0.0 Context setting

It’s Saturday, October 24 2020.

There is just over a week left until the U.S. Presidential election, which is not just the U.S. Presidential election, it’s a whole bunch of other critical elections, too.

I’m trying something different this time - there are two versions of this episode - one is the shorter, preview version, and the supporter-subscriber one goes into more detail.

This is the supporter-subscriber edition: so thank you for supporting my writing practice.

On with the show:

1.0 Some (short) things that caught my attention

Speech

A few notes on speech and language: Martin Krzywinski [tweet] has been putting together analyses of the U.S. Presidential Debates. The tweet of Krzywinski’s that I saw made the observation that Donald Trump “drags his opponents down to his level”, that “without Trump’s Trump’s interruptions, Biden’s speech grade level rose by 2.2 in his second debate town hall, while Trump’s remained the same at 3.8/3.6.

Thoughts: from a content design point of view, there’s general acknowledgement that simpler, plainer language is understandable by more people. In the UK, there’s the Plain English campaign, in the U.S., there’s the Plain Writing Act 2010 (I did not know about this!) and the corresponding plainlangauge.gov guidance.

So there’s a point about making sure your grade level is low. This doesn’t mean you can’t explain complicated subjects, and of course it’s not like there’s a hard rule saying you can’t use polysyllabic words when they make sense and are required. It also means you generally end up using more words, and more sentences.

I’m going to dip a very careful toe in the water and say that a lower grade level of speech is a factor when people say that they like Trump because he “isn’t a politician”. Sure, there’s a stereotype of educated elites using fancy, ten dollar words as (I’m going to say it) some sort of signaling when you easily say the same thing in a more accessible manner. Using fewer, simpler, clearer words? You’d be forgiven for thinking that that person wasn’t bullshitting. (Trump, of course, is a really great example of bullshitting very clearly despite simpler language). There’s a related point here too about corporate bullshit. The number of reports and presentations I see that don’t write simply is, well, it’s the norm, right? It’s corporate bullshit. Here’s a great paper on corporate bullshit from just a couple months ago, Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations.

Gowalla is back?!

Via Andy Baio [tweet], Gowalla [relaunch, wikipedia] has relaunched! Gowalla was a location-based game that came out in 2007 (ah, the SXSWi days), back when the iPhone was new and everyone thought location-based stuff was going to be the future. (Yes, it was (would be?) the future. In about ten years.)

Gowalla kind of came out before Foursquare (2009), which itself was preceded by Dodgeball (2000-2009, killed, of course after being acquired by Google).

But! Gowalla is back now! And I always had a fondness for Gowalla because it was more game-like than Foursquare. I mean, it was mildly more gamelike than Foursquare because it was more about collecting different kind of stickers in general, whereas Foursquare was about collecting stickers from specific kinds of checkins. Gowalla had the whole loot-drop RNG thing going on, and Foursquare felt like a very elementary gamification and leaderboard thing what with its mayorships. All three of them were precursors to the early iterations of Pokemon Go. (And in my opinion, part of the reason why those early iterations of Pokemon Go were so frustrating).

Anyway, Gowalla is back! It’s still a social game played in the real world and yes they do acknowledge that it’s a bit weird to launch during gestures at everything. But this reminds me of something else: there are a whole bunch of ideas that people have that didn’t succeed due to not having the right combination of timing, luck and money. There’s a crap ton of internet/digital stuff that a bunch of people could see coming (e.g. location based stuff in the early 2000s!) that we knew was coming, but probably got a bit carried away in terms of exactly how fast availability and penetration of networked devices was. There are also people who get less interested in an idea when it isn’t new anymore, and if you tried to execute once, you don’t want to go back. That’s… maybe not for the best? Maybe it’s okay to try again later? (Why certain people are able to try again later as opposed to others is left as a mind-boggling clear exercise for the reader).

Anyway, Gowalla is back!

And then, right at the same time, Foursquare, which I now think of as a location data collector and vendor, has a Labs which has launched… Marsbot, an augmented reality app for Airpods? They say it’s “our take on what happens when Foursquare merges with Clippy” which, okay, you have my attention if only because of the trollish nature of your statement.

But there are interesting things here from their announcement:

• apps that you don’t have to use recalls ubiquitous computing, for which see Adam Greenfield’s definitive Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing from 2006.

• proactive virtual assistants recalls the concept of software agents that act on our behalf.

• audio as an interface, for which I’d start paying attention to things like Apple’s Spatial Audio for Airpods [sic] Pro as a likely ah, the pieces are coming together.

• software that makes cities easier to use which again was “part of Foursquare’s original mission” and the modern incarnation of which is Citizen which I see more as the terrifying dystopian let’s-ignore-historians-and-sociologists version of software that makes cities easier to use. But then, speaking of dystopian, one of the experimental features is hearing a recreation of the McDonald’s jingle every time you walk past a McDonald’s which, okay, I see how labs these days have the How Do We Monetize question very pointedly inserted these days.

More alternate histories

I have been idly wondering about alternate histories as a way to think about how and where things might change now. I mean, clearly in a way that takes into account a completely different ecosystem and systems, but more as an interesting way to think about what preconditions might be.

For example, was there ever a window in which, in the U.K., the BBC could’ve had a different posture toward the internet, with the result being publicly owned and funded critical infrastructure? [tweet]

Let’s agree that 1997’s New Labour was too late to set the tone. Even by then, the early lead by West Coast/Silicon Valley ideology internet companies might have been insurmountable, despite all the photographs of Tony Blair sending an email. And this is even ignoring the New Labour, neo-liberal, public-private Third Way approach to all things.

I always come back to an organization like the BBC for this because in one part their rhetoric of a public service mission to inform, education, entertain [archive.org, because I’m sad and suspicious these days] is in my mind very clearly medium and platform agnostic. My understanding is that the BBC, as a public service organization, funded a bit, but not quite, by taxpayers, lives in that unique position of an aim of public service and the regulation of a scarce resource, in this case, access to the electromagnetic spectrum. You have a prevailing culture about the use of a public commons and whether it should be used for the public good as well as commercially, and if so, how that public good is to be used. Also, back then, we were concerned about any (clearly classist) Johnny-come-lately blundering in and causing both physical interference and interference of purpose, beaming literal waves of moral panic into impressionable peoples’ heads.

But on the other hand: inform, educate, entertain. If delivering that outcome was their remit and purpose, distinct from the need to regulate a public resource, well. What might they have done? What could they have done as technologies were made available? I mean, the BBC had (has) a whole R&D department that invented a whole bunch of broadcast technologies and more recently, technologies like video codecs.

In other words, if the BBC were more like the National Health Service, could we have ended up with infrastructure? (I mean, it’s arguable that we wouldn’t have, for the simple reason that we don’t really have the kind of public infrastructure I’m talking about from the NHS either). A public search engine? A publicly available API for commercial companies to build services on (sorry, create value), in the same way that the European unbundled the local loop of copper.

One good answer was around 1994, when the BBC had an ISP, the BBC Networking Club (for which I remember watching reruns of a late 90s comedy show, Fist of Fun, which included a bbcwebsites.co.uk tilde-type URL, which was hilarious for reasons), [via @gwire], and another was around the time of the BBC Micro, which for those who don’t know was an honest to god 1981 state-funded national Computer Literacy Project, and arguably single-handedly kickstarted the entire U.K. video games industry and the ARM processors in every single phone these days, so, you know, pretty much the entire internet as experienced by over a billion people.

Anyway, the point being this: if we wanted that again, or if we want publicly owned internet infrastructure, what would need to happen?

Regulations and bureaucracy

Ohhhh do I have opinions about this essay, Pure Programming [via Michael Tsai]. It’s about, in general, how hard it is to… I don’t know. Use software to solve problems? At scale? For people? It starts with the realization that there’s a bunch of bureaucracy to deal with in getting something out on to Apple’s App Store, which, you know. That’s true. But then:

The entire internet is increasingly burdened by various governments, corporations, and everything in-between. Users can already feel the pain to some extent – every time we dismiss another GDPR pop-up or navigate to Amazon’s website (not their iOS app) to buy a Kindle book, we can feel hints of bureaucracy adding arbitrary hurdles to our technology. But as a developer… that’s where it hurts.

and

This gradual centralization & regulation has been happening for several years, and it’s a double-edged sword. It’s bad for attracting a particular personality of programmer to certain types of companies, but some rules are necessary as the software industry matures & becomes more influential in the lives of billions of people. It’s also a small price to pay in exchange for access to the best product-distribution network ever… However, it’s still important to articulate this changing reality, if only to inform prospective engineers.

The essay is as much as it is about capitalism and being able to profit from one’s labor as it is, I don’t know, unbridled freedom to use software to create and to make that available to other people.

But, you know, I think it misses the point by several orders of magnitude: “some rules are necessary as the software industry matures & becomes more influential in the lives of billions of people” dares me to be hyperbolic in response. I mean, everything matures, so sure, let’s accept that. “More influential in the lives of billions of people”. I mean, really? Can we talk about how influential or critical or unavoidable software is in the lives of everyone? Why is this particular piece of the world, of the human experience different?

Three very short things that caught my attention

• Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail is a 2008 article by Dr. A Berglas, which puts forward the idea that since software makes bureaucracy easy/easier, then they must fail, because otherwise… there’d be less work to do: “We now see why it is so critical to society that software projects fail. The boundless creativity of politicians and bureaucrats to develop new and more complex regulation is bounded only by the bureaucracy's inability to implement them. The absolute size of the bureaucracy is constrained by external factors, so the only effect of automation can be to increase bureaucratic complexity.”

• Venture capital (specifically, Andreesen Horowitz) thinks that the next big innovation in social play will come from tabletop games and includes an appearance of my brother and Naomi Alderman’s Zombies, Run! as an example of a “hybrid audio-fitness game that defies categorization” which is a very nice compliment.

• RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users, from the abstract: “This document explains why the IAB believes that, when there is a conflict between the interests of end users of the Internet and other parties, IETF decisions should favor end users. It also explores how the IETF can more effectively achieve this.”

• A $900m accidental payment at Citigroup was because of a software modernization issue.

Okay, that’s it for today. How are you doing? I’m nervous. And it’s the weekend, whatever that means.

As ever, I love getting notes and I always make sure to reply to them, even (and especially?) if they’re just saying hi. So, hi!

Best,

Dan