Unordered S2E1 - Reboot
Sitrep
I did a bit of a design refresh of this site a couple of months ago, which also meant looking at a bunch of old posts to check that everything was still working properly. But that also meant a bit of reflection on what I'm posting and why I'm actually running a personal website when pretty much everyone else seems to have moved their "presence" to LinkedIn (professional networking), Facebook/Insta (personal networking), newsletters (personal publishing) or Twitter (at this point, I can only assume that the motivation is sado-masochistic).
I'm not sure I reached an actual conclusion, but one of the outcomes of that reflection was the decision to reboot my "Unordered" posts- where instead of writing a few thousand words about something vaguely topical (that generally seems to take me so long to write/edit/publish that it usually isn't topical anymore by the time its done), I throw together a loose collection of links of things that I'm thinking about before I do my more in-depth "thinking through my keyboard" thing. Essentially, I guess its my own way of managing Posters Disease while resisting the urge to feed the ML algorithms of whatever the most appropriate newsfeed happens to be...
Anyway, this was written over the course of about 3 sessions at different times, in different places, on different devices. The plan is to start knocking these out in one session, so when I manage to do that, I'll include some actual context. This is really just to get the ball rolling again.
Things that Caught my Attention #1... "Things That Caught My Attention"
Top of the list of "things that caught my attention" is probably still Dan Hon's Things That Caught My Attention, from which I've stolen both the introductory 'sitrep' format (because I realised that although I like writing about the things I'm thinking about, I also like reading my old posts that give me hints of what was going on in my life that made me think about them in the first place), as well as the 'series/episode' labelling thing.
Dan stopped writing for a while but has come back earlier this year with a renewed sense of energy/commitment - if you're a nerd like me (ie. you're interested in design, technology, and where "things" in general seem to be moving), I strongly recommend subscribing.
Taylor sweeps the charts
Going through some old posts to check I didn't break anything too horribly in the redesign (still not sure if footnotes are working properly yet) reminded me of what I think was my first ever 'blog post' about Britney vs The Beatles, written about 20 years ago. (Back before we called them 'blog posts'- I am very old...)
One of the (badly articulated) ideas in there was that the people 'manufacturing' pop music were people who were very good at their job, and if they weren't necessarily the same people that sing on the records and dance in the video, then thats not necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, Max Martin (who wrote and co-produced Britney's …Baby One More Time, (You Drive Me) Crazy, Oops!… I Did It Again, Stronger) went on to produce - among other artists - some of what I think are Taylor Swift's best singles; We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (her first US #1 single, from her fourth album), I Knew You Were Trouble, Shake It Off (her second US #1, from her fifth album), Blank Space (3rd #1), Style, Wildest Dreams, Bad Blood (4th #1...), …Ready For It? and End Game. Anyway - it doesn't look like Swift and Martin are working together any more (on the basis that he wasn't involved in producing the "Taylor's Versions" of the Red singles), and she has proved that she's more than capable of making #1 singles without his help - as proved by the fact that she's done what nobody else has done before and owned the whole of the US top 10. Which is quite a feat.
I have to say though; I don't think its quite as significant a feat as the Beatles' having 5 Top Ten singles, simply because the charts are so fundamentally different today- commercially (you don't have to buy the records- you can just stream from Spotify/Apple Music/Tidal/etc.), artistically (you don't have to release them as "singles"- any album track qualifies) or culturally (ie. who actually cares about the charts these days?) - but thats a topic that warrants a post of its own. But still- getting to #1 is still an achievement; getting to #2-10 at the same time is pretty wild.
Speaking of The Beatles, I got an autograph
I've never been the kind of person who wants to meet 'celebrities' or collect autographs (the only 'autograph' I can think of that I own is a signed copy of one of David McCandless' data visualisation books, with a note about pie charts - which I'm really pleased with, but wouldn't go so far as to call him a 'celebrity...), but I made an exception last month when I went to the launch event for John Higgs' Love & Let Die - a book purportedly about the biggest band ever and the biggest movie character, both launched on the world on the same day (5th October 1962 was the release date for Dr. No and Love Me Do), but really a look at British culture, its role on the global stage, modern masculinity, aspiration, establishment vs counter-culture and more. So, I now have a pristine (I listened to the audiobook) signed copy of the first edition, as well as an autograph from Jeremy Deller (who interviewed Higgs for the event) on my 25 year old vinyl copy of ***K The Millennium.
Twitter implodes
The really big story at the moment is Twitter. Well... more accurately, what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter, and whether or not it is at all related to what he's actually trying to do to Twitter. (Does he want 'free speech', or does he want to ban jokes he doesn't like? Does he want to turn it into a successful business, or does he want to burn it to the ground?)
I kind of stopped being "active" on Twitter some time around 2016 (I didn't "quit"- just… fairly gradually stopped posting), but... well, there's a thing about "if aliens looked at earth, they would probably conclude that the dominant life forms are cars, and the one thing cars like to do is look at other cars that have crashed." (For me, an idea that goes back to Douglas Adams - but there is prior art) from 1966) For all of its many faults, when some element of society "crashes" - whether that's the death of a significant individual (from musician to monarch), the apparent collapse of an institution (UK's political leadership - twice this year, white supremacy with #BLM, a culture of sexual harassment with #MeToo etc.), I don't think there's really any better place to watch it unfold in realtime than Twitter.
So there's a weird vibe there at the moment as it appears that Twitter itself might be crashing, and Twitter watches from the inside. (I don't think this is a particularly good sign...) Part outrage ('How was this allowed to happen!'), part last-day-of-school vibes (eg. paying for blue ticks to create fake brand 'content') - but I think my favourite part is something that resembles when a long-running TV show ends and after the 'final' episode, and they do a kind of compilation of all the best moments throughout the years. I think there's a few of these kind of things around, but I think this one is my favourite.
I've never really been one for hot takes (which is probably one of the reasons I backed away from Twitter in the first place), so this whole Twitter implosion will probably be something I write an actual post about in a couple of weeks or so. (Or to put it another way, the post I started writing was so out of date by the time I was even close to actually posting it that I'm back to square one. If Twitter's shelf life is shorter than, say, a head of lettuce, then it will probably turn into an obituary…) But for now; I'm sad that Twitter seems to be going away, but I'm even sadder that the 'decentralised', web-based world before it of things like RSS readers went away as a result of centralisation (first in Google Reader - killed by Google, and then to a large extent by Twitter- fate uncertain). Maybe something more interesting will take its place - we will see...
Hang on... what was that about cars being the dominant life form on earth?
Well, there's a lot of them, using up a lot of energy, and taking up a huge amount of urban space.
When SimCity was being developed, they had to effectively eliminate parking from the game - traffic flow was still a fundamental part of the data model, but in terms of allocating space, they had to just model/pretend that every car got parked underground - otherwise a game based around how you allocate urban space even vaguely realistically would have been less "Sim City" and more "Sim Parking".
The Philosophy of SimCity: An Interview With the Game's Lead Designer
And "Sim City" is...?
Its a computer game that was very popular when computer games were things that grown-ups played on computers rather than consoles. You played the role of a kind of town planner, and zoned off land to be Residential, Commercial or Industrial, and you had to set tax rates, fund the emergency services and stuff like that... OK, it doesn't sound great when I describe it like that, but I'm pretty sure it was actually fun at the time... Real fun - not the kind of "fun" where (even) older people tell you how they used to play in the streets with sticks and bits of string when they try to explain how they had fun before TV and life was great, but end up just making watching TV sound really good in comparison- the thing is, it's one of those kinds of games that just doesn't really translate very well to either a console controller/TV/sofa arrangement, or touchscreen/mouse/phone, so I think its pretty much disappeared now- but it used to be huge.
So huge, in fact, that there's a special bit of code in Windows 95 that fundamentally changes the way the system runs if an old version of Sim City is running, so that it doesn't crash... Which tells you that a) Sim City was really big, and b) the efforts Microsoft went to so that they could maintain backwards compatibility with old software was also really, really big.
Source: Joel Spolsky's "Strategy Letter II: Chicken & Egg Problems"
Anyway, look - the "car as dominant life form" thing was supposed to be a silly aside about how what we look it isn't really a good measure for what we want to look at. "Attention" is a hot topic in the media industry right now, but I'm not convinced that its as big a deal as some people are making out, but don't want to do a whole "We're Paying Too Much Attention To Attention" thing right now. It was just a bit of a bad joke - let it slide...
So... Is this going to turn into a 'thing'? Turning headings and body text into a weird dialogue with yourself?
No. Well, I hope not. Maybe. We'll see...
I thought I was going to keep the headlines consistently as linked text and that doesn't really work with that idea- but now I'm not so sure if I want to deal with the (re)design implications of that decision if headings are all the same colour, whether they are linked or not..
I'm done with it for now though. Lets get these last few links and notes turned into sentences and see if we ("We"? "I"?) can avoid this weird split personality/dialogue thing, because I think I preferred it when the headers and the text had a more consistent flow of first person narrative.
So, its OK for Elon Musk to make up the rules as he goes along, but its not OK for you/me to make up the rules for how you write on your own website that nobody else writes on?
Yep. I like to think that I have some sort of standards. They might be my own, unwritten, secret standards - but I do like to think that I have them. Linking to things I'm talking about is one of them. Leaving things that I should probably delete and putting them into footnotes is another.
I think avoiding nosism is probably one of them.
Fair enough. I mean, you're just showing off that you learnt an obscure word now, but lets just move on.
Thank you.
Amazon lost a trillion dollars!
I know! (See, the dialogue thing just doesn't work.)
As the headline reads, "Amazon lost a trillion dollars as tech giants bleed money"". Thats $1,000,000,000,000- twelve zeroes. A lot of money, by anyone's standards.
Wow.
Except... Its a very big number... A good way of understanding very big numbers is to put them into context. So lets give that a go…
OK...
I wasn't talking to you- that was the author's "we", inviting the reader to follow along.
So, if you consider all the cash in the world, you're looking at around $7.6 trillion. If a trillion dollars in cash suddenly moved from one place to another, that would have massive implications. If someone had a trillion dollars in the first place, then that would have massive economic implications. Add in what's in 'easily accessed' funds (eg. money in current accounts), then that number goes up to about $37 trillion- and a trillion dollars is still enough that it would cause serious econoic shockwaves. Factor in 'broad money' (which includes money tied up in things like ISAs, savings and fixed-term accounts) and that goes up to $90 trillion. The combined value of British shares is less than $3 trillion.. Apple has more money than just about any company - about twice as much cash than the US Government - and it 'only' has $202 billion.
So, why the story? Amazon's "lost trillion dollars" is not 'real' money. It hasn't been 'lost', because it never existed as money - only as 'value'. Amazon never 'had' that trillion dollars in the first place; its shareholders had stocks worth a trillion dollars more than they are today.
When you start counting property, stocks, bonds, commodities and other derivatives (like the 'money' that Amazon 'lost'), you're looking at between $630 and $1,200 trillion in the world. But most of that isn't real money that you can use to buy, for example, a new pair of shoes.
What has actually happened is that Amazon's share price has gone down by 48% since July. A company's market cap1 is the number of "outstanding shares" - that is, the total number of shares that exist (in Amazon's case, that number is 10.2 billion), multiplied by the share price - that is, the price that shares are currently selling for. So; if there was someone who wanted to buy 10.2 billion Amazon shares, and shareholders willing to sell 10.2 billion Amazon shares, and all willing to buy/sell at the current market price, then the price they would hypothetically buy/sell for is a trillion dollars less than it hypothetically was in July. But the very act of buying/selling shares affects its value; the act of turning the value into actual cash, turning it from a hypothetical value to an actual value, changes its value. Its why, when Twitter's share price was $45.08, Musk's offer to buy shares was at $54.20 per share.
"Amazon loses a trillion hypothetical dollars; tech firms bleed hypothetical money" might be more "true", but doesn't really make for a snappy headline though. (The same goes for "Even 'real' money isn't real"...)
(I'm sure that my numbers are inaccurate and out of date, but for a sense of scale I think they are still relevant. Here's a neat visualisation (dated 2017))
Two Minutes of The Simpsons
I'm still missing the Rule of Three podcast that Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley used to do which analysed comedy (and either "learn something about how comedy works or quote bits from it and giggle until we're finished"), but Morris has been busy with a book, so I'll forgive him. If the actual book is anywhere near as good as this close reading/dissection of every joke in the first two minutes of an episode of The Simpsons ("Homer Badman" from Series 6 - peak Simpsons), it will definitely be worth a read. Assuming you're the kind of person who likes pulling jokes to pieces and wondering what makes them funny, rather than wondering why they aren't funny any more.
The Onion defends parody
So... lets start with some context. Someone made a Facebook page that parodied his local police department. The page was anonymous, but police got his records from Facebook, obtained a warrant and arrested and charged them with felony disruption of public services. The case was dismissed (after they spent 'three or four days' in jail), but the legal debate rolled on.
Which is why The Onion filed an amicus brief ('friend of the court') detailing why jokes (specifically parody and satire) are important elements of free speech, and why its important they should be protected - ie. forcing people to clearly label them as 'jokes' completely undermines their effectiveness.
There are some important issues here (which, once again, probably warrant a much more in-depth analysis than I'm giving here); there's the issue that privately-owned social media platforms can make it easy to confuse a parody with the real thing. (There's a reason why top level web domains like .gov, .edu etc. are reserved.) There's the issue that unregulated social media platforms designed around people and advertising have become an important platform for areas of society like politics that (rightly) have particular regulations around them. And there's the related issue that Elon Musk declared that "Comedy is legal on Twitter" (Tweet currently 'unavailable'), and then went on to announce that "accounts engaged in parody must include “parody” in their name, not just in bio".
Basically, Musk really needs to take a look at The Onion's filing. I mean, its probably not the issue that will determine whether Twitter floats or sinks - but regulation moves slowly, and the way 'free speech' is defined and regulated in today's environment is likely to be shaped by the failures of the platforms rather than the successes. A serious failure by Twitter in this space could have consequences that go far beyond what happens on Twitter.com, or to Twitter Inc.
Why I don't watch adverts
After Halloween is over, its officially John Lewis Ad season, and the new one is out there. I haven't seen it yet though, because I don't actively seek out adverts to watch. I wrote about why a little while ago, and it seems topical again. (That is, if you work in the media/advertising industry.)
I guess the point I'm making here is that if an advert is a thing where somebody pays somebody to put their message in a space where people see it, then if you put it in a different space where people watch it voluntarily then it isn't really an 'advert' any more; its just 'content'. A bit like how a TV programme that is never broadcast on a TV channel isn't really a TV programme, or a film that is never put on film or screened in a cinema isn't really a "film".
Hang on - is that just another one of your "things that deserve a post of their own" things that you haven't properly thought through and written down?
Shut up.