Planet of the apps

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This morning’s Observer column.

You know the problem: you’re sitting there reading an email from a friend on your smartphone or tablet and there is a link in the message to what looks like an interesting website. So you tap on it and the web page begins to load. And then suddenly up pops a dialogue box with text that looks like an escapee from the MySpace museum saying something like: “Hey! Why not download our cool new App?”, an invitation helpfully translated by the wonderful XKCD site as: “Want to visit an incomplete version of our website where you can’t zoom?”

Welcome to appworld. Personally, I blame Steve Jobs. He understood that since smartphones were really small computers then they could also run programs. So he set up the Apple’s app store to make this happen, and in the process ensured that the firm took 30% of everything sold on it.

It was significant also that on the day that Jobs revealed this insight to the world, standing next to him on the stage was John Doerr, one of Silicon Valley’s smartest investors, who was there to announce the setting up of a $100m investment fund for app developers.

Which is how we got to where we are now – awash with smartphone and tablet apps, more than 90% of which are crap…

Read on

What gets found in translation

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The New York Times has a nice obituary of the writer Raleigh Trevelyan, who died the other day and came from a long and distinguished British family. One of his ancestors was Thomas Macaulay. The obit contains this lovely snippet:

Mr. Trevelyan’s accounts of his forebears’ role in British history covered well-known historic episodes as well as obscure ones that were telling about imperial rule.

He recounted, for example, a 400-mile journey across the south of India by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the historian and former secretary of war, traveling “on men’s shoulders.” The bearers kept up a chant, which Macaulay presumed to be “extemporaneous eulogies,” but which he later learned were something else.

Roughly translated, Mr. Trevelyan wrote, the bearers sang, “There is a fat hog, a great fat hog/How heavy he is, hum-hum/Shake him, shake him well.”

Which reminds me of the Lone Ranger, one of the comic-book heroes of my early childhood. He was always accompanied, you may recall, by his loyal native American companion-cum-servant, Tonto, whose stock response to anything the Ranger said was “Ke-mo sa-bee”, which of course I interpreted as “yes, boss” or words to that effect — an impression later reinforced by studio assertions that it meant “faithful friend” (radio series) or “trusty scout” (television series) in the language of his tribe.

Imagine my delight, therefore, to meet a guy years ago who had studied the matter and claimed that “ke-mo sa-bee” actually translates as “horseshit”.

As the Italians say, even if it isn’t true, it ought to be.

Digital capitalism, red in tooth and claw

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My Observer comment piece about Uber & Co.

The real lesson of the Uber exposé, though, is that it’s time to discard the rose-tinted spectacles with which we have hitherto viewed these Silicon Valley outfits. For too long, they have been allowed to trade fraudulently on the afterglow of the hippie libertarianism that supposedly infected the early days of the personal computer industry. The billionaire geeks who currently run the giant internet companies may look and talk like a new species of entrepreneur but it would be more prudent to view them as John D Rockefellers in hoodies.

And the economic philosophy that’s embedded in this new digital capitalism is neoliberalism red in tooth and claw, which is why they minimise the number of “ordinary” (ie non-geek) workers on their payrolls, outsource everything they can, despise trade unions, view regulators as barriers to “innovation” and are outraged by the temerity of European institutions that seek to curb their freedoms of action.

There’s a geopolitical angle to this too…

Read on

If you’re interested in the impact of digital capitalism, then the place to go is the work of Dan Schiller, particularly his new book, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis. If you’re pushed for time, here’s a useful short interview with him about the book, and an informative review by Richard Hill.

Bobbie Johnson has a terrific essay on Medium about why we are so steamed up about Uber. People use it because of its convenience, even though they are also aware of its disruptive impact on things we supposedly value.

The dick-swinging, the gluttony, the not-quite-lies and the full-on bullshit… All of these things, and in particular the spectacular combination of all of these things, are enough to dislike a company, and even to hate it. But it’s incredibly popular, too, because, man, if people vote with their feet — or in this case their fingers — then they keep voting, again and again, for Uber.

And that, in the end, is the real reason so many people hate Uber: Because whatever we do, we can’t stop ourselves from making it bigger and more successful and more terrifying and more necessary. Uber makes everything so easy, which means it shows us who, and what, we really are. It shows us how, whatever objections we might say we hold, we don’t actually care very much at all. We have our beliefs, our morals, our instincts. We have our dislike of douchebags, our mistrust of bad behavior. We have all that. But in the end, it turns out that if something’s 10 percent cheaper and 5 percent faster, we’ll give it all up quicker than we can order a sandwich.

Seven rules for good interface design

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I like this essay by Erik D. Kennedy. The rules are:

  • Light comes from the sky
  • Black and white first
  • Double your whitespace
  • Learn the methods of overlaying text on images
  • Make text pop— and un-pop
  • Only use good fonts
  • Steal like an artist

It’s work in progress, so he will be adding to it as time goes on.

Facebook moves in on LinkedIn

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Well, well. According to this BBC story (which itself is based on a Financial Times story), Facebook is moving in on LinkedIn’s territory:

Facebook is building a network for professionals to connect and collaborate on work-related documents, the Financial Times reports.

Facebook at Work will look similar to its existing social network, but users will be able to keep their personal profiles separate, the paper says.

They also would be able to chat with colleagues, build professional networks and share documents, people said to be working on it told the Financial Times.

This is a difficult one for some of us. I mean to say, I loathe and detest LinkedIn, which I think is one of the most obnoxious ‘social’ networks I’ve seen. On the other hand, I’m not too enamoured of Facebook either. But I’m not surprised that LinkedIn’s shares were down today after the news broke.

In a more detached frame of mind, there might be something interesting here in terms of network theory. For example, are the ties that bind Facebook users stronger or weaker than those that link LinkedIn users?

Useful hypocrites

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This morning’s Observer column

Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was “useful idiots” and it applied to a good many people who should have known better.

I now propose a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites. That’s you and me, folks, and it’s how the masters of the digital universe see us. And they have pretty good reasons for seeing us that way. They hear us whingeing about privacy, security, surveillance, etc, but notice that despite our complaints and suspicions, we appear to do nothing about it. In other words, we say one thing and do another, which is as good a working definition of hypocrisy as one could hope for.

This sounds harsh, I know, but the data support it…

Read on

Back to Hobbes?

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At dinner in St John’s this evening after Timothy Garton-Ash’s Hinsley Memorial Lecture, a friend sitting across from me offered this thought. Politicians in liberal democracies have traditionally made promises of better economic futures when seeking election. But given that we now appear to be moving into an era when the economic prospects of children are, on average, worse than those of their parents, then that campaigning option will be closed off. In which case, what can politicians offer their electorates?

The obvious answer is: security. More and more ‘national security’.

Which brings us neatly back to Hobbes.