Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

iPads and Ephemeralization

Paul Graham puts his finger on the nature of the revolution ushered in by iPhones and iPads:

The iPhone isn’t so much a phone as a replacement for a phone. That’s an important distinction, because it’s an early instance of what will become a common pattern. Many if not most of the special-purpose objects around us are going to be replaced by apps running on tablets.

It’s not just a new software platform. It’s a device that can, through software, change the way we live our lives in meatspace:

In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software. The reason tablets are going to take over the world is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force.

The future gets cooler, and scarier, every day.

Fantastic Shop Vac Video

I absolutely love this Jarrett Heather video, for Jonathan Coulton’s Shop Vac.

Deus ex Jobsina

An iPad developer recently had what appears to be a very civil run-in with Apple. He hit a bug in the iOS SDK that forced him to use a private API to get the keyboard working correctly — but the App Store gatekeepers rejected his application, because iOS developers aren’t allowed to use private APIs. He appealed, saying that he really had no choice: there’s no other way around the bug. His appeal, predictably, went nowhere.

The only slight wrinkle to this familiar story is that Steve Jobs called the guy. Not to grant him an exception or anything: just to reiterate his demented policy, with — I gather — a couple of toothless palliatives thrown in. Because there are no exceptions. There is only the Way.

The developer, who seems like a very nice guy, was gracious about it:

Steve Jobs has a well-deserved reputation for creating great quality products and for his passion for excellence and user experience. I’ve also read that he is a detail-oriented executive and a hands-on guy who is intimately involved with his company’s work (in a way that few other CEOs are).

His phone-call reinforced those notions and went further to suggest that he was also a very conscientious guy who cared about people. The fact that he took the time to read my email, think about the app and then personally call me was amazing.

I guess we’re supposed to be impressed that Lord Jobs would deign to call a mere developer to tell him personally that he’s shit out of luck, but really I find this kind of thing profoundly depressing. Not so much because Apple continues down their draconian path with iOS — that’s just the way it is, and there’s no point in lamenting it anymore. Mostly you just avert your eyes. What’s bumming me out is that at least some portion of the development community now accepts Apple’s ecosystem lockdown as a fact of nature, entirely inaberrant. And, worse, they feel actual gratitude when its mastermind reaches down from on high, like a benevolent deity, and … doesn’t help them, at all. A kind of deus ex machina, minus the part where the deus does something useful.

This is how the ridiculous and the unacceptable worm their way into the general consciousness — slowly, bit by bit, until you forget what it was like, back in the old days, when you were allowed to fix your bugs.

Civilians

Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The latest Wikileaks dump, on the Iraq war, pretty much confirms what the unofficial civilian death tolls have been saying for years: 100,000 Iraqis killed in the process of being liberated. Stuff happens.

Ubuntu the Helpful

There are plenty of things in this world to get choked up about, but this probably isn’t one of them:

Nevertheless, I found myself battling tears when Ubuntu made this gracious offer. I still have deep regrets about the many hours of my youth I wasted trying to get Slackware to recognize my soundcard, or read a CD, or not destroy my monitor when I misconfigured the refresh rate. So now, in 2010, when a Linux distro does something more than laugh derisively and erase my hard drive when I issue a command it doesn’t know about, I think it’s perfectly natural — and totally understandable — for me to get a bit misty. ¹

Interview with Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange

“Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.” As soft-spoken a revolutionary as you’re ever likely to see.

Fiction & Empathy

Sometimes you hear people say that they don’t read fiction. Not that they don’t usually read fiction, or haven’t read fiction in a while, or don’t enjoy reading fiction. They don’t, as a matter of principle, read it at all. Nonfiction is ok, because nonfiction has facts, and you can use facts to improve yourself. But why waste your time on stuff that isn’t true? What’s the point?

Well: even though the question (a) gives truth way more credit than it deserves¹, and (b) is, to my mind, slightly ludicrous — like asking about the point of breathing — I’ve never managed to cobble together a good answer. No, it’s totally got a point dude! almost never seems to do the trick.

Thankfully, David Foster Wallace has already addressed this, brilliantly:

I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

It’s such a beautiful idea, this notion of fiction as a gateway to empathy. Empathy always seems to be in short supply — and it’s such a terrible resource to lack, since you can trace much of the harm that we do to one another to its absence. You see the phenomenon everywhere, from easy behind-the-back calumny to the casual belligerence of online “discourse” to the Dresden firebombings. Distance — physical, emotional, experiential — helps defeat the simplest tenets of morality and good behavior.

Which is to say: the problem with being skullbound creatures is that we can’t figure out what’s going on inside all the other skulls. What we “know” about other people isn’t just speculative — it’s filtered through a veil of preconception and self-regard that taints and colors everything. If our entire view of the world consists of fleeting glimpses between the battlements, then we’re screwed: it’s not just possible to be cruel, it’s inevitable.

We have more than that, of course. Love and family and religion and civilization are all at least in part attempts to defeat this ugly segregation. But, even with all that, it’s fundamentally impossible to fully transcend our barriers — contra Donne, every man really is an island. What we can do is gather into archipelagos of common purpose, and link hands over the narrow straits that divide us, and give it our best shot.

I used to think that Jesus’ exhortation to love your neighbor as yourself seemed to kind of miss the point — shouldn’t you be preaching a path to love that doesn’t involve narcism? But lately I see the wisdom of this: you have to take your own narrow worldview as a given, and then use it as a template for getting into other people’s heads.

And that’s what fiction gives us: a way to import the lives of strangers into the walled cities of our minds, and experience them as our own. It spurs our imagination. If we can imagine, we can understand. If we can understand, we can empathize.

That’s the point.

Also, girls dig guys who read fiction.

Michael Moore

I’ve always admired Michael Moore immensely, but after watching his extended talk with the folks at Democracy Now, I’m dangerously close to upgrading my admiration to hero worship.

Here’s why: a good portion of the interview is devoted to the Oscar speech he gave in 2003 — after he won Best Documentary for Bowling For Columbine — and its aftermath. He used his 45 seconds onstage to condemn Bush and the just-started Iraq War, and got an angry chorus of boos for his trouble — before he was completely drowned out by swelling emergency Oscar music and ushered offstage.

I remember all that. What I’d forgotten was how thoroughly he was ostracized by everyone afterwards — and not just the usual suspects, but people who should have known better, from Keith Olbmermann to Al Franken to the New Yorker. He was absolutely right, of course, and in retrospect everything he said seems not just uncontroversial but blindingly obvious — at the time, though, five days into the war, what he did in front of billions of people watching all over the world amounts to an immense act of bravery.

And he suffered the consequences: death threats, assaults, crazies plotting to blow up his house. He had to hire bodyguards to protect himself from people who were (literally) coming at him with knives and pipes and scalding cups of coffee. But what’s so remarkable about the interview is his account of how scared he was throughout — his apprehension about giving the speech; the trembling walk off the stage; the hour he spent that night flipping through channels, watching newscaster after newscaster pronounce his career over; his concern for his family; his quiet admission that, if he had to do it all over again, he very probably wouldn’t have. What emerges is a portrait of a human being with the same fears and doubts and weaknesses as the rest of us, doing courageous, principled things.

I don’t want to descend too far into hagiography. Moore has his faults, like everyone else. But he’s devoted a good deal of his life to pointing out the injustices all around us, and trying to make people’s lives better — always in the face of fierce condemnation, and worse. He’s not fearless, though: fearless is easy. He’s brave.

Also, Simile of the Year

The winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which applicants compete to write the worst first sentence of novel:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.

The award goes to Molly Ringle, an actual writer who writes actual, non-terrible, novels. Bravo.

Maniacal Chortling Fail

My mom’s notebook has been running dog slow of late, so I logged onto it last night to troubleshoot. I used iChat’s remote screen sharing feature, which lets me control her computer and chat with her at the same time, all from the comfort of my own home.

Now — one thing I like to do when Mom gives me this kind of god-like control is change her desktop image to a picture of Hillary Clinton, who she loathes with the heat of a billion suns. Sometimes I use Nancy Pelosi, but for maximum impact you’ve got to go with Hillary.

So that was naturally my first order of business, after Mom granted me access and went off to do some paperwork. I also did a little gleeful cackling, and a lot of detailed, Bond-villanesque explaining of my evil plans — to my wife, in this case, who happened to be nearby, ignoring me (as is right and proper when I get into cackling exposition mode).

Anyway — there I was, chortling maniacally, searching Google for just the right Hillary portrait, when the phone rings. It’s Mom. I say: “Hi Mom!” She says: “I can hear you.”

Because I’d forgotten about the “chat” portion of the screensharing-and-chat thing, of course. I’d muted my end of it, but Mom hadn’t. She’d been listening the whole time.

My first impulse was to lie, but that wouldn’t have done me much good — because my cacklings had also drawn her back to her desk, where she’d been watching me look for Hillary pictures. On her computer.

My second impulse was to collapse into more or less uncontrollable laughter, which is what I did. I’m laughing still.