Hey CZ

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

• 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

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.

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.

Emily Bell:

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.

• 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”.