Hey CZ

Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon is donating $1 million AUD to support Australians coping with our devastating bushfires.

Meanwhile, Amazon is extracting a lot of money from oil companies:

The partnership [between Amazon and BP], which has received comparably little attention, capped a year of aggressive expansion into the fossil fuel market for Amazon Web Services. In addition to forging new alliances, over the last several months Amazon has hosted and participated in a string of oil and gas industry-focused events, ostensibly to help it woo potential clients. It has done so even as it was releasing its much-touted “Climate Pledge,” a series of sustainability commitments including a plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, and despite the fact that thousands of Amazon employees have publicly criticized the company for working with the fossil fuel industry as the world burns.

The kicker: the partnership is supposedly about helping oil companies get “greener”.

The bushfires currently razing Australia are a result of climate change. We’ve always had bushfires and they’ve always been dangerous. But these fires are catastrophic as a result of the environmental changes brought about by our warming world.

Amazon’s donation is great. It’ll help a lot of people.

But expressing sympathy for a people affected by climate change while benefiting from the fossil fuel industry – which is the biggest contributor to carbon emissions – is disingenuous at best and destructive at worst.

It’s not enough to be philanthropic. The world needs systemic change.

And, besides, if you’re going to be philanthropic, at least commit. Jason Koebler did a bit of math on Twitter:

Jeff Bezos is worth $116,000,000,000. Donating $690,000 USD is equivalent to someone worth $50,000 donating 29 cents

Inspiring stuff.

Apple loves to highlight the Watch’s health benefits. Here’s what they don’t tell you: the Watch is a sassy bitch.

I’ve wrapped up a 10km run and had a friend respond with “🆒🆒🆒”. Nothing about that is sincere. One 🆒 is dismissive. Two 🆒s is fine. Three borders on callous. I’ve gone on long walks and had someone say “Thanks for the low bar!” The exclamation point just adds insult to injury.

These are the Watch’s quick replies, preprogrammed possible responses to messages and notifications. They’re usually normal things like “Thanks” or “Can’t talk now”.

Expect when you’re responding to Activity notifications. Then they’re… different.

I’ve responded to countless of my friends' accomplishments – from 50km bike rides to two-hour gym sessions to all manner of the awards Apple doles out for activities – with “That’s a ripsnorter”.

I don’t even know what a ripsnorter is. But it sounds sarcastic to me. And I love it.

Part of it is cultural. My friends are loving and caring people. But they also know the value of good banter. And Australia has a tendency to cut down tall poppies. What might, to American programmers, read as a sincere celebration of someone’s accomplishment can come across as an ironic eye-roll to me.

Intimacy and insults

The Apple Watch can be an intimate device. When it was announced, Apple highlighted a feature that lets you send your heartbeat or animated kisses to someone with a tap. I don’t know anyone who’s used them. They’re cloying and impersonal. They kind of thing a third-party would think is personal but, because of that, it seems distant and abstract. They’re a Hallmark card with a bad poem.

But the Watch is still a shortcut to your iPhone – likely the most personal bit of tech you have – and, through that, a quick link to all your loved ones. And it lets you share the kind of things nothing else does: your exercise. And, let’s be real, exercise can suck. It’s hard; it’s gruelling. It’s an accomplishment. But it’s made all the easier when you’re doing it with someone

I know what my friends are trying to achieve. Some of them want to lose weight, some of them are working their way back from injury, some of them are trying to tire out incredibly energetic dogs.

Sharing that journey with them? Getting to following along with them through little notifications and responses throughout the day? That’s intimacy. That’s personal.

Even if it comes in the form of a little “fuck you” sent with love.

It’s a real ripsnorter.

Damien Cave, for the New York Times:

And on Wednesday, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp, the largest media company in Australia, was found to be part of another wave of misinformation. An independent study found online bots and trolls exaggerating the role of arson in the fires, at the same time that an article in The Australian making similar assertions became the most popular offering on the newspaper’s website.

It’s all part of what critics see as a relentless effort led by the powerful media outlet to do what it has also done in the United States and Britain — shift blame to the left, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change.

“Influencing” is a polite word for it.

Murdoch’s papers have been pushing Australia further away from real, substantial climate action for years. They played a sizeable role in destroying at least two governments, with climate policy forming part of the reason.

Part of the problem is their outsized influence: Murdoch’s News Corp is the biggest media company in Australia. In many cities, they run the only paper in town.

That’s a problem in any country, let alone one that’s already as deeply conservative as Australia.

The second problem: it’s hard to fight against the kind of misinformation News Corp peddles. Ketan Joshi and Jason Wilson have been picking apart their articles on Twitter and their threads are deep, informed, and well referenced. That takes an inordinate amount of time and knowledge to do well.

It’s much easier to make a false claim than it is to debunk it. And we all know which one is going to go further.

Dieter Bohn, reporting for The Verge:

[Twitter’s director of product management Suzanne] Xie says Twitter is adding a new setting for “conversation participants” right on the compose screen. It has four options: “Global, Group, Panel, and Statement.” Global lets anybody reply, Group is for people you follow and mention, Panel is people you specifically mention in the tweet, and Statement simply allows you to post a tweet and receive no replies.

This is a good change (on balance) that’s about a decade too late. Now it just looks tone-deaf.

Twitter’s foundational problem has always been the fact that anyone can jump into your notifications whenever they want. Very few worthwhile discussion can happen like that – try talking to someone on the street if every random passerby tries to interject.

I can’t remember where I read it now, but someone once argued that too many founders of social media platforms grew up in the 90s where liberalism seemed easy (for a certain few – there were always problems). That gave them the misguided notion that all we needed more of it – more connection, more discussion, both of which are by their nature good things – and everything would be great.

That sense of ease, of course, was predicated on a limited view of the world. Some people were disadvantaged for reasons that go beyond not having a voice. Some people were angry. Some people were awful, hateful, unrepentant.

Putting all of those people in the one place was asking for trouble. And not giving people the tools they needed to manage their discussions was asking for disaster.

I’m not sympathetic to Twitter. They should have seen all of this coming. But I do get it.

The the entire platform seems to have been built on some kind of techno-utopian vision of discussion. And, for a time, it seemed to have worked. People who were around for Early Twitter seem to have loved it. But that doesn’t scale. People need to be able to opt-in and -out of whatever discussions and micro-communities they want.

Constructive, worthwhile conversations need guardrails and boundaries. Or even just basic respect and good faith. People need space to be vulnerable. Twitter’s all-in environment doesn’t allow for that.

Unfortunately, the utopian view of things left people unprepared to responding to the kinds of abuse and vitriol Twitter helped foster. And their dedicated to strongly held – but maybe not strongly considered – ideas around “free speech” created an ideological logjam that prevented any actual responses.

So we get this.

Here’s the funny thing: had Twitter launched with the features they’re implementing now, Twitter would probably be a very different and a much healthier place.

But they’re years too late and the lack of anything like this has lead to much bigger problems that need addressing – some of which will be enabled by these belated changes. So they just look weak, ineffective, and cowardly.

You have to laugh.

John Gruber:

But I worry that with its services push, Apple is turning into an advertising company too. It’s just advertising its own services. In iOS 13 they put an ad for AppleCare at the very top of Settings. They use push notifications to ask you to sign up for Apple Pay and Apple Card, and subscribe to Apple Music, TV, and Arcade. The free tier of Apple News is now a non-stop barrage of ads for Apple News+ subscriptions. Are we at the “hellscape” stage with Apple? No, not even close. But it’s a slippery slope. What made Apple Apple is this mindset: “Ship great products and the profits will follow” — not “Ship products that will generate great profits”.

Gruber is right that we’re nowhere near an ad hellscape. And a hellscape doesn’t feel particularly likely. But there’s reason to be cynical.

Services aren’t bad in and of themselves. Great services are as equally valid a product to ship as a great iPhone. It’s just that none of Apple’s services are great.

Okay, you can make a case for Arcade being great but the others? Apple Music is serviceable, fine even, but there’s nothing to distinguish it from Spotify unless you’re weirdly into Zane Lowe (and they’ve done nothing to capitalise on Beats1, which still has potential). TV+ is an expensive meh that might improve.

iCloud Storage is so baffling ungenerous that I’ve circled back around to feeling okay with paying for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tim Cook walked out on stage at WWDC 2020 and said

Okay, so I logged into iCloud today and realised we were charging you money, actual money, for 50GB of storage. I had no idea, I asked around, no-one here knew about it, did you? You did? My bad. My bad.

and then doubled it or something.

News+ is the most disappointing. I should be an ideal customer for it but it delivers a worse reading experience than Safari’s reader view or any RSS reader. Bouncing a reader from News in dark mode to a blaring white article screen is a wanton act of aggression.

To be fair, the New York Times app has the same problem (and it has the same low-rent ads) but at least my subscription gives me a mini crossword. I’ll endure a lot for a quick crossword. Can Apple innovate in the highly illustrious crossword space? I’d pay a few dollars a month for ceramic and space grey squares.

Services make sense for Apple. They’re staring down expectations of consistent growth in increasingly saturated markets and, despite my belief in Apple’s willingness to do their own thing, they have to meet those expectations. Hardware alone won’t do that.

Services play to Apple’s biggest competitive advantage – a swarth of satisfied users. Ads make sense here too. It’s easy to convince yourself that pinging those customers about Great New Offer X is both okay and, actually, a good thing to do.

They love Apple. They’ll love this too.

The problem is that nothing they’re delivering is all that loveable.

It’s tempting to feel fatalistic at the moment.

Australia is burning: 500 million animals have died, an area bigger than the Netherlands is ash and cinders, lives and homes have been lost. The photos are apocalyptic.

The USA is finding wars to fight anywhere it can, the UK is tearing itself apart, atrocities deserving dozens of headlines are happening all around the world every day.

Our governments are failing. And we haven’t mentioned the more routine and systemic failures befalling our societies.

The problems are many and they resist any simple solutions. Here’s one to start. It won’t fix everything. But it would help fix some things.

Let kids vote.

Pick any age you like, so long as it’s low. David Runciman, a political historian at Cambridge, floated lowering the voting age to 6 years old.

Why not?

Voting against a world on fire

Take two sizeable, seemingly intractable problems facing Western countries (if not a lot more): climate change and economic inequality.

I’ll draw from Australian examples but the themes will be familiar to readers elsewhere.

Climate change

Recent governments in Australia have categorically failed on climate. They’ve taken us backwards on emissions (and changed emissions data to make things look better), pitched policies that have no credibility, and backed a new coal mine that has no real reason to exist.

Young people are leading the charge in climate advocacy in both around the world and in Australia and being dismissed and attacked as a result. Despite concern about climate change being high across demographics, older people tend to vote for the Coalition – the driver of Australia’s political failures here.

Economics

Jennifer Rayner sums up the situation well in her book Generation Less:

… Economics, demographic and technological trends mean the deck is actually heavily stacked agains us [young Australians]. Worse, the dud cards are mounting up all the time.

She provides some depressing numbers to quantify those “dud cards”:

Adjusted to constant dollars, household net worth for people aged 15 to 24 grew by just under $30,000 in the not-quite-decade between 2004 and 2012. People in their mid-50s and early 60s saw their net worth grow by almost $179,000 – a respectable bump in anyone’s book. But my cohort? We went backwards. Those aged 25 to 34 were worth $15,000 less in 2012 than people the same age in 2004.

[…]

If you want further evidence, consider this: between 2004 and 2012 people in every age bracket over 45 saw their net worth grow by more than the total wealth of those under 25.

Not a great time to be a young adult.

Go young

This isn’t just generational griping: inequality of wealth, opportunity, growth, and climate have disastrous social impacts both now and into the future.

Rayner again:

A country that makes no room for the young is a country that will forfeit a fair future.

This inequality – this “Generation Less” – takes many forms and is, in many of them, a direct result of policies set by the Australian government.

Why would any government build a disadvantageous future for its young citizens? Sheer self-preservation, and a political culture built around getting power in the short-term, not building anything worthwhile long-term.

According to Rayner, older voters in Australia dramatically outnumber the young:

Of the 15 million plus voters enrolled in 2014, more than one in three were aged 55 or over. Fewer than one in four were under 35. There are currently 2.8 million more grey-haired electors in Australian than there are youthful voters.

The Australian Labor Party was razed for a policy that some thought would make life a bit harder for some older Australians (thanks, in part, to a sizeable misinformation campaign).

People tend to vote for what they think advantageous (le gasp). Even without demographic disparities, the average older person is more likely to show up on election day than a young person. Politicians will cater to them.

There’s no point in waiting for a swaths of people have a dramatic change in perspective (or die).

Lower the voting age.

Rebalance demographics

As David Runciman spells out, keeping the voting age at 18 (or even lowering it to 16) will maintain major imbalances in voter demographics.

It wouldn’t be true if we started voting at year 0, because if the median age is 45 it would be sort of roughly 50/50, but if you start voting at 16 or 18, younger generations are going be outnumbered by older generations, even if everybody votes.

Lowering the voting age wouldn’t be a radical decision. Runciman argues that societies have “expanded the franchise” before when democracies have gotten stuck: who gets to vote has grown along class, gender, and racial lines.

That isn’t to say that young people being prevented from voting is an act of discrimination in the same way. Age isn’t equivalent to any of these categories and age has been politicised in very different ways. Today, citizens naturally age into the right to vote; everyone else has had to fight for it.

The comparison is a limited, but there’s one useful parallel: each time more people were given the vote, there were some who believed governments would crumble. It’s never come to pass.

(As an aside: Australia lowered the federal voting age from 21 to 18 in 1973. Some may argue that the country has gone downhill since then, but the voting age likely isn’t the problem.)

Here’s Runciman again:

All the history suggests that those fears are always overblown. The same kind of people still get elected. It’s not like if children could vote, they would elect children to parliament. We’d probably still get the same kinds of representatives, but they’d have to take account of the views of children.

Those views need to be heard and respected, now more than ever. Children have a vested interest in their planet not being ravaged as a result of climate change; they have an interest in living in societies were they have a fair and equal chance to succeed personally and economically.

People have called on the young to save the planet. So let them do it.

David Porter, writing on the 8tracks blog:

8tracks has had a long run and its day in the sun. We’re sad to announce, however, that the company and its streaming service will wind down with the end of the decade, on December 31st, 2019.

I haven’t used 8tracks in years but it was a cool service at the time. I followed a few people with remarkably better taste in music that me and that, along with a few forums I stumbled into, shaped the music I love today.

Without 8tracks, I might never have got into dance, soul, RnB, hip-hop, and a whole lot more. And that’s good. You can’t live on post-hardcore alone.

8tracks itself innovated in a few areas out of the gate [in 2008]: the playlist was the atomic unit of curation, sharing and consumption; each playlist was represented visually by its mix art, a couple of years before Instagram’s arrival; and DJs could apply freeform tags to describe a playlist by not only by genre or artist but also by activity, mood or other theme, introducing a novel, contextual approach to listening that Songza, Beats, Spotify and others would later emulate.

Hard to imagine our current streaming services without any of that.

Despite the innovations, 8tracks couldn’t keep the good times spinning. Royalty fees made it hard to keep the mixing board on and listenership dropped off thanks to competitors like Spotify.

Moreover, Spotify offers a complete music streaming experience, spanning on-demand and lean-back (radio) listening. Our bet was that most consumers, most of the time, would opt for highly tailored lean-back programming — because easy and relevant — and could pop out to an on-demand service once in a while when they wished to hear a particular track or artist. And we were right, in part. Executives at on-demand services note that, after a new user’s honeymoon period of building her on-demand library, she generally migrates to listening to her library (aka liked songs) on shuffle or to a lean-back program of music (playlist or station).

I know I’m the outlier here – that’s the polite term; the impolite term is “ancient curmudgeon” – but I don’t get the appeal of listening to music like this. Maybe it’s a function of my music library: throwing it on shuffle will just bounce between electro and death metal and classical and hip-hop and indie pop that’s too twee to live. No one wants that. And, if they do, I don’t want them in charge of my music.

But I still love albums. At their best, they’re powerful artistic statements that open up over repeated listens, constantly delivering new favourites.

At their most average, they’re a few great songs with some filler that still form a cohesive hole. At their worst, they’re not in my library.

This preference is why I drifted away from 8tracks and it’s focus on user-created playlists. But they still hold value. Some of the best music I’ve heard, often in genres I never would’ve tried, came from recommendations from people whose taste I trust. They can come from playlists.

But that trust comes with time and a sense of knowing who’s suggesting the music. That’s what 8tracks provided and where the playlists from Spotify and Apple Music falter.

Nonetheless, easy, on-demand access to any song has proven to be a must-have requirement; it’s what people are accustomed to in the “ownership” model, and periodic on-demand listening makes algorithmic lean-back selections ever better. The upshot is that the average music consumer wants all of his listening needs addressed “under one roof.”

This make sense from a consumer perspective: one app is easier to manage than two. And, unlike running multiple streaming services for TV, I don’t think most people consider music as culturally vital to juggle more than one service without a strong reason to do so.

Exclusive music might do it (and Soundcloud is making a case for that, if not the strongest one). But playlists? Not so much.

The main problem here is that providing access to all that music presents a barrier to entry for new players and thus competition. “40 million+ songs” is a lot of money to put on the table just to get in the game.

And that’s a shame:

We — the remaining team at 8tracks — all think it’s still to hard to find playlists with a “soul behind the music.” User programmed playlists on Spotify and YouTube are great, but they remain relatively hard to navigate to find the best ones for a particular person’s taste, time or place. And there’s not (as yet) an ecosystem to allow curators to flourish. There’s still work to be done.

No-one is knocking it out of the park in this space. Apple Music and Spotify remain just fine enough to do the job.

There’s room in music streaming to do something novel. It’s a pity 8tracks couldn’t get the money to keep trying.

Christmas isn’t Christmas without great tunes. Unfortunately, the tracks on offer can get a bit bland. Here are five good options on Apple Music if you want to get festive this season. No Michael Bublé or Robbie Williams in sight.

A very Too Many Zoos Xmas, Vol 1 – Too Many Zooz

Festive cheer with Too Many Zooz’s brass-based swagger. Perfect for getting people dancing around to Jingle Bells.

White Christmas – Bing Crosby

Getting this record spinning first thing on Christmas morning is as close as my family gets to a tradition. Apple Music mightn’t have the crackle of a vinyl, but that doesn’t distract from Bing’s smooth voice. Perfect for traditionalists.

Sleigh Ride / Fireside – The Gregory Brothers

Turns out the people best known for Songify the News and the Bed Intruder song have fantastic voices. This is good mix of traditional favourites (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”) and lesser-known tracks (“Christmas in Prison”), delivered with a wink and a bit of jazz. Perfect for people who want the traditional with a dash of meme.

This Christmas Aretha – Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin has one of the best voices of all time. You need a bit of gospel and R&B on Christmas Day and there’s no better way to get it.

Christmas Songs – Bad Religion

No-one I’ll be spending Christmas with will let me play a punk rock Christmas album, so I have to share it with you instead.

Honourable mention

This goes to A Very Special Christmas because it features a Christmas song from Run-DMC. What more do you want?

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead was clever, thoughtful, and funny and I never want to see it again.

Midsommar was beautiful but messy (and Ari Aster has a weird thing about heads).

Avengers: Endgame did Hulk dirty but I’m glad it’s over.

Jojo Rabbit balanced humour and drama well and will be impossible to reference in passing conversation.

Logan does for superhero films what Joker wishes it could.

Captain Marvel had a cool cat and Brie Larson was fantastic.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes nails its story beats and gets a lot of emotion out of small moments.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes builds its world well and does a lot with some great performances.

War for Planet of the Apes balances humour with drama well and it broke my heart.

Spider-Man: Far From Home has infectious energy, fuelled by a bunch of actors having a lot of fun.

IT was loud and dull.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters deserves this incredibly earnest review.

Beetlejuice holds up, even if Beetlejuice was my least favourite part of the movie.

Train to Busan is tense, compelling, and emotionally abusive.

Detective Pikachu is beautiful and intoxicating even if it does completely fall apart.

Spy is a fun romp that has completely ruined all of Jason Statham’s future roles.

Hobbs & Shaw was loud and dull.

Ralph Breaks the Internet tells a lovely story with a bunch of good visual gags (even if its best moment is on YouTube).

BlacKkKlansman was very, very good.

Godzilla Part 1: Planet of the Monsters was fine for a plane movie.

Top End Wedding was a nice, simple story backed by some beautiful landscapes.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is perfect.

Steven Universe: The Movie was a welcome return to a world I love.

Hereditary has left me looking for Toni Collette in every dark corner.

Boy was earnest, moving, and hilarious.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is also earnest, moving, and hilarious.

What We Do In The Shadows is still very funny. (I think I just love Taika Waititi’s work.)

Ponyo was visually stunning and heartwarming.

Us was unsettling, atmospheric and brilliantly acted.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum was a treat (especially with a big audience).

Game Night was more fun than I expected (and featured Coach Taylor, which was an unexpected treat).

Melanie Ehrenkranz, for One Zero, writing a community of people hacking Kindles:

Now when he looks over to his nightstand, Iman sees the covers of Marie Kondo’s Spark Joy, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers, or a collection of short stories from the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering. In its way, this too can be a subtle act of resistance: Amazon offers slightly discounted Kindles that come with “special offers,” meaning they display advertisements when you’re not using them. Though you can disable these through a one-time payment to Amazon, some hackers circumvent the images through other means, replacing the stock wallpapers with their own.

You know what would be a real “act of resistance”? Buying an ereader that isn’t a Kindle. Every hacked-in featured mentioned in Ehrenkranz’s article is available natively on Kobo ereaders (and that’s just one brand).

Buying into an ecosystem only to hack your way out of it in a minor way isn’t an act of resistance. Ehrenkranz’s article and, to a lesser extent, this hacking community buys into the self-fulfilling prophecy that the Kindle (and, by extension, Amazon) is all there is in this space.

That’s not resistance or defiance. It’s acquiesce wearing a white hat.