The new, discounted iMac has the RAM soldered to the logic board.The Surface 3 is nigh-unrepairable.. We’re increasingly being locked out of the inside of our computer hardware, and there’s precious little we can do about it. These are symptoms of the appliance-ificiation of technology, which is itself a symptom of mass-adoption of technology by ordinary people instead of hobbyists. A personal computer is more akin to a refrigerator, or a washing machine to many users. They want something that works, something that’s in their price range, and they don’t want to have to open it up to fix it when it breaks.
Considering that so many technology people like myself came up in an era where owning a computer was both a mark of the sort of person we were and required learning the ins-and-outs of computer maintenance, this shift has unmoored more than a few. Witness the gnashing of teeth from the iFixIt team with each, increasingly unfixable revision of Apple hardware, or Andy Ihnatko’s frustration about the retina MacBook Pro’s omitting the Ethernet port. [1] I’ve been bitten by the unfixable nature of Apple hardware twice in recent months. My iPhone 5S was completely replaced twice. One due to a broken screen, which on the 5S can no longer be swapped out. Second, due to a fault with the vibrator motor in my replacement.
The truth is, annoying as it may be, people like us are increasingly the minority. Most people want their tech to be small, light, and cheap like kitchen appliances. Most people don’t care about upgradability and repairability. How many people fix their own cars—or even change their own oil? Even in the enterprise world, it’s easier and faster for IT departments to swap out broken hardware than fix it. And if “BYOD” becomes common, the onus will be on the end user who will just replace it. Laziness will win, at least as long as typical consumer priorities remain the same.
It’s something that Phonebloks and Google’s Project Ara miss, even beyond the technical issues of speed and power consumption. If the priorities of users are cost and size, it can become more expensive to work in expandability and repairability over a closed system. At the very least, it’s more parts that could break. The priorities of hackers, tech hobbyists, and others who bemoan the appliance-ificiation of technology are different than the priorities of the growing mass market. Either their priorities will have to change, or we will. My money isn’t on the former.
In fairness to Andy, he considered Ethernet to be a “Professional” feature, and the rMBP has “Pro” in the name. He doesn’t make the same complaint about the Air, which is the mass-market Apple laptop. ↩
Today, dollar vans and other unofficial shuttles make up a thriving shadow transportation system that operates where subways and buses don’t—mostly in peripheral, low-income neighborhoods that contain large immigrant communities and lack robust public transit. The informal transportation networks fill that void with frequent departures and dependable schedules, but they lack service maps, posted timetables, and official stations or stops. There is no Web site or kiosk to help you navigate them. Instead, riders come to know these networks through conversations with friends and neighbors, or from happening upon the vans in the street. — The New Yorker – “New York’s Shadow Transit”
Reading about the underground transportation in this city—happing right under my nose, walking distance from my apartment—had me thinking. People may harp on about how revolutionary the “sharing economy” is, or how Uber and Lyft are going to disrupt the taxi industry. As long as they’re priced for Silicon Valley incomes, contemporary ridesharing services aren’t going to help working class, ordinary people get to work any time soon. Part of what makes the shadow shuttles of New York so effective and essential is that they’re often tied to a community: immigrant, non-English speaking, or just plain poor. They go not only where the subway doesn’t, but also where no well-paid Uber or Lyft driver will go. It’s also proof that you don’t need smartphones, cloud hosting, VC funding, or other high tech crap to create something that actually improves people’s lives.
I own two watches: one is a Swiss Army analog quartz watch, which I wear for dressier occasions. The other is a Casio F–91W, the choice of discriminating terrorists. I wear them, yes, as fashion, but also for utility. It’s still easier to look at this thing on my wrist to check the time than it is to pull my phone out of my pocket and tapping the sleep button. No matter how complicated the innards might be, the surface purpose of a watch, as technology, is simple: show me the time. That level of simplicity and focus will help define what becomes a mainstream device, should wearable devices catch on. Craig Hockenberry’s theoretical iRing hits on this just a bit. Combining Apple’s existing flair for minimal designs with an equally minimalist set of functions would allow them to make a simple device. If it has to be a watch, why not just put it under the surface of a decent quality, simple, quartz analog watch? It’s not crazy—we know Jony Ive already likes analog watches.
One of Apple’s tricks is that, while they do sometimes drop something as mindblowing as an original iPhone on us, most of their new products are just a push into the adjacent possible. They combine a lot of pre-existing technologies with a knack for aesthetics and UI that other companies miss, and they often do so in ways that seem painfully obvious in hindsight. Truth is, if it really were that obvious, we’d all be wearing analog watches that are also smart pedometers and wrist mounted notifications for our phones. Or something else we hadn’t thought of. When, or even if there’s an “iWatch,” it’s going to be something that executes on an existing set of ideas in a new way that won’t be obvious at first. We’ll feel the impact later. Especially when the price comes down.
Until then, if anyone wants to let me borrow $400, I’ll totally pay you back.
At some point in the last year or so, I stopped moving. Inertia carried me for a while, but I came to rest, and that was a dangerous thing to do. When I moved to New York, the idea was to hit the ground running, and keep moving until I had achieved what I wanted. What I wanted was a good job doing exciting work, enough money to afford to pay my bills and rent a decent apartment in a safe neighborhood of Brooklyn or Queens with my partner, to be able to afford to go to a concert or two per month, and sock a little away for later.
Inside of two months, I thought I'd achieved at least part of that. I found a good job doing interesting work, and the potential to make decent money. It was a trap, and as co-workers flitted away by will or by force, and the work became duller, I realized I'd made a mistake. The mistake wasn't taking the job. The mistake was thinking that taking the job would mean I could stop moving for a while. When I came to my senses, I had the good fortune to be pushed back into motion, and now I'm getting up to speed.
There's one good thing that came from not moving. I was able to discover a direction for my professional life that I enjoyed. Though the work environment, and that particular job were not what I wanted, a lot of what I did in my job excited me, from email newsletter design to content curation, to website QA testing. It was a lucky break to get some experience in a new field that I really enjoyed and build some skills that can help wherever I go. 1 During that year, and into my unemployment and new job, I've also found some direction to my writing.
Direction helps. Being in motion is a good plan, but it carries risks. Moving without any plan is just as dangerous as standing still. When you're moving on uncharted territory, you don't know what lurks ahead. A few years ago, I spent a whole year out of work because I had no concrete direction. The whole point of my job search was to Not Look Back, and not take another shitty telemarketing job ever again. So, I ran, panicked across the dangerous Serengeti for years, exposed and at risk. Had I not been convinced to take a Civil Service examination, I might never had the chance to catch my breath and get employed before the unemployment ran out.
I read a great piece in Fast Company about how to deal with anxiety.
When you tell yourself to “calm down” you have to make two hidden steps, moving both arousal and valence. But moving from anxiety to excitement is easier: your body can stay in an amped-up physiological state, but you re-appraise your anxiety as excitement.
Anxiety is akin to moving without a direction, while excitement is knowing the direction to go. When you're anxious, the only thing you want is to stop being anxious. To get some place, any place, that's safe. When you're excited, you have a goal and you want to achieve it. You have direction. Goals and direction, however, should be flexible. If you're focused on one specific thing above all else, you miss out on other great opportunities that can make your life more interesting. It also gives you an option for when plans change and you've been cut off from the direction you wanted to go.
During my job hunt, multiple people have told me that my experience and skill set are “unique.” I've taken it as the compliment I assume it was intended to be. ↩
Every time something like that happens, I think: “That could have been me holding the gun.†Why? I already wrote about that. Easier to say why not. One was that I didn’t have access to a gun. The other reason is that I was able to escape the toxic environment that was driving me to either suicidal or homicidal despair. Many kids lack that option. In the deepest pit of my darkest years, I didn’t know I had the option, and so The Anger grew.
The Anger is in all of us. The Anger manifests itself differently in each person, to different degrees. The Anger can be eased, it can be released safely, but it never goes away. You have to be taught how to deal with The Anger, but few people ever learn on their own. Fewer still know how to teach it. Instead, we try to sublimate The Anger, hide it, pretend it doesn’t exist. But it doesn’t go away. Without a way to acknowledge The Anger, to release it in a safe way, The Anger explodes, increasingly in a hail of gunfire.
Put a gun in someone’s hand, and say “go nuts.†Some point it at other people. Some point it at themselves. Some put it down and walk away. The Anger doesn’t dictate what a person does with a gun, but it influences that decision. If we don’t know how to deal with The Anger, it will be the loudest voice in our head, demanding we pull the trigger, that we hurt something to make it go away.
We need to deal with The Anger before we deal with The Gun.
But we also have to deal with The Gun. Those who say The Gun is the solution are a victim of The Anger. You can see when you ask them to put The Gun down. Somewhere along the line, there was a cultural shift, and The Gun went from being an object of respect, to an object that confers respect. A gun is a deadly weapon, and you show respect for it by treating it as such. You lock it up, keep it maintained, and secure. You learn to use it properly—not just how to shoot, but where, and when. Strapping an AR-15 to your chest to get a burrito is the opposite of respect. It turns The Gun into a status symbol, an object of fashion.
Gun ownership is about being a “gun owner,†and not what that gun is for. When you can fulfill the educational requirements of a concealed carry permit “can now be taken in minutes at a gun show, revolving-door styleâ€, that’s proof enough of what owning a gun means. It’s a lifestyle choice, and given all the thought that we put into what phone we carry, or what brand of soda we drink. When you combine this with The Anger in all of us, it’s a dangerous cocktail.
A culture that straps an AR-15 to their chest to buy a burrito is not one that’s going to think about whether it’s right to shoot first. Gun makers know if they market a gun as a lifestyle choice, it will sell better than if they market it as a dangerous weapon that requires more of its owner than the price of ammunition. But, The Anger knows what The Gun is for, and The Anger will make us reach for it and spill blood.
But The Gun is as ingrained into American life as The Anger is ingrained in all of our psyches. When we say that perhaps it should be harder to get a gun, and that it might prevent future tragedies, gun owners hear: “I want to take away part of who you are,†and react accordingly. The Anger is there, and it lives for moments like these. The Anger grows every time we are spurned, denied, hurt, and abused. The Anger feeds on fear.
And The Anger knows that The Gun is an easy way to unleash itself, to devastating effect.
I want to be clear that I’m not anti-gun. As an ex-Boy Scout, I’ve been around guns, albeit usually .22 caliber rifles. I have relatives in law enforcement, who own guns, and treat them with the respect they deserve. Their guns are under lock and key, kept unloaded, and secure. They’re not carried unless they are needed. I do not own a gun, nor do I have any desire to, despite living in cities all my life and having experienced:
An attempted mugging on the subway in Philadelphia
Living over a coffee shop that was robbed at gunpoint
Living in a neighborhood where people have been held up at gunpoint in spitting distance from my apartment
Almost having my apartment broken into by a homeless man who was either drunk, high, or both
I’ve had cause to want something to protect my life and property with. I still don’t own a gun. Yet, I understand that there’s perfectly valid reasons to own one. The lifestyle of being a gun owner does not appeal to me. Why? I can’t say. Maybe, it’s because I know The Anger is within me, that it’s spilled out in dangerous ways before, and will again. The last thing I need is a gun when that happens. I respect The Gun, and I respect The Anger.
When we talk about how to solve the problem of gun violence in America, be it school shooters, seemingly random mass shootings, or gang violence on inner city street corners, the conversation hits an impasse. The culture of The Gun doesn’t want to give up their guns, and the other side can’t find a way to address the topic without putting The Gun first. We can’t solve the problem without addressing The Anger, too. Until the culture shifts, and we talk about the “why†we have this violence, instead of the “how,†we will be in this predicament—not just because the “how†will always be the same thing as the proposed solution, The Anger manifested yet again.