A personal computing crisis
1.8
Back in the saddle.
🌟 Feature
I am surrounded by technology unimaginable to a human being just thirty years ago. In my immediate proximity, I have a Mac Studio desktop, my iPhone 12, my iPad Pro, my e-reader, my work MacBook Pro, and a work Windows laptop. I have a cheap Android phone in a drawer and a Rasperry Pi in a box under the couch. The processing power in all of these computers (or just ONE of them) is, frankly, extreme overkill. I do not need my phone to be able to use its camera, an onboard LIDAR sensor, graphics processing, and other miscellany to measure the width of my desk. But that is something I can do. I can point my phone at something and measure it.
In the 2000s, personal tech was just more specialized. This Game Boy is for games, this cell phone is for calls and texts, this TV is for watching TV, this camera is for taking pictures. But now my phone can, and does, do all of these things. I’m not necessarily lamenting this, I’m not even saying this is a bad thing, but I am left with extreme decision fatigue and a completely muddied thought process.
When my device is the place I receive direct deposits from work AND the place I play backgammon AND the place I scroll social media AND the place I make my grocery lists, I find myself disoriented, opening my phone and forgetting what I was doing in the first place. There are things I’ve done to try to streamline things, reducing icons on my home page, setting up focus states that block certain notifications. But all in all, it’s a tall task to ask your phone to do less for you.
I wonder if it is even possible, if I have become so accustomed to the conveniences that come with such an ensnaring tangle of technological possibility that to reduce that convenience as a trade off for mental clarity would even be worth it.
For example, I purchased a desktop Mac instead of a new laptop because I figured I could use my iPad for many of the laptop-y tasks I needed to do. But for the last several months I’ve been doing this, I have found the iPad clunky. The hardware awkward, the software jolting and tangled.
I am attracted ideologically to concepts like the “dumb” phone. These are phones with dramatically reduced capability than our modern smartphones. But then I try to imagine the trade offs, like not having as immediate access to an excellent camera, like not being able to use iMessage, like not being able to read the news. It has become an expectation with myself that I will have these things at a glance all of the time. Am I really willing to break that?
📚 Reading list
This week here’s a video about this guy who made his own computer. I like the idea of making your own computer, but this guy is kinda weird about it.
⚡️ Lightning
YouTube and Universal Music Group have formed some sort of “team” to consider how to proceed with the use of singers’ voices in AI generated song covers. It’ll probably end up with UMG (a massive corporation) making money off the use of one of their “stable” artists’ voices in an AI generated song or cover. There is so much bad here. To name a few:
Individual artists, otherwise known as human beings, should have full control over the usage of their voice. In the world of “name, image, and likeness,” I think a legal precedent should be set that existing contracts engaging in NIL do not include recordings of a person’s voice.
YouTube has a pretty rough history flagging content for licensing reasons. Their Content ID often misses, doesn’t even know what Fair Use is, and has wrongly accused people who don’t have legal teams of infringement.
You can’t copyright a voice. I’m not saying that as a declarative statement, but as a statement of fact. You can copyright recordings (which the AI companies should be able to pay royalties for), you can copyright images. But as it stands, you can’t copyright the “uncopyable,” i.e. a human being and their characteristics.
📕 Glossary
Nothing for this week!
☎️ Answers
I asked a friend today:
What software do you use to write?
She said Google Docs, mostly. I’d love to hear how people respond to this question. I almost exclusively use Pages on my Mac, but I think I do that entirely for aesthetic reasons. Google Docs feels to academic to me, Word is a flustercluck of icons and ephemera. What I’d really love is a word processor that is gorgeous. I’ve yet to see a gorgeous word processor.
That’s all for this week! Thanks!