have to think outside the startup to find new solutions that aren’t just adding middlemen and profit taking.
I’m not going to harp on Yo, except to point out that Yo is ambiguous enough that content and context will need to be bundled back in by its users. Otherwise, the future of Yo-style messaging looks pretty bleak. Though a joke, the previous link illustrates a big problem with The Great Unbundling, that of cognitive overload. Simplicity only works to a point. To stay with messaging, decoupling a message from its content introduces a lot of ambiguity. The closest example is the infamous Facebook “Poke.” Ostensibly designed to signal a friend that hasn’t updated their status in a while, its actual purpose was ambiguous enough that users created one: to solicit sex. If Yo is the first in a wave of content and context-free “messaging,” others will follow suit. Imagine a world where if you send a “Sup” instead of a “Yo” to an acquaintance or co-worker, it ends up misconstrued as a come-on, or something illicit. You’ll be begging to bundle content again.
There’s also the problem of proliferation. My iPhone home screen only holds 20 apps, while each page in Android’s app drawer holds about the same, depending on implementation. A user has to search, scroll, and remember which new app does the one thing that they used to do in the other app that doesn’t. Ordinary users learn how to use technology with a task-based mindset. Change one thing: add a step, move an icon, and they have to relearn the task all over again. One advantage of smart phone and tablet UIs is that they lend themselves well to fast task-based learning. It will still mess someone up to drop a change like splitting app functionality. Aaron Walter of MailChimp makes a point in a great essay on app unbundling:
People will, of course, muddle through as they always do. But, if unbundling doesn’t benefit the end-user, who does it benefit? App makers benefit from new downloads, and new avenues to collect data and serve ads. It’s good for juicing stagnant numbers, too. No wonder Mark Andreessen is a fan. Unbundling works best for people when it offers a net benefit to the user. Andreessen talks about how Google unbundled search, but in doing so it provided a better search. Facebook unbundled finding people from Google, but still provided a compelling place for people to go to. The new unbundled apps can offer an easier way to do the same old thing, but not all do. This is why the emphasis on unbundling makes me skeptical. I figure one day the novelty will wear off, the numbers will be juiced as much as possible, and the Swarms and Yos of The Great Unbundling will looked on as a failed experiment. If I’m proven wrong, I’ll be chagrinned, but the world will keep spinning.