articles
-
Apple may have set out to be culture defining – and they may still want to do so in some area – but I don’t think that holds true in general anymore. ↩︎
- Open app filled with enthusiasm
- Scroll through my feed
- Ignore all the entertainment news that keeps popping up for some reason
- Ignore the low-rent ads
- Find something interesting; tap it
- Recoil in horror as my dark-mode feed changes to an article with an obnoxiously bright white background with text I can’t customise
- Saying either “love you too” or “see you soon” to my partner on the phone (unclear which, likely the latter).
- Something someone said on the radio, which was neither “Hey” nor “Siri”, while I was driving alone. I have, on numerous occasions, tried to invoke Siri intentionally while driving. It hasn’t worked.
- My vacuum cleaner. (How?)
- “Someone’s over there,” said while playing an online shooter with friends, leading me to say “not now Siri” in a panicked tone; my friends, fairly, laughed.
- The question “Shall we?”
- Casual conversation with my partner in the kitchen.
- My vacuum, again. (Seriously, how?).
- Almost any phrase with an S in it apart from “Hey Siri”.
Apple never really gave Apple Arcade a chance (and that’s why it needs to change)
Looks like Apple Arcade may not be going as planned. They’re cutting some games in development and moving to more addictive games, according to a report from Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier in Bloomberg:
On calls in mid-April, an Apple Arcade creative producer told some developers that their upcoming games didn’t have the level of “engagement” Apple is seeking, the people said. Apple is increasingly interested in titles that will keep users hooked, so subscribers stay beyond the free trial of the service, according to the people. They asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.
[…]
On the calls with developers in April, the Apple Arcade representative cited a specific example of the type of game the company wants: Grindstone, an engaging puzzle-action game by Capybara Games that has many levels.
Grindstone is great. But it’s a refined, well-polished version of all the mobile games that hook you in with moreish, one-more-round puzzles as a way of getting you to pay for in-game currency or extra lives via microtransactions. That’s not a criticism of Grindstone: it’s a fantastic version of that kind of game and it’s all the better because Apple Arcade’s model means it doesn’t need those in-app purchases. So it’s no surprise that it has some of the highest levels of “engagement” among Arcade’s offerings.
But Apple Arcade was pitched as an antidote to those kinds of games. And focusing solely on “engagement” misses the point of what makes games valuable in the first place.
I spent most of my time in Apple Arcade in Grindstone but it’s not the most memorable experience . I certainly wouldn’t recommend people subscribe to the service to play it. It’s not even the best version of the one-more-round puzzler on offer, in my opinion: Card of Darkness has a lot more going for it.
Sayonara Wild Hearts, meanwhile, is straight-up one of the coolest games I’ve ever played. It was the reason I tried Apple Arcade in the first place. Give me one of them every few months and I’ll sub for a while. I think about it all the time; I listened to the soundtrack on Apple Music non-stop for almost three months. It’s amazing.
But it’s also a play-through-once-and-never touch-it-again game. And that’s okay. I don’t need mobile games I go to again and again and again. And trying to provide that via a subscription kind of misses the point of those games anyway. A mobile game subscription makes sense if you’re offering a slew of great games that’ll occupy you for a little while before you move onto something else. That makes sense for the model.
My partner is currently obsesses with a Candy-Crush-like game were you solve a bunch of symbol-match puzzles in order to refurbish a mansion. She’s been playing it nightly for the last little while. Before that, it was a word game. Before that, it was a different word game. She’s the model mobile game player: get into a game for a little while, play it exclusively, move onto something else.
It’s high engagement. But it doesn’t make sense for a subscription. Why pay a monthly fee when you can get more-or-less the same experience for free? People may end up spending more in micro-transactions but no-one ever goes into one of those games thinking they’ll buy the in-game currency.
Apple Arcade was a chance to do something different in the mobile game space. And it delivered some cool, interesting, and fun stuff. It was always going to be a tough sell: their hasn’t been a consistent flow of fantastic, single-hit games on the App Store to built a real, vibrant audience for this kind of stuff. There have been a lot of amazing games, of course, but they pale into comparison to the addictive, “high engagement” games on the platform. Part of that is because of the business model Apple promoted in the App Store. Hard to build a high quality, standalone game when you can only charge a few dollars a pop.
Apple never gave the kinds of games Apple Arcade promoted a chance to thrive on their own. That’s why the service was so appealing – maybe they’d finally have one – but that makes it hard to get people who aren’t already into those kinds games a reason to subscribe. They’ve got their games already and they’re the games the App Store has always prioritised, thank you very much.
I’m reading a lot into their statements here but it looks like they could be sacrificing that to do a slightly more polished version of what’s already out there. I’m sure it’s a wise business decision and I’m sure they know what they’re doing –it’d be remiss of me to assume they don’t understand why people play the mobile games they do. But it’s still a disappointing move.
Hopefully the Sayonara Wild Hearts of Apple Arcade still get made. And I’m sure they will. After all, Netflix pump out mediocre show after mediocre show and fall onto greatness occasionally. No reason that won’t happen with games here.
kites can't jive (June 2020)
June needs to be a month of change. The Black Lives Matter movement reverberated around the world and reminded everyone, again, that the USA, Australia, and elsewhere have systematically destroyed the lives of black people. And that needs to change. And that change involves the structures that govern every day life and it involves us, as individuals.
kites can’t jive is a music column. It’s narrow in its focus. But part of June’s changes, for me, was to listen to more black musicians. Sometimes it was rediscovering an old favourite, sometimes it was looking for new voices. It was always about listening to the stories of talented artists.
This isn’t activism. It’s not a replacement for the work we all need to do to tear down systemic racism or address the history of injustice our societies have perpetuated. Education is important, yeah, and listening to and supporting the work of black artists can be part of that.
But you don’t get to listen to a few tracks and read a book or two and say “I’m done”. This is step one. This is a soundtrack. There’s a lot more work to do.
Listen to this
Nyaaringu by Miiesha
Mieesha’s Nyaaringu is incredible. Just take a moment to go listen to album opener “Caged bird”. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the album: the moving spoken word, provided by Miiesha’s late grandmother, Miiesha’s voice, and an exploration of her experience as a young Indigenous woman.
The second song on the album, “Black privilege“ continues the theme:
Funny, when I lose, you keep on complaining Then write the new rules, just to be bent on breaking Told me that I choose the noose that you’ve been making Then I need to prove I’m worthy of saving
Nyaaringu would be great if it was just the songs. But the spoken word interludes from Miiesha’s grandmother are peppered throughout the album. Her story, her advice, and recollections mirror, extend, and contextualise Miiesha’s lyrics.
It’s a reminder of an important truth: the struggles Miiesha’s singing about have been here for a long time. And, as she says on “Black privilege“ they’re a result of deliberate choices by white Australia.
Other highlights
Black thoughts by Ziggy Ramo. A stunning debut album that explores Australia’s history of racism, colonialism, and trauma.
Rosetta - EP by Dua Salah. Soulful, hypnotic hip-hop about everything from race, to gender, to identity, and more.
Dead like me by Danny Denial. Heartfelt, raw, catchy rock that mixes bits of indie and grunge. “Suck my Jesus” has a perfectly infectious hook you’ll feel weird about singing around the house.
Pleasure venom – EP by Pleasure Venom. Everything you want in a banger of a post-punk record.
ALL-AMERIKKKAN BADASS by Joey Badass. Badass takes his golden-age-of-hip-hop sound, pushes it forward, and uses it tell listeners what it’s like to live in the US as a young black man.
The return by Sampa The Great. Fantastic storytelling, tight flows, and a real statement of intent in Sampa The Great’s fantastic debut album.
RTJ4 by Run The Jewels. If there was ever a time for RTJ to come out swinging, it’s now.
Abandoned language by dälek. “Turn that page muthafucka cause our story’s all scripted. 600 years, ain’t a fuckin' thing different. Don’t speak to us about strength and upliftment. The closest thing to paradise is mad distant.”
Everyone’s joining the ban train
The bans are flowing.
Reddit banned r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and 2,000+ other subreddits:
Reddit will ban r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and about 2,000 other communities today after updating its content policy to more explicitly ban hate speech.
“I have to admit that I’ve struggled with balancing my values as an American, and around free speech and free expression, with my values and the company’s values around common human decency,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a call with reporters.
It’s almost as if people are realising that no one platform has an obligation to house abusive, degrading discussion.
That’s not incompatible with free speech.
Every discussion reaches an end point, for a time. That means platform holders do, at some point, get to say “Hey, you’ve been talking about this for a while now and we’ve decided that people shouldn’t be vilified or denigrated on the basis of their race. That’s the decision we’ve reached after your voluminous arguments here”.
That’s how the entirely fictional “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work. People agitate for a point of view and, if they’re convincing, that point of view is codified in the policies and laws and moral code of a society. In the case of online chatter, those policies manifest as bans or community guidelines.
These things are never definitive and permanent. People will keep arguing that, hey, maybe people should be attacked on the basis of their race and those people may successfully convince major online platforms that those arguments should be allowed. They’ve certainly done a good job of it at the highest levels of government for a long, long time.
But, for now, the pendulum seems to be swinging ever-so-slightly away from that POV. It’s only taken years to get here.
Back to the bans.
Twitch has “temporarily” banned Donald Trump’s account:
Twitch has temporarily banned President Donald Trump, in the latest surprise and high-profile suspension from the streaming service. Trump’s account was banned for “hateful conduct” that was aired on stream, and Twitch says the offending content has now been removed.
This comes after Twitch permanently banned the massively popular Dr Disrespect for as-yet unknown reasons and swathes of other streamers over sexual abuse allegations. (There’s nothing to suggest that Disrespect’s ban falls into that category, though.
Meanwhile, the Indian Government has shut down a long list of Chinese-based apps:
The government of India has decided to ban 59 apps of Chinese origin as border tensions simmer in Ladakh after a violent, fatal face-off between the Indian and Chinese armies. The list of apps banned by the government includes TikTok, which is extremely popular.
A government press release announcing the ban stated: “The Ministry of Information Technology, invoking it’s power under section 69A of the Information Technology Act read with the relevant provisions of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking of Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009 and in view of the emergent nature of threats has decided to block 59 apps since in view of information available they are engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order”.
Others include ShareIt, Clash of Kings, WeChat, and UC Browser. Here’s a full list.
This is what it looks like when a government is really trying to limit what people say and where they say it.
Update
YouTube has removed five channels used by high-profile white nationalists in the US:
The removed accounts include those owned by far-right political entertainer Stefan Molyneux, white nationalist outlets American Renaissance and Radix Journal, as well as longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. YouTube also removed two associated channels: one belonging to alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer and another hosting American Renaissance podcasts.
Platforms like Mixer, Twitch, and YouTube don’t care about you
Microsoft shuttered their streaming service Mixer without warning. That extends to people streaming on the platform – most of them found out at the same time we did. Here’s Alex Walker, reporting for Kotaku:
Some Mixer streamers discovered the news during the middle of their stream, while they were processing the shock of racial allegations the company. “Mixer just tweeted, let’s go Mixer,” streamer PrincessCourt told her chat, resulting in a long, quiet stare at the screen while she processed the news.
This must be devastating for people who have built an audience on Mixer. Especially since Mixer presented the shutdown and the shift to Facebook Gaming as a good thing.
That’s, ah, a failure of communications right there.
The headline on Walker’s article, itself a quote from PrincessCourt, is right: “They clearly don’t give a shit.” And, really, services like Mixer (and Twitch, and YouTube) don’t care about most of the people streaming on their platform.
A lot of people within those companies care about streamers, of course. But, organisationally, most creators don’t matter. The big ones – the people who pull in massive numbers – matter because they’re the people who provide scale. And scale is how outfits like Mixer make money and gain any semblance of cultural cache.
YouTube celebrated small, indie creators for a time because that’s how they built scale. Once the company was big enough and, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly, those smaller creators were less important. A whole lot of other things – like massively popular creators and music labels and movie studios – were driving millions of views and, thus, millions of dollars in revenue.
That matters more, to YouTube and to Mixer and to Twitch, than fostering a familial relationship with small-fry makers.
And that’s the tragedy, really. Services like Mixer and all the rest push this cultural line of “You matter, we’re a community, we’re a family” to hide the fact that, when you publish videos on these services, you’re working for them. You’re finding views and giving them something to run ads against.
You’re an employee, but you’re not. So you don’t deserve the same treatment or protections.
And, unless you’re someone they need to make a whole lot of money, you don’t matter. They don’t give a shit.
A long list of short thoughts about things announced at WWDC (2020)
Apple announced a lot of new things for their platforms at WWDC. Let’s turn them into a list, complete with quick reactions.
Overall
Kinda wish Tim Cook opened with “Hey there”.
Hearing a room full of people cheer about setting default email and browser apps would’ve been something.
Nothing on my wish list was announced because my wishes are, again, too brave.
Whole lot of nice steps forward for mature OS platforms.
iOS 14 and iPadOS 14
iOS 14: What if Android looked nice?
App Library: Just let me default to the alphabetised list, like a civilised person.
App Clips: Can’t wait to be reminded they exist next year.
App tracking controls and privacy info: Love it.
Memoji: Still hard to believe that we don’t have the technology to make a hug emoji that doesn’t look like someone smiling at and backing away from a mugger.
Messages: All the changes would’ve been great if my main group chats hadn’t migrated to Discord a while ago.
Pinned conversations: Legitimately handy. No more scrolling through acres of spam messages to find people I only ignore by accident.
Emoji search: And there was much rejoicing.
Widgets: My obsessive tinkering with my home screen just got more complicated.
Compact UI: Phone and FaceTime calls look great, as goes picture-in-picture.
Compact Siri: Now it won’t take over my screen when Siri decides to pop up for no good reason at all. Hooray.
Default email and browser apps: Cool. Just means I’m going to spend hours researching new email apps again.
Translate: Fun.
Maps: Lots of great stuff that might come to Australia eventually.
Maps guides: Clever way to add useful content without relying on crowd sourcing, a la Google Maps.
Car Keys: Can’t wait for my partner to tell me we’ll never get a car with this.
Apple Music: Changes look positive. I’ll have inexplicably strong feelings about all of this once I can play with it all.
Scribble: This will be a real “what, I couldn’t always do this?” feature once it drops.
macOS: Big Sur
macOS: Huge Unit.
macOS: Self-Aware Name We Hope You Meme.
macOS: We Fucking Love Mountains.
Notification centre: “We think it’s good now, guys, seriously.”
UI changes: “How many synonymous do you have for ‘sleek’?”
UI changes: Lots of nice changes I’ll stop noticing quickly but will miss if I go back to an older version of macOS.
Control centre: Makes sense. Seems fine.
Safari password monitoring: Getting closer to being a decent iPassword replacement for me.
Safari privacy report: Love it.
Macs and “Apple silicon”
Can’t wait to see this evolve. And to read more about it from people who know a lot more about this than me. The transition should be finished right around the time I’m looking for a new computer. Convenient.
tvOS 14
watchOS 7
Sleep tracking: How long until Apple releases a watch band designed especially for sleeping in?
Sleep app: This looks like a nice evolution of some features that were already pretty okay.
Charge notifications: Clever and helpful.
New watch faces: Can’t wait for the yearly “They can’t make nice faces” takes.
Complications: Should be fun.
Fitness workouts: Reminds me that I really need to clean out my workout list.
Hand washing: Cute headline that probably won’t amount to much in the short term. Clever tech, though.
Apple's Windows Problem
You know what makes a phone or computer great? Amazing software. You know what doesn’t? So much rubbish software that you can’t find the amazing stuff.
Apple doesn’t quite have the problem. Yet. But it’s close.
Developer Will Shipley nailed the issues facing iOS and macOS devs in his scathing response to a survey from Apple. The whole thing is worth a look over but this is the crux for me:
Having thousands of third-party developers coming up with great ideas is the way Apple thrives. Right now GOOD third-party developers are dying out. Yes, there are a billion terrible apps in the App Store, so it’s easy to say, “Oh, we have developers.” That’s what Microsoft told themselves for years, “We have tons of (bad) software! There’s no problem!”
I built a gaming PC a little while ago. There’s a pandemic on, I was bored, my Xbox is uninspiring. Things happen. And it was fun: I bought a Mac-like case, put the thing together, now I have a lot of sensational games to play.
I won’t be doing any work on it, though. When I rebuilt kites can’t fly, I did it on my MacBook Pro. When I write, I do it on my MacBook. When I have to do anything that isn’t playing games, I’ll be doing it on my MacBook. That won’t be changing any time soon.
Why? Because the Windows software scene is bleak. Sure, it’s functional but it’s not much more than that. Even the software I use to monitor my PC – and this is software that comes highly recommended – is a nightmare to use. It’s as if the obtuseness is the point.
Taste matters
A little back, I was looking for a nice markdown editor I could install on one of my work laptops. It was a decrepit Windows thing. There were a few that seemed okay. But there was nothing nice.
There’s iA Writer now. And Mark Text. But not a whole lot else. Meanwhile, macOS is lousy with beautiful, robust markdown editors. And that’s just one type of app.
I appreciate functionality, of course. But I also have taste. And I want the developers whose software I use to have taste too.
The good ones do.
Here’s Will again:
Apple should be doing everything it can to support good third-party developers that make the real Apple apps that make Apple devices unique, and provide cool Apple-only experiences. But, again, all the developers I know who do this are dying off, because of the App Store’s policies.
I used an Android phone for a year or so. Didn’t take. Went back the iPhone. I have a Pixel 3 for work, now. Figured I’d try the platform again in a non-committal way. Hasn’t taken either.
The phone is fine, in most ways. I could even get used to the OS. It’s just the apps. Everything I rely on may have functional equivalents on Android but none of them are as nice. As tasteful.
Fantastical. Drafts. Overcast. NetNewsWire. That’s just on my home screen.
Apollo. CalcBot. Elk is the single most elegant currency converters I’ve ever seen.
It’s a currency converter. Why does a currency converter need elegance? It doesn’t. But it has it. Because some Apple devs – the good ones, the ones that make Apple’s platforms worthwhile – value elegance alongside functionality and pragmatism.
I’m sure a lot of Windows and Android devs do too. But, for whatever reason, they’re a lot harder to find. Maybe the Apple’s App Stores do a marginally better job of it. Maybe the Apple communities I’ve stumbled on spend more time lifting up elegant apps than the Windows once I’ve found.
I don’t know what it is. But it’s something I value about Apple’s tech.
More than marketing
Apple seems to value it too. Or they like saying they do. Every WWDC, the company does something to signal that the devs that make stuff for Apple’s platforms are special. That they’re appreciated.
That’s what they say. But that doesn’t always line up with what they do. The requests in Wil’s tweet aren’t new. But Apple seems to be going in the opposite direction.
Maybe it’s easier to produce a five-minute video once a year to tell people they’re loved than to make the course correct required to really demonstrate it.
That’s just speculation on my part. Maybe Apple are doing the right thing, on balance, for most people (according to the data they value). Maybe I’m being unfairly cynical. But it’s hard not to be.
I’ve taken a stroll around Windows’ and Android’s avenues recently and I’m not a fan. The apps and software on Apple’s hardware aren’t anything like that at the moment.
They still have taste. I hope they keep it.
Mates don’t let mates kill people
Speaking of Australia’s relationship with the United States, Michael Wesley characterised it perfectly as he described how, over time, the US became less of an ally to Australia and more of a “mate” [$] – and how that isn’t necessarily a good thing:
Yet Australia’s continual invoking of loyalty and sacrifice has given the alliance a marriage-like status, in which adherence to our ally’s cause has become a test of national character. We have lost sight of the limited-liability nature of the alliance at a time when this quality is more necessary than ever. As the United States needs Australia more, we have the chance – and the obligation – to shape the alliance in our interests. Instead, we have become less questioning and more compliant with each presidential tweet.
According to Wesley, no politician of a major political party in Australia has questioned the Aus/US alliance since the early 2000s. That’s not healthy. And recent events in the USA should make that clear.
Nor is it the usual order of things:
For seventy years Australia has been creative in reshaping its alliance with the United States around the evolution of their shared challenges; it must rediscover this tradition at a time of arguably the greatest contest over their positions in Asia.
Wesley was writing about how China is “testing the alliance” between the United States and Australia. And it is.
Right now, the actions of the American government should be testing it too. Australian politicians have been presenting the “mateship” between the countries as a matter of values – not pragmatism – for quite some time. It’s time to ask what they stand for.
But, given the way countless Australian governments have treated our Indigenous population, maybe our countries have bonded over shared values we don’t like to talk about all that much.
Australia’s relationship with the US started with deception
Foreign policy is, obviously, complex. A lot goes into building and maintaining relationships, especially with your biggest allies on the world stage. Still, it’s worth thinking about the tenor of your partners.
I’ve been thinking about Australia’s relationship with the United States. Specifically, if you remove the sizeable (and important) economic and defensive benefits of the USA, would they still be the kind of country you’d want to associate yourself with?
The superpower comes with a lot of positives. But, geopolitically, one of the early interactions between the countries [$] way back in 1908 was instructive:
Australians christened the American visitors “the Great White Fleet” in a surge of pride at what their Anglo-Saxon kin on the other side of the Pacific could achieve. But amid the celebrations of fraternity in Sydney, Melbourne and Albany, the officers of the Great White Fleet were quietly collecting intelligence on Australia’s coastal defences. These reports contributed to an American plan to attack British Pacific bases, including in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Fremantle, Albany and Auckland, should Britain’s alliance with Japan draw it into a war between the United States and Japan in Asia.
Nothing starts a long and productive relationship like a little bit of light deception.
Maybe things haven’t changed all that much. Take this phone call between US President Donald Trump and Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison from early this week, as described by Paul Bongiorno for The Saturday Paper:
According to the White House’s version, the US riots were not mentioned in the conversation between Morrison and the president. The Australian version says “both leaders discussed the distressing situation in the United States and efforts to ensure it would be resolved peacefully”.
Phone calls can be tricky. But you’d hope everyone involved could at least agree on what they spoke about.
Trump made the call after storming a church for a photo-op; an Australian journalist and camera man were beaten by police outside the White House in the lead up.
The world leaders didn’t discuss it. Morrison didn’t know about it (but has since said he’d support a formal complaint). I guess the PM also didn’t know about Trump’s call for “total domination” of protesters – which he made a few hours before they spoke.
That’s a lot of obfuscation for a supposedly close relationship. But, given its beginnings, maybe that’s no surprise.
Police Commissioner: the officer who threw a kid to the ground had a bad day
A police officer in New South Wales, Australia, held a 16-year-old Indigenous boy’s hands behind his back – he wasn’t resisting – and then kicked his legs out from underneath him. The boy’s head crashed against the concrete below. He had no way to break his fall.
Here’s what the NSW Police Commissioner, Mark Fuller, had to say:
The fact that this officer doesn’t have a chequered history and he has been in [the police force] for three and a half years, if the complaint is sustained against him, you would have to say he has had a bad day.
He had a “bad day”.
The officer walked over to a teenager, restrained him, and deliberately and purposefully made that teenager hit the ground without any way to protect himself.
Wouldn’t have happened to a white kid.
He had a “bad day.”
What did the kid do? During an argument with the cops, he said I’ll crack ya fucking jaw bro". Right thing to do? No. But here’s the thing: he’s a 16-year-old kid. The cop is an adult. And a cop. He’s supposed to be the grown-up in the room.
The officer escalated the situation. He took a bad situation and made it worse. Check the footage. He had the kid restrained. The kid wasn’t struggling. The officer could’ve pushed the kid to the ground. He could’ve done any number of things to either control or deescalate the situation.
Instead, he made things much worse.
He had a “bad day.”
Would’ve have happened to a white kid.
Four years ago, a drunk white woman pushed a cop into a bush – actually pushed him, not threatened – and was gently led away and arrested by two other officers. The officer who was pushed seemed amused when talking about it later.
Guess he wasn’t having a “bad day”.
Update
Ben Fordham on Twitter:
Police Commissioner Mick Fuller says he is “absolutely” sorry about handling of the Surry Hills arrest: “We could have handled that situation better. (But) I’m sure people don’t want the officer sacked.”
Fuller’s half right. The situation definitely could’ve been handled better.
kites can't jive (May 2020)
May was all about catchy, guitar-drive tunes (and a band whose name you can’t say in polite company). Lot of local artists too: what better time to discover the artists around you than when you can’t go see any of them live?
I discovered some great acts. dave the band and Suss Cunts are both Australian and Molly Payton is from New Zealand. Close enough.
Here are my musical highlights for May.
Yoch! Bangers, Vol. 1 by dave the band. Catchy indie rock with an Aussie pub rock twist.
Temper – EP by Suss Cunts. “Vaxxer” is an anthem for the misinformation age.
Mess – EP by Molly Payton. Molly Payton is going to be a big deal.
Stranger Fruit by Zeal & Ardor. Combine old school blues and black metal but make it work. It took me four years to come around to Zeal & Ardor.
I Laughed, U Cried, We Swapped. by cbakl. Stylish instrumental hip-hop for when you want people to think you’re cooler than you really are.
I update the playlist as I stumble on music I like. Check it out.
Only monsters reply all
Lavender Baj, writing about the “shopping cart” theory, for Pedestrian:
Well as the theory goes, whether or not you return the shopping trolley determines what kind of person you are. Why? Well because there’s no real consequences to NOT returning the trolley, nobody really cares if you do or don’t and there’s no reward for doing the right thing. But that’s just the thing, we all know that putting back the trolley IS the right thing.
“A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it” the post reads.
Related theory: the reply-all response.
I teach at an Australian university. This morning, I woke up to a nightmare in my email inbox. Someone (who later claimed they were “hacked”) sent a link to an email list. It has 4,600 people on it. How many people do you think hit “reply all” to say they want to be unsubscribed from this list? Too many. How many people do think then hit reply all to say “stop using reply all” with a few sanctimonious exclamation points. Again, too many.
Pressing “reply all” is the easy way out. In some situations, it’s good office politics. “Visibility” and all that. Defaulting to it requires no thought. And, in situations like this, it means you don’t need to do the work required to figure out who manages the list. (Someone was ID’d as the list manager, by the way. That person then had to hit reply all to tell everyone that they, in fact, don’t manage the list.)
And these people are moulding the minds of young Australians.
Reply all is the communications version of the shopping cart. Not pressing reply all requires thought, consideration, and a desire to not mindlessly gunk up 4,599 other inboxes. Pressing reply all is easy. It signals your wanton indifference to the lives of others. It’s an email hand grenade into the trenches of my already riddled attention span.
Put the shopping cart away. Don’t reply all unless you actually have to. Be a decent human being.
5 nit-picky changes I want to see in iOS 14
Some people have ideas that would push iOS forward. Make it a better, richer, more nuanced platform. Something that will enrich both your personal and professional lives.
Not me.
My grievances are smaller. Some would say more intimate. People may dismiss them as “petty”. To them I say “You lack the courage to sweat the stuff that, really, doesn’t matter.”
Here are my 5 nit-picky – nay, brave – changes I want to see in iOS 14.
Edit snooze time
Occasionally I want to snooze my alarm. But I want to snooze for a period other than 9 minutes. That’s what the iOS alarm snooze is set to – 9 minutes – and it can’t be changed.
And it’s set that way for arcane reasons: apparently it’s because of the hardware limitations of the first clocks with a a snooze function.
Surely we’ve transcended our love of the failures of yore? Apple certainly haven’t, in the software-clock department. Don’t keep sleeping on courageous change, Apple. Let us set our snooze time.
Preview wallpaper on both lock and home screens
You can have different wallpapers on your lock screen and your home screen. Mine are always different. But you can only preview a new wallpaper on your lock screen. A travesty.
Sometimes my choice for the home screen clashes with my app icons. That just won’t do. A preview would save me a lot of time.
This, however, is dangerously close to be a good idea.
Swap snooze and stop buttons for alarms
I want an alarm to get me out of bed when willpower won’t. And willpower never will. Right now, the iOS alarm is letting me down.
Design is about prioritisation. You make the things you want your audience to do more prominent. Apple wants you to stay in bed. When your alarm goes off, the snooze button is front and centre and brightly coloured. The stop button? Small and tiny and grey.
Apple wants you to snooze. Sure, it might be the more commonly used button. Sure, accidentally pressing the off button has more downside than accidentally pressing the snooze button. But Apple needs to take a stand for standing up in the morning.
Don’t indulge my stay-in-bed bullshit, Apple. Indulge my overly-opinionated-about-buttons bullshit. Swap the snooze and stop buttons.
Pick whether the time on lock screen is light or dark
iOS changes time and date on your lock screen would to black text if you have a light enough wallpaper
It’s inconsistent and weird.
If you have dark text and you preview a new wallpaper, you’ll see black text. But! If you then set that wallpaper and Apple doesn’t think it worth that dark text, it’ll revert to white. Even if you prefer it the other way.
I want to experience photos of my white cat being an absolute weirdo on my lock screen. I also want to see the time on my lock screen in a comfortable way.
Let me decide if I want to make the time on my lock screen black. Give me that option.
View time as analogue clock
I have a passion for making choices that make my life more difficult in a small, meaningless way. It’s usually for aesthetic reasons.
Thus: let me display the time as an analogue clock. Not on the lock screen. In the top left-hand corner of the phone when it’s unlocked.
Now, I admit, this would be noticeably less useful than a digital clock. I understand this. But, Apple, you let me view the time as an analogue clock in macOS’s menu bar.
It’s daft. It helps no-one. But I can do it. And I like the way it looks. Bring it to iOS. I make like noon and bring my hands together in prayer.
My essential self-isolation apps
Life is different now, to put it mildly. People all around the world are stuck indoors, perhaps indefinitely. It’s a new, smaller, world.
Personally, I’ve been self-isolating and working from home for two weeks. All in all, it’s been okay. I get to spend all day with my partner and my cat – two of my favourite people in the world.
But, pleasant companions aside, other things help. Love alone cannot build a new, healthy routine. Here are the apps and services I’ve been using to keep me sane.
Down Dog
I get profoundly twitchy if I don’t exercise regularly. Some old injuries flare up too but, mostly, I just bounce around the house and annoy my partner. Thankfully, yoga is a perfect home workout – even if my cat loves to sit underneath whoever’s planking in the area.
Down Dog is my favourite yoga app, hands down. It has variable routines (generated each time you use the app) and paid members can add “boosts” to target a particular location or movement, like “hamstring opening” or “standing balances”. Add in a range of instructor voices, music, and movement display options – stills or video, at a mix of quality and detail – and you have a comprehensive package to get you moving.
And move you do. I’m pretty fit, but not particularly experienced at yoga, and the Intermediate 1 difficulty setting gets me sweating. Thankfully, Down Dog makes it easy for complete beginners to get started too.
There’s Beginner 1 and 2 levels to work through and a range of yoga styles to play with. Full Practice is your default but, if that’s a bit intimidating (or you just want a mellow stretch before bed), something like Restorative or Gentle could be right for you.
Down Dog has been a life saver during my first two weeks stuck in the house. No doubt it’ll get me through everything that follows too.
Basketball GM
Basketball GM will be the death of me.
It’s a web-based basketball management game. You pick a team, build out the roster, manage your finances, and try to achieve glory. It’s the most addictive (and intuitive) spreadsheet I’ve ever played.
I’m an NBA nerd and this is a perfect replacement for the suspended season. There are even custom player lists available so you can recreate what we’ve lost. For what it’s worth, Houston won the 2020 Finals in my game. As a Spurs fan, it caused me no small amount of grief.
It’s uncanny how invested I am in the careers of my players. At this point, they’re just randomly generated names with simple portraits but I truly want them to succeed. I fist-pump when they do and blame myself when they don’t. My heart glows when a favourite player of mine retires and enters the Hall of Fame.
I’m in deep with Basketball GM. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve sat down at my computer to do something only to spend 20 minutes running through a few seasons instead.
I have a roster to balance, after all. It’s important work.
Headspace
A lot of people have spilled a lot of ink and pixels writing about Headspace. With good reason: it’s the mindfulness app par excellence.
The gist: Headspace combines a well-structured approach to meditation with charming animations and themed sessions for almost everything. From relationships to competing, there’s mediation for you. There’s also semi-guided and unguided options available if you just want a slightly twee meditation timer.
And Andy, who leads most of the sessions, just has an excellent voice. That helps.
There’s a free trial for anyone interested. I accidentally rolled straight onto the yearly plan but I don’t regret it. I feel better about myself and life in general when I meditate on the regular. Headspace is a great way to do that.
If you want a free alternative, try Smiling Mind. It features a nice range of programs (including dedicated streams for kids) and is completely free. It’s also translated some of its problems in an Indigenous Australian language, which is a sign of a great company.
Overcast (and a digital radio)
This may surprise you but podcasts are great. And Overcast is my go-to podcast app.
It’s filled with handy features, like Smart Speed, which cuts out silences in whatever you’re listening to, and Vocal Boost, which, yeah, does what it says on the tin. All in all, great app.
More existentially, though, podcasts just add more voices to the room. Often familiar voices. It’s easy to build relationships with podcasters – you hear them so often, and so intimately, that the best ones become familiar. In a time when you can’t have friends and family over, it’s nice to fill your house with friendly voices that aren’t the ones you live with.
Having a digital radio in the kitchen helps too. I’ve had ABC Radio National (a fantastic news and current affairs station from Australia’s national broadcaster) or Triple R (a community station based in Melbourne) on in the background any time I’m just pottering around the house. Both are great passive listening and both offer something valuable: RN keeps me informed, RRR keeps me connected to my community.
Libby and NetNewsWire
Libby and NetNewsWire are unlike except that they both serve up the written word. But that’s enough of a link to bundle them together.
Libby is a library app. It connects to your local library service and, provided you’re a member, lets you access its collection of e- and audio-books. It’s not as elegant a system as it could be: you’re limited to the library’s catalogue (which can vary wildly) and they don’t have all too many copies of each book available, despite being electronic, so you may have to wait for popular titles.
Fortunately, my local library network has a robust online offering. And Libby connects with my Kobo ereader (the excellent Aura One). Anything I find on my phone (a better browsing experience) appears there (a better reading experience).
NetNewsWire, however, is the best RSS reader going on both iOS and macOS. There’s more news than I can deal with at the moment and the ratio between signal and noise favours the latter. NNW is a joy to use and lets you filter by stories published today, making it simple to parse the most recent news.
I’d be lost without it.
Activity – Apple Watch
Here’s the thing: I enjoy walking. I enjoy exercise. I enjoy sunshine. Neither of those things by themselves will get me moving during the day right now. Filling a ring on my Watch? I’ll go for three strolls a day to do that.
I’m not quite the Activity Rings obsessive I used to be (I used to be a monster) but, now that I’m working from home every, I need a reminder or two to stand up occasionally. A little tap on the wrist makes that easier.
It’s also perfect for keeping to some semblance of a routine. Having stand hours, energy burned, and minutes moving represented visually keeps me on track. I used to fill them comfortably; it’d be easy to assume I still will. Now, when I get halfway through a day and see that I’ve barely made a dent in any of them, I’m reminded that, yeah, my routines have changed. I need to change how I approach health, too.
I mean, I get annoying when I don’t exercise, after all.
"Digital Air Jordans" and the future of collectibles
Benjamin Wallace, writing for Intelligencer:
“The elevator pitch I always give,” offered Duncan “is that a nifty is a fundamentally better digital good.”
Based on the same blockchain technology as cryptocurrency, nifties are a departure from [previous digital goods]. Short for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), they are unique digital objects you can buy, own, and sell. The brothers’ go-to analogy is that nifties are like “digital Air Jordans.” “If I own a pair of shoes and Nike shuts down, I don’t expect that my shoes would just disappear,” Duncan said. “We expect our items to behave a certain way, and past digital items have not.”
The brothers see nifties’ first mainstream application being rare digital artworks and collectibles. MLB has already launched Champions, a line of bobbleheadlike crypto-collectibles, and the NBA has a similar collection in the works.
If they hit the right markets, nifties (or something similar) could be a winner. People already spend a lot of time and money collecting items in videogames like Destiny, Fortnite, and World of Warcraft (not to mention the people who make and sell items in other online games).
Add in elements of uniqueness and tradability and it’s easy to see these things taking off. They’ll just have to avoid talking about blockchain too much – that’ll kill any of the fun before it starts.
Digital artworks might be a harder sell, though. Art, at its best or its most portentous, has a physical form. Whether or you’re hanging a painting to look at it on your wall or placing a sculpture so your guests know you have a work by that particular artist, the physical presense of the thing is part of the point. I’m sure that’ll cross over to digital goods sooner or later – maybe having a screen on the wall to show a work won’t be all that different to having a canvas for most people – but it seems like a harder sell.
Collectibles though? They’ll have legs in the right communities.
What will survive when the millennial aesthetic dies?
Molly Fischer, writing for The Cut:
You walk beneath a white molded archway. You’ve entered a white room.
A basketlike lamp hangs overhead; other lamps, globes of brass and glass, glow nearby. Before you is a couch, neatly tufted and boxy, padded with an assortment of pillows in muted geometric designs. Circles of faded terra-cotta and pale yellow; mint-green and mustard confetti; white, with black half-circles and two little dots — aha. Those are boobs. You look down. Upon the terrazzo nougat of the coffee table, a glass tray trimmed in brass. It holds a succulent in a lumpy ceramic pot, a scented candle with a matte-pink label. A fiddle-leaf fig somewhere looms. Above a bookshelf (spines organized by color), a poster advises you to WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE. In the far corner, within the shrine of an arched alcove, atop a marble plinth: one lonely, giant cartoon jungle leaf, tilting from a pink ceramic tube. You sense — in a way you could neither articulate nor explain — the presence of a mail-order foam mattress somewhere close at hand.
I’m doing my bit to make clutter cool again. How about you?
Fischer goes onto explain how the millennial aesthetic came to be and why it prioritises design above all else. Legibility, it seems, is key:
Today, Urban Outfitters sells a pink-and-red poster that says COOL TO BE KIND and another that says BAE BAE BAE. A voice of chatty positivity, conveyed via fun typography, pervades walls, ads, and social media. The text is casual, friendly, and impersonal — the verbal equivalent of a beveled edge. And perhaps all those words are just the logical end point of a broader tendency to prize legibility. Instagrammable is a term that does not mean “beautiful” or even quite “photogenic”; it means something more like “readable.” The viewer could scroll past an image and still grasp its meaning, e.g., “I saw fireworks,” “I am on vacation,” or “I have friends.” On a basic level, the visual experience of a phone favors images and objects that are as legible as possible as quickly as possible: The widely acknowledged clichés of millennial branding — clean typefaces, white space — are less a matter of taste than a concession to this fact.
That legibility reinforces some of the aesthetics other values: comfort, warmth, simplicity. Muted elegance. Fischer contrasts it with the trend that came before – hipster and all its deliberate chunkiness and roughness. The millennial aesthetic drops all that in favour of something nicer, more positive.
It stripping away the rough edges, the aesthetic says “we have only now, finally, thanks to innovation and refinement, arrived at the objectively correct way for things to look.” But in a friendly way.
At that point, “good design” becomes synonymous with “high quality”.
Last year, the interior-design start-up Homepolish collapsed; last month, Casper made its disappointing IPO; last week, Outdoor Voices CEO Tyler Haney stepped down amid reports that her company, based on tastefully colored leggings, was losing cash. Design created an astonishing amount of value in the last ten years, and increasingly that value looks ephemeral… We have lived through a moment in which design came to seem like something besides what it was, like a business model or a virtue or a consolation prize. The sense of safety promised in its soft, clean forms begins to look less optimistic than naïve.
Towards the end of her article, Fischer asks an worthwhile question:
When the time comes — when smooth pastels start to feel a little tacky, when brown starts looking good again — what will be saved? As in any era, most of our belongings will be lost, but fewer than ever seem worth trying to preserve.
Personally, I hope that brown never starts looking good again. But I can’t think of much that’s worth saving. Maybe the iPhone 5. I still like its design. The combination of rounded corners and sharp edges holds up.
Nothing else comes to mind. Bring on the brown, I guess.
The power China has over companies and countries (and how that shapes the world)
Richard McGregor, senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute writing about China’s use of sanctions to flex its power for Australian Foreign Affairs [$]:
In the words of Tsinghua University’s Yan Xuetong, well known for his hawkish views, Chinese diplomacy under Xi Jinping is likely to divide the world increasingly along the lines of “friends and enemies”. Writing in the early years of the Xi administration, Yan said those countries that play a “constructive” role will get “practical benefits” from China’s development. Conversely, antagonistic countries “will face more sanctions and isolation”.
Beijing has stuck to the mindset that it pioneered in the early years of the People’s Republic, using access to its large market as an inducement to get its way and closing off economic opportunities to countries or companies that don’t toe the line. The difference now is that China wields real economic clout as the world’s largest trading power.
China’s affect on other countries, both now and into the future, warrants a great deal of thought and attention. It’s also understandable. They’re a superpower and, as McGregor spells out in his essay, they’ve learned from the United States' playbook in a lot of way.
What deserves an equal amount of attention, albeit for slightly different reason, is the affect China’s government will have on major companies and what they produce.
Creative and commercial output – be it a film, a game, a phone, or anything else – help form our cultural understanding of the world and the assumption we make. It’s not one big thing; it’s thousands of little things, consumed daily. Over time, that forms the fabric of our lives (even if we see through it).
Podcaster Stephen West touches on this in an episode of Philosphize This! discussing the work of Adorno and Horkheimer:
The plots of these movies are going to resemble a sort of: stay in your own lane, don’t become an antagonist in the movie of your life because the bad guy always loses, when life gives you lemons make lemonade and just enjoy your life as much as you can. This becomes the attitude portrayed by art that life begins to imitate. The culture industry is constantly working to turn everyone into the same person, so that they’ll buy the cultural products that it produces.
What’s even crazier Adorno and Horkheimer point out is that all this stuff is not a mystery to most people. Most people realize at some point in their life that this is going on, that people are just sort of doing their best impression of a conglomeration of different characters they’ve seen on all the movies and TV shows they’ve watched. […]
Why would somebody do that? Why would people that see through what’s going on with the culture industry still choose to participate in the game? Horkheimer would say, because they consider the alternative. What can an average worker REALLY do when it comes to changing it? They’re not gonna run for president. They’re not going to incite revolution. The only change that would come for them if they chose to not participate.
West goes on to explain that Adorno believes that “works of art have the power to give people a different perspective on things without violence. Works of art have the power to change the world.” I’d agree with that. And it doesn’t have to be niche or independent art that achieves this. Mainstream art – mainstream products and platforms – can incite real change (rather than just co-opting the movements behind them.)
Any revolution in China will invariably have to come from within. But external attitudes matter. And, so long as the people making art, products, and platforms want access to China’s market, they will invariably have to toe the line China’s government wants them to toe.
Things like Apple removing the Taiwanese flag from iOS in Hong Kong and Macai or removing an app that helped protestors in Hong Kong avoid police from the App Store may seem small as individual moments but they, along with any number of cultural artefacts made in the past or in the future, have the power to shape our understanding of the world when aggregated.
(In the case of the Taiwanese flag, it literally removed a marker of independent statehood so it’s not even that small a thing when taken as a single act.)
I don’t intend for that to be hyperbolic. But I do think it’s true. How any individual sees and understands what’s happening around them is informed by countless things. Some of which they believe to be instructive but, really, millions more they don’t even notice.
Many of the people who create these cultural touchstones don’t set out to do so. They’re just making a movie or an app. They just want to get paid.1
But, in the process of getting paid in China, they may have to reflect a particular view of the world amenable to an authoritarian government.
That’s not something to be afraid of. But it is something to be aware of and something to think about.
Apple News provides a mediocre reading experience
Apple News should be my kind of service. I’m a media hack with too many opinions about the news and a propulsive need to keep across it at some level. And I believe in the news: I’ve worked in newsrooms and seen first hand the positive effects the media can have on people.
But I can’t stand Apple News. And News+ was a real disappointment.
There are a few reasons. Curating your feed is tedious and the stories that were served to you ranged from on point to baffling in their subject matter. But the main problem was simple: News provides a bad reading experience.
Bleeding edge news, bleeding eyes
A platform’s dedicated news app shouldn’t provide a worse reading experience than your web browser or any RSS app.
That goes double if you’re charging a subscription fee.
Apple News and News+ need to provide a best in class reading experience. They don’t. They don’t even respect your choice of light or dark mode.
Here’s how my average experience in News played out like so:
I dislike reading on screens. I spend a lot of time optimising my experience to be as less-dreadful as possible. That means living in Safari’s reader mode when I’m browsing the web, for example. It’s just plain better than not. I don’t care about any given website’s branding or stylistic flair: just give me your story and get out of the way. RSS readers, at their best, provide the same basic experience.
Apple News doesn’t. It’s a shallower, less malleable, more actively painful reading experience. News+ is even worse – some of its magazines aren’t even optimised for the platform, making their articles difficult to access and navigate.
Finding the good stuff
All of this would matter less if it was better at surfacing worthwhile news and articles. But it’s only okay. Algorithmic suggestions for anything are hard to get right. It may be even more difficult for news.
I have a clear sense of what I want. Maybe that’s part of the problem. I know the topics I want to read about and, in some cases, I know the news sources I want to read. But Apple News makes it hard to control what I see: I can choose outlets I like and subject tags I want but, when I open the app, I have no idea how it’s going to interpret any of that.
So I’ve chosen a few Australian papers – say, The Age and the ABC – in my sources list and “Australian politics” and “Australian government” as topics. Am I going to get an emphasis on those newspapers' political coverage? Or am I going to get whatever’s popular from those outlets and a mix of those topics sprinkled around from wherever?
In my experience, it was the former. I got more sports and entertainment news from The Age than I knew what to do with.
Sometimes, that can be fine. You get surprises and interesting stories you wouldn’t see otherwise. But the noise to signal ratio was untenable. I flicked through countless stories I had no interest in just to find a few that were interesting. And, even then, they were unpleasant to read. (And then there the full-screen ads for awful products and services.)
Sure, I could spend time “liking” and “disliking” stories to help train News. But why would I spend that time doing something vague and obscure – what’s it really doing, anyway? – when I could spend thirty minutes curating a set of RSS feeds to deliver news in the areas I’m interested in from a variety of news sources I know can deliver high quality journalism?
News+ went some way towards ameliorating that problem by providing magazine and newspaper editions but, ultimately, it has a limited range and it’s cumbersome to navigate.
Breaking: do better
Apple News is great for a lot of people. I’ve seen what it can do for a news story: it drives a lot of traffic. People are using the app and it works. It’s good enough – I’m the outlier.
But it’s not best in class. When Safari provides a better reading experience than your bespoke news app, something’s gone wrong.
Apple made its name off of opinionated, considered design that convinced people they were using the best. And they clearly care about News and see it as a pillar, albeit a small one, of their service offering moving forward.
It’s just a shame they’ve sat at “good enough” with it for so long.
Police are using an invasive tool they don't understand
Kashmir Hill, reporting on Clearview AI, which uses a database of 3 billion images scraped from the internet to identify people and find information about them::
Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.
There’s no justification for law enforcement agencies to use a tool they don’t understand. It’s unprofessional and it’s dangerous.
For example: Clearview seemed to know when police ran Hill’s photo. Did the police know their searches were being monitored? If not, it’s easy to see that being exploited by people who’d rather not having the law snooping around.
Clearview AI is an Australian tech company and its founder claims it’s being used here. Australian police have proved time and time again they can’t be trusted to use tools like this properly – from data breaches to officers using databases to look up Tinder dates.
Clearview will be exploited, if it hasn’t already. If the reports are true, it works too well for that not to happen. Some cop somewhere will feel slighted or curious or whatever else and they’ll look up someone they shouldn’t be looking up. That in and of itself is an invasion of privacy. Anything else that happens from there just compounds the harm.
And we know who’s likely to bear the brunt of this. Minorities and those already disempowered. That’s the pattern.
There’s another element to this though. Clearview built its database with images scraped from publicly accessible websites. No-one submitted their images willingly. That’s yet another violation of privacy to add to the pile.
But Clearview represents a very public, very pronounced instance of the things we share being taken and used for reasons that go far and beyond our original intent. People seem to have either made peace or decided to just not think about the things we share being used to send ads our way (but they’re not okay with their photos being used in ads, if the scare campaigns are anything to go by). But this goes beyond that.
At some point, mass surveillance is going to have a chilling effect on the sharing and creativity that has thus made the internet tolerable. Maybe Clearview will be a tipping point, for some people at least.
Why lie to journalists when you can lie to the people directly?
In the past four years the media in the US and UK have learned what other parts of the world woke up to some time ago: namely, that politicians can be elected without ever engaging with the news media.
Presidents and prime ministers can succeed by telling lies and avoiding any accountability in terms of public scrutiny. This is a global phenomenon – Narendra Modi, India’s charismatic authoritarian leader, has never held a press conference. The White House press secretary has not held a briefing for half a year – not even in the last week, when the US has teetered on the brink of a war.
Western media outlets have been learning something devastating over the past few years: they weren’t valued for their own sake.
For a long time, news rooms performed a vital role: they were a mediator between the world and people. People who, because of the limits of technology, only had access to a limited amount of information. If a politician wanted to gain traction with a wider community, they had to go to a paper.
There’s a cultural element to this: people of a certain class were convinced (in part by the media) that it was good to be the kind of person who reads the news. So they dutifully listened to bulletins and bought papers to stay informed.
There were political ads, of course. And they were regulated. Journalists asking questions and conducted investigations and did their best to play their part in this lynchpin of democracy (albeit a self-proclaimed lynchpin).
Then social media came along. And as Bell puts it:
Politicians across the spectrum understand that there is little to be gained by subjecting themselves even to good faith questioning.
Media outlets have been roundly removed from the politicians-to-people relationship. And why wouldn’t politicians avoid them? Facebook alone lets them share the exact message they want, often micro-targeted and tested to whatever demographics they want (although the value of any data they receive is questionable) and, to top it all off, they can remove or hide any comments they dislike to create the illusion of support.
To that end, it’s worth paying attention to what’s happening in countries that haven’t necessarily had the same relationship with the media as the West. We can learn a lot about our own challenges by looking at places that skipped tech generations – say, for example, those that went straight from “little to no internet access” to “pervasive internet via smartphones” – and this interaction between the public, politicians, and social media could be similar.
News media still has value. It’s still important. Some of the brightest people I’ve worked with are journalists. They also have the benefit of access, expertise, resources and, most of all, time (even if the last two are in noticeably shorter supply nowadays).
But there’s one problem. Media outlets convinced people it was important to hear from politicians. They just didn’t prepare for a time when they weren’t part of that relationship.
Social media does the job faster and seemingly more effectively. If it’s important to hear from politicians, why not go to the source? Especially now that Western media has a bad reputation (and who has been spreading that idea around?).
Because of all this, media outlets are desperately trying to reassert and reframe their value. Some are doing it better than others.
But here’s the thing. A lot of people don’t really care about the news in a practical sense. They care about it abstractly, if they care at all. This came up countless times when I worked at media outlets: readers would comment, at length, about how much they cared about an issue but, if you checked the number of reads on an article about that exact subject, the number would be so low you’d start to lose hope.
People want to know that someone out there is doing the work. And, if something big happens (or if they personally care about something), they want the news there. But, beyond that, they don’t care. They don’t want to read or support all the little bits of reporting that build up to those big stories.
It’s much easier to just follow a politician on social and feel like you’re across it all.