The real dividends of technology are only paid out to those who know how to control it. I don’t just mean this financially, though web programmers are in a good place to make a lot of money. Control of technology pays off in less obvious ways. The NSA and CIA know how to control technology—it’s how they’ve been able to peek into our digital lives for the past several years. They know more about how to use technology than the people who are elected to oversee how they use it. That is a dangerous combination.

For ordinary people, however, controlling technology allows us to bend it to our will. Treating our devices as the tools they are prevents us from being tools of our devices. Controlling technology doesn’t mean “owning the full stack,” or being Richard Stallman and only using free, open-source software and hardware. It just means knowing the limitation of the technology, and the dangers. It means knowing where and when to rely on the tool, and where and when to rely on yourself. Doing this takes time, and a willingness to learn. Not everyone has that.

It worries me when people gush over the latest new gadget without thinking about how it fits in to the bigger picture of both how we use technology, and how we control technology. Look at smartwatches. The biggest use case anyone can seem to come up with is a “second screen” for your smartphone. A smartwatch is just something to show you notifications so you know whether or not to take your phone out of your pocket. Wouldn’t it make more sense to rethink how our phones decide to notify us, when, and why? That way, we know that when our phone buzzes, it’s automatically something worth taking it out for.

Of course, that’s not going to sell another $249 device to an audience of gadget-hungry nerds. It’s easier for a technology company to feed the human craving for novelty, rather than come up with a real solution to a real problem. Occasionally, they’ll manage to do both, but the hits are few and far between. Besides, we already have the power to solve the problem in the palms of our hands. No matter the device you own, it’s possible to make it shut up, or set it to only bug you about the things you think are important. Unfortunately, this is a power-user move.

Those of us who live in and of the world of technology, who have identified the problem, need to find real solutions for the real people who are being overwhelmed. We should be teaching people how to take control of their technology. So much technology education in schools is still about how to use Microsoft Office, and not much else. There’s a full toolbox at their disposal, and all we’re teaching the average person is how to swing a hammer. If Facebook can make it easy for an ordinary person to give up all their personal information, we can make it easy for an ordinary person to understand what they’re giving up. It’s not easy for us to do it, nor was it easy for Facebook, but it can be done.

Too many of the companies we depend on build a financial livelihood making it harder for us to be in control. Developers and technology companies should make it easier for their customers to take control of their technology. Companies that intentionally make it harder for us to control our devices should be taken to task for it. Whether it’s hardware manufacturers capitulating to carriers demands to load crapware , or Apple’s lack of inter-app communication, the pushback has to be made. More importantly, it has to come from more than just the technological elite. If we can bring ordinary people on our side, make them understand, and make them care about the tools they use and the potential they carry in their pockets, it can lead to a better technological world for all of us.

After replacing my shared iCloud calendar subscriptions in Google Calendar with actual calendar events, Google Now actually became a service that worked almost as advertised. Almost, but not close enough. I started getting push notifications for the events on my calendar, but the wrong ones, and at inopportune moments. I don't need to be told traffic is bad and I should leave for work at 8:35 when I'm already on my way to work—by subway. Certainly not after explicitly telling Google Now I don't drive, and to only give me public transit directions.

I put up with Google Now's lunacy for a few days, hoping it would get better. After a Google Now card telling me to go to work, when I was already at work, by walking around the block, I gave up. I turned off Google Now, uninstalled the app, moved my calendars back to iCloud, and now I'm waiting to see what Apple has in store for Siri in iOS 8. Public transit directions in Apple Maps are a given, at least. My only hope that Apple's context-aware solution will work better than Google Now or any of the third party alternatives, is that Apple tends to not release half-baked new features. ¹

It's not hard to get the data. My iPhone knows where I live, where I work, and where the next event I'm going to in the evening is. It's doing useful stuff with the data that's hard. It's so easy to picture my phone buzzing while I'm eating breakfast to say “Get your butt out the door, the F train is delayed. You can switch to the E at Union Turnpike, and get to work five minutes faster if you leave now. By the way, your package from Amazon is out for delivery, and it's your best friend's birthday tomorrow.” I know I can count on the last two, but the first is still up in the air. About a year ago, Harry C. Marks described what the Google Now dream would be. We're tantalizingly close, but it's still far away. How frustrating to see the future, to reach out and touch it, only to smash your hand on its glass case.

I’m starting to wonder if I have too many gadgets. I have the Apple User Trifecta of a MacBook, an iPhone and an iPad—along with a Kindle Paperwhite, a Fitbit, and a bunch of related accessories. To give you a short list: an external keyboard, an iPad stand, a Magic Mouse, a Cosmonaut stylus, a Glif, three pairs of EarPods(?!), a laptop sleeve, and all the attendant hubs, cables, and power supplies. In fact, through no obvious fault of my own, I now have more iPhone charger cubes than I could possibly need.

What are all these things for? My iPhone is a communication device, though far too often only a one-way one as I dive into the various streams. My MacBook is my workhorse. I needed the power to chew on editing and producing hour-plus length podcasts, though with Crush On Radio on hiatus, it’s vastly overpowered for the tasks of writing in plain text, listening to music, and checking Facebook. I stare into this screen all the time, and when I’m not staring into this one, I’m staring into the smaller screen I keep in my pocket, or I stare into the big screen at my office, and occasionally the composition notebook sized screen of my iPad.

The iPad has had the hardest time finding a role in my life. What it’s settled into is being my portable writing machine, which seems a bit of a waste of $499. (At least I already had the bluetooth keyboard.) I take it with me once a week to a writing group, and I occasionally take it into the living room after my girlfriend has gone to sleep. If I’m not using it for writing, it’s a social media device, and maybe an occasional comic reader. That’s it. If I travelled more, it would be useful as a travel computer, but only because my MacBook is a giant 15" non-Retina model. I opted for that over the Air or Retina Pros because I still need to use an optical drive from time to time. If I had a MacBook Air, I don’t know if I’d ever need an iPad.

What are all these things for? So much of it is for everything. I remember in the days before the iPhone, when everyone was preaching about the Convergence of Devices, I remained skeptical that I could just carry one thing that would be my camera, my music player and my phone. This was because all the devices on the market in the early 2000s that promised to be all these things were both far out of the price range of a college student, and sucked at being any of the things they promised. I’d much rather ten tools that do one thing well than one tool that does ten things, but does them to mediocrity.

It’s why I’ve gravitated back to the Kindle for much of my reading. It’s a purpose-built device that sucks if you try to use it for anything other than reading books. A while back, Stephen Hackett ditched his iPhone for a flip phone. I’ve given thought to trying a distraction-free iPhone setup, just to free up the mental clock cycles I spend on Twitter and elsewhere, but I do use the darn thing for legitimate work purposes, which makes that difficult. [1]

A thought that has been running through my head, off and on, for over a year is: “How can I use technology better?” Part of the answer is finding the role of all of this in my life. Nick Wynja’s latest piece had me thinking a lot.

I won’t let a computer tell me what to do. I’m going to choose what I want to do with my life, thank you very much. Then I’m going to do it and not tweet about it and just sit outside with a beer and watch the sun set. Because I’ve missed too many of those sitting in front of this harsh, heartless machine.

One of the differences between Nick and myself is that I like sitting in front of this harsh, heartless machine. It’s how I’m wired. There’s an outside, and there’s experiences, and I can be there and of them, but I keep coming back to the machines because I like them. I like the Internet, and the social media streams, and occasionally diving into a Wikipedia or TVTropes K-Hole.

But, fundamentally, these machines are tools, and their job is to enable us to live the life we want to lead. If that life involves seeing more sunsets, then using technology better means using it less. I don’t care that much about watching sunsets, but some of the things I do care about might just mean using the technology less—or at least being mindful about what, how, and when I use it. The hard part is overcoming that Pavlovian training and the Fear of Missing Out, and use the tools instead of letting them use me.

What are all these things for? To use to our great ends.

This past week, I finally had the chance to see Kraftwerk perform. I attended the second night at the United Palace Theatre, a restored movie palace that serve as a church and occasional concert venue. In its ornate lobby is a massive, four manual organ console. One could easily imagine it being part of the encore, but Kraftwerk have moved on from such low-tech methods of sound. There is something old world about Kraftwerk that is suited to such an ornate space, but all the retro glitz of the palace fell away once the lights dimmed. All there was to see were the four podiums, their operators, and the movie-theater sized projection screen displaying a 3D wonderland of visuals.

The visuals, like much of Kraftwerk’s music, are often subtle and simple: Kraftwerk’s robotic doppelgängers performing their calisthenics routine, a sheet of iridescent green undulating numbers, a virtual drive on the Autobahn, a ghostly TEE train traveling on rails of light, and occasionally key phrases from the song lyrics. The performers were secondary to the visuals, and by design. Even before co-founder Florian Schneider left the group, the platonic ideal of a Kraftwerk show was for robots to perform the songs via telepresence. The closest they ever came was having their robots dance on stage during their titular song, while the band performed the song backstage (or just played a recording) while enjoying a schnapps. As long as it sounds right, it could be anyone up there: man as machine, as replaceable components.

Which leads to the dark undercurrent that many miss when discussing the music of Kraftwerk. There’s an undertone of ambivalence to their oft-celebrated songs about technology. The altered lyrics to “Computer World” which they started using in the 90s bring this ambivalence to the forefront, resonating all the more in the post-Snowden era:

Interpol and Deutsche Bank
FBI and Scotland Yard
CIA and KGB
Control the data, memory [1]

There’s a double-edged sword cutting through their technological songs. “Computerlove” wistfully calls to mind the potential of connection from the information age, and the loneliness of staring into our screens. In concert, the tripped out glitch visuals of “It’s More Fun to Compute / Home Computer” are as overwhelming as spiraling into an Internet K-Hole. Then, there’s “Radioactivity,” originally a paen to broadcast radio, recast in the 90s as an Anti-Nuclear anthem. The most recent iteration adds lyrics in Japanese about the Fukushima disaster. It’s a stark contrast between the joy of Kraftwerk’s songs about motion and travel. “Autobahn,” “Trans-Europe Express,” and (of course) “Tour De France” are bouncy and ebullient. They relish in the freedom and expansive nature of travel and motion, and their accompanying 3D visuals drove the contrast home.

Kraftwerk’s live shows prove the concept of “multimedia” as performance. The visuals, the music, and the lyrics all play off each other. Their interaction is calculated and controlled, right down to the occasional 3D trick to amaze the audience—the needle tip of a space probe poking into the room caused the whole theater to gasp. While the music stands up on its own, adding the live experience only helps communicate the ideas in Kraftwerk’s vision. A Man-Machine may be a super-human being, but what are they giving up in the process? Are they depersonalized like “The Model”? Kraftwerk provides no answers, except perhaps riding a bike. They don’t need to. They just need to provide music to feed your head. If you can dance to it (and you can), all the better.

For the past two weeks or so, I’ve been trying out two iPhone apps that try to deliver on some of the potential of context-based computing. I’ve found it somewhat wanting. The reasons behind all of this lie in the shortcomings of iOS, the difficulty of location awareness in a dense urban area, and a personal life that doesn’t play to these apps strengths. Below are my experiences with two apps:

Mynd

Mynd is a “smart calendar” that I learned about from Merlin Mann’s latest appearance on Mac Power Users. Even before Merlin finished talking it up, I downloaded the app and set it up. Slightly over a week later, I uninstalled it. Mynd didn’t work for me because my calendar is not full of lots of appointments and meetings. I have the lucky, rare knowledge worker job that lets me sit at my desk mostly unmolested for the majority of the day to get work done. The furthest afield I’d ever have to go for a meeting is two floors up.

Mynd could be useful to help me with my commute and travel to various extracurriculars. Problem is, I don’t drive, and Mynd doesn’t do public transit directions. This is, I suspect, because iOS has no native public transit directions since uncoupling from Google Maps. It’s a shame, because it’s a pretty app, and if you have a more packed calendar than I do, Mynd might work out. Harry C. Marks seems to dig it, and between him and Merlin, that’s two ringing endorsement.

Google Now

Along with Mynd, I’ve been experimenting (or re-experimenting) with Google Now. Google recently added push notification support to the Google Search iOS app, which is also the interface to Google Now. I figured this would solve the biggest problem I had when I tried Google Now for the first time of having to dive into the app to see my cards. It’s been almost two weeks, and I have yet to receive a single push notification on my phone from Google. Not one.

In fairness, part of this may be that I turned off a big pile of the possible notifications/cards I can get. I don’t need to be notified when a movie comes out, when there’s breaking news, or when some Google Sponsored restaurant is near me. I only want my phone to buzz when I need to know something else useful to my daily life. Turning off all the cruft reduces the number of things Google Now will push to me by quite a bit, but it’s worrying that I still haven’t seen a single push notification.

When I remember to launch the app, Google Now is hit or miss about what cards I get. Some mornings, it knows I’m going to commute to work. Other mornings, it just gives me the weather. In the evenings, its much the same. Part of the problem with Google Now might be that it’s not pulling events from the iCloud calendars I’m syncing to Google Calendar through subscriptions. If that’s the case, I’m not sure it’ll be worth my time to switch from iCloud back to Google for calendaring.

Previous Attempts and Future Plans

I’ve yet to find something in this space that really works for me. The other apps I’ve played with in this space: Cue and OSITO are dead. Cue was snapped up by Apple. With luck, this means that Cue’s awesome functionality and search integration will come to iOS 8 in some form. OSITO, meanwhile, seems to have disappeared from the face of the Internet entirely. Sad, because it was the best alternative to Google Now before Google Now came to iOS.

It would be great if Apple’s own offerings were more robust. It’s great Apple knows where all my events are, and when, but the lack of subway directions and service notifications really hurts functionality. I guess I’ll know when WWDC rolls around if the Cue acquisition will help with that. As it stands now, I think I’ll just have to stick with being mindful and not relying on my machine to remember everything for me. Though, if I do move my appointments to Google Calendar…

…I might have to report back in a week or so. I really want to make this work.