This, the view from my window as the sun set yesterday.

I have several complaints about Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: The book feels unfinished. The introduction is scattered and unconvincing. He often makes little asides that sound really interesting and then never follows them up. He doesn’t spend enough time exploring his many ideas. His solutions to the problems he discusses are often not convincing. And I could have done without the distraction of the too-clever section headings that appear every second page and feel like slogans rather than content.

But in spite of those complaints, I’m still recommending this book to everyone I meet. It expresses a number of ideas that I’ve felt implicitly, draws some incredible connections, and engenders a lot of worrying thoughts about the digital age we’re living in.

I tried to write a quick summary of Lanier’s argument, but the book isn’t really structured like an argument. Rather, it’s a web of interconnected and sometimes contradictory ideas. The best I can do in a sentence: Lanier thinks that our present technological and cultural milieu poses danger to individual identity and individual creativity. The book explores many forms of this danger, and considers some of the solutions. Some of the more interesting examples:

- That Web 2.0 sites like Facebook try to standardize the definition of fundamental human concepts like “person” and “friendship” in simplistic ways that are understandable to computers but miss much of the richness of reality. Because people are willing to dumb themselves down to fit into the boxes that the machine provides, we’re in danger of losing that extra richness completely. He uses MIDI, a music standard designed for digitizing pianos that has become the standard for digitizing all instruments, as his example of what happens when a poor representation becomes entrenched.

- That first order creation by individuals is not valued as much as aggregation and derivation by the anonymous crowd. He illustrates this by leveling some fresh criticisms at Wikipedia, that triumph of “crowd sourcing”. Most people who complain about Wikipedia worry about its accuracy. Lanier worries about Wikipedia’s tone, which is a kind of neutral journalistic style free of the imprint of any of its authors. He thinks wikipedia is in danger of claiming too much authority: it becomes the voice of the all-knowing crowd, rather than the creation of a bunch of real, individual people with whom one could meaningfully disagree. He draws an interesting parallel: “Like wikipedia, the Bible’s authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors severed to create an oracle-like ambience of the document as “the literal word of God”.”

- That there is very little that is new coming out of online culture: “Even the most seemingly radical online enthusiasts seem to flock to retro references. The sort of “fresh, radical culture” you expect to see celebrated in the online world these days is a pretty mashup of preweb culture.

“Take a look at one of the big cultural blogs like Boing Boing, or the endless stream of mashups that appear on YouTube. It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over the garbage dump.”

If you don’t believe him, plug “Super Mario” into the search box at YouTube, and look at all the people making things about a game from the mid 1980s…

- And, most frighteningly, that there is no standard path to success for a creative person trying to make it online. In the old days, if you were a musician, you played concerts, got a record deal, and got your music on the radio. If you were a writer, you sold your book to a publisher. Large numbers of musicians and writers did these things and were able to make a living. Now, what do you do? There are people making a living from their online endeavors (he mentions Ze Frank and Jonathon Coulton), but Lanier thinks that their success is doesn’t represent a model to follow. They’re one-offs. There is no reproducible method. Once “old media” is dead, how will the creative people be able to keep creating?

The thing that makes his criticisms so hard to ignore is that he is not a Luddite. He’s a silicon valley nerd who believes that the internet ought to have lead to an explosion of new weird and vital forms of culture. He isn’t arguing against technology, but against the unconsidered attitude that the digital revolution will magically turn out alright, and against the way the technology is structured and used. Drawing an analogy to the printing press, he writes, that “People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.”

If you think all of this sounds interesting and true, you should read his book, because there is much more material where that came from. And if you think this sounds fishy and wrong, you should still read his book, because you can always benefit from someone challenging your premises, and the stakes are very high here.

Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’

- Lao-Tzu. (At least, it’s usually attributed to him, although I so far haven’t been able to find that particular idea in Tao Te Ching. Of course, there are a million different translations of Tao Te Ching, so who knows. I like it anyway, regardless of who actually said it.)

—

I have a proposal: let’s all wake up an hour earlier than usual. Let’s eat breakfast in a fog, put on mismatched socks, and go to work an hour earlier. Let’s break for lunch before we’re hungry, and let’s knock off an hour earlier in the afternoon. It’ll give us more daylight hours to enjoy after work.

Could you imagine what it’d be like if someone actually made this proposal? It would be hard to get anyone else to play along. And, supposing the idea did catch on, you’d eventually get to an awkward stage where half your co-workers showed up an hour earlier than you (or an hour later), and it’s extremely hard to organize a group for lunch. And even if the idea really caught on, there would still be hold-outs, call them the True Nooners, who would stubbornly resist changing their schedule after everyone else had long ago adapted to that 6:00 am wake-up.

And yet, this is exactly what is going to happen on Monday, with all the attendant grumbling and traffic accidents. Daylight Savings Time begins tonight. The brilliance and tyranny of DST is that it bypasses the messy process of trying to get everyone to agree on something, and just flips a digit on the clock. And because we’re used thinking of The Clock as an immutable external force that must be obeyed, we go along with it. It never even crosses our minds that the whole thing is just a convention we have tacitly agreed to follow.

There’s probably a lesson here about how easy it is to manipulate people into doing things, if only you can find the right artificially-created (and thus, easily changed) concept to fiddle with. In this case, we’re being manipulated into something basically harmless, but Daylight Savings Time serves as a reminder that we can be easily thus hoodwinked. This is the danger of living too comfortably with abstractions: 12:00 noon is now quite divorced from the real phenomenon of the sun at its highest point in the sky, but because we live by the clock (the abstraction) and not the sun (the concrete thing), we don’t even notice the disconnect.

Abstractions are useful and all—having a standardized system of time sure makes scheduling that lunch meeting easier—but we should also remember to keep an eye on reality.

The CBC Reports:

Nobody feels worse than Mellisa Hollingsworth right now.

The 29-year-old skeleton racer from Eckville, Alta., considered to be a lock for a podium finish at the Vancouver Olympic Games, had a medal slip through her fingers after a disastrous fourth run down the track at the Whistler Sliding Centre on Friday night.

“I feel like I have let my entire country down,” Hollingsworth told CTV as tears streamed down her rosy cheeks.

No Melissa, you haven’t let us down. If you’ve been made to feel that way, perhaps by the reporters shoving microphones in your face and flaunting their photographs of your tears, or by national sports officials eager to “own the podium” at the games, then let me apologize for them and for all of us. We’re happy to cheer for you, ecstatic when you win, and we share your disappointment when you fall short, but we don’t need you to win a gold medal for us. We’ll be just fine if you don’t.

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not saying you should stop striving for gold. We want you to go for it, and we know in your competitor’s heart that you want that gold medal badly. But whether you finish first or last (and 5th place at the Olympics is a rather good showing) we’re proud of you. And if we aren’t, that’s our problem, not yours.

The elevator door closed. Then it popped open half an inch and made a crunching sound. Then nothing. There were six of us and a dog in the elevator, and we weren’t going anywhere. I’d never been trapped in an elevator before, and found that my reaction was to chuckle and roll my eyes. A couple of our fellow passengers became a bit panicky. At least the dog was calm.

Fortunately for us, there fire department was already on the scene. There had been half a dozen burly firemen standing in the lobby of our building when we’d stepped in to that elevator, and they quickly went to work on freeing us.

We had just spent ten minutes standing on the street with the fire alarm blaring, until those same firefighters had determined that the alarm had been triggered by “a malfunction in the garage sprinkler system” and let us back inside.

About 15 minutes before that elevator door gave up the ghost, I had just sat back down to our fancy Valentine’s Day dinner after fending off a telemarketer. I was just saying to myself, “that was our interruption for the evening,” when the fire alarm started to ring. Now, here we were, going nowhere at all in a small metal box, while our dinner rapidly cooled on the table, a dozen stories above our heads.

To the great credit of the Ottawa Fire Department, the firefighters managed to get the door unstuck after about five minutes of fiddling with it. We thanked them and took the stairs, laughing all the way back up to our apartment, and to our dinner.

Happy Valentine’s day, everyone.

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Physicist Richard Feynman, from the report on the Challenger disaster.

This is obvious, and yet apparently easy to forget. It drives me nuts when I see corporations and governments spending marketing dollars to tell us how Green they are, or Sustainable, or Organic, or whatever the branding fad of the day requires (google “greenwashing”). The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, not in the advertising copy. This applies most immediately to the climate crisis. Even the best ad firms in the world aren’t going to be able to fool nature on that one.

=(

The global corporation sells mass-production techniques, even in their branch plant version. To be profitable, however, mass production requires mass consumption—that is, the homogenization of the tastes, needs, values, and priorities of all the nations within which the firm and its subsidiaries operate. In the name of technical efficiency, we erase the differences among persons, the style and the art of their living. People of different cultures and nations in varying stages of development are made, through enormous selling and advertising pressure, to want the same things. The freedom of the individual to choose, to maintain his own preferences, and to search for satisfaction, is reduced.

Economist Eric W. Kierans, from his 1983 Massey Lecture, “Globalism and the Nation State”

In this TED talk on the paradox of choice, Psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests that the west’s vaunted “freedom of choice” is not liberating but crippling. Not only do too many options bewilder us, he says, but they also raise our expectations. He gives the example of buying a new pair of jeans. In the past, there had only been one kind of jeans, but on a recent trip to the clothing store, he discovered that there were many different options to choose from. He eventually left the store with the best-fitting pair of jeans he’d ever owned.

All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But I felt worse. Why? […] The reason I felt worse is that with all of these options available, my expectations of how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor; when they came in one hundred flavors, damn it, one of them should have been perfect. What I got was good, but it wasn’t perfect. So I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing.

I think Schwartz is on the right track, but in light of Kieran’s observation, I wonder if Schwartz might have missed something. He says that when there was only one flavor of jeans, he had no expectations. If he had no expectations, he can’t have been very invested in his need for a pair of jeans. Perhaps the kind of choice that we find so paralyzing is actually choice among options that don’t really appeal to us in any deep way. Why was Schwartz so sure he actually wanted jeans in the first place? Was his desire for them a product of advertising and social convention rather than an expression of his real preferences?

If you have to choose among 100 options when your heart isn’t really in it, of course you’ll have a rough time. When it comes to choosing things that you really care about, having a wide range of options does not seem negative. For example, I never feel buyer’s remorse after a trip to the bookstore, but then I love books much more than I love jeans. Maybe we don’t have a paradox of choice so much as an illusion of choice. Choosing among a hundred pairs of jeans is not a real choice, if jeans are not meaningful to the chooser. Maybe the reason Schwartz felt deflated after buying his jeans is that he thought he was getting a choice, but in the end it wasn’t a meaningful one.

I snapped this a couple of weeks ago at the locks on the Rideau Canal. I think it’s one of the cooler pictures I’ve taken, though I can’t claim it was totally on purpose.

At work, I use a Mac and a Windows Vista machine every day. I also poke around on XP and Windows 7 from time to time. When I have to switch from using the Mac to using some flavor of Windows, I always wince a little bit. I’ve been trying to work out exactly why.

I’ve always thought that the Mac’s user interface, especially since Leopard, looks much cleaner and grown-up (I have a special hatred for XP’s Fisher Price blue-and-green default colour scheme; thankfully Vista and Win 7 have moved away from that), but my discomfort with Windows can’t just be because the Mac is more pleasant to look at. People often say that Macs are “easier to use”, but how does one measure that? There aren’t wild differences between their user interfaces: both are point-and-click and built on the metaphor of a “desktop” with several “windows” floating above it, and each window contains a “document”. We tend to take that basic arrangement for granted, but it is useful to remember that it really is only a metaphor: one could conceive of other modes for performing the same underlying interactions. For example, a command line interface is built on the metaphor of a conversation: I tell the computer to do something by typing a command, it does it, and then tells me about the result with a line of text.

Of course, most of the time we don’t interact with computers via the command line: we use the desktop metaphor instead, because it is an easier metaphor to work with. It’s easier for us to conceptualize a pile of documents that can be shuffled and sorted and laid out than it is for us to carry on multiple simultaneous conversations with the machine. We can accept this metaphor at face-value and then get on with working on our “documents” without bothering to remember that they are really representations of the underlying computer data. And I think this might be one way in which the Mac user experience is an “easier” one: the Mac does a better job of maintaining the metaphor.

Here’s an example that I hope will illustrate what I mean. On a Mac, there’s a little “grip” area in the bottom-right corner of a window that you can use to resize the window by clicking and dragging. On Windows, you can resize a window with a similar grip, and also by dragging the edges of the window’s frame. While these interactions are superficially the same, there is a key difference. On my Mac, the window always resizes smoothly. On my Windows machines (Vista and 7 especially), the window’s content tends to lag behind the frame. For a split second there will be an empty black gap between the outside edge of the “document” and the inside edge of the frame, and then the document “jumps” over to fill the gap. Well, so what? Does this really matter? After all, on both platforms, I accomplished the same thing, didn’t I? I resized the window, giving me a larger area in which to work on my document. So what if it looks a bit less clean on Windows?

That wily window frame has some other quirks too. Sometimes, when application is starting up on Windows, the window frame will appear before the content, giving you a split-second view “through” the window at the desktop behind it (imagine holding up an empty picture frame and looking through it at the room behind). Then, the window content appears and the whole thing is properly opaque. This never happens on the Mac.

These may be small things that you barely notice consciously, but I think the small details are really important. On the Mac, the window content (the “document”) and the window frame are a cohesive unit. A window is a solid thing, it contains a document, and it behaves in a reliable way. On Windows, you get these constant reminders that all is really an illusion. Every time the window shears apart, the metaphor is broken, and your brain has to work a little harder to paper over the little gap between the metaphor and the reality. The Mac’s interface doesn’t tax you in this way. I think that’s why I breath a little sigh of relief when I switch back to working on the Mac: I know I can just relax and get on with what I’m doing.