A guide to digital text fuckery (largely on Apple Platforms) from one of the world’s foremost authorities.

My project to properly document Bluetooth keyboard support on iPhone has given me a new reverence for accessibility, generally, which might come as a hypocritical statement at the beginning of such a piece, but I did explicitly ask you if you felt this subject was anti-accessibility before I officially embarked upon writing This Post. I don't consider the answer – a very weak “no” – to be an all-encompassing excuse, whatsoever. If you feel this post's existence has the potential to do real harm, contact me and I will straight up take it down. I dare you. Since I consider myself a genuine authority on Text Fucking, however, I am going to do my best to main unapologetic language when expressing opinions in orbit of the matter. You can trust me, I think.

It’s already as good a place as any, editorially, to initiate the goddamned “good vs. evil” discussion because we could very easily find ourselves sincerely addressing the class implications of Text Fucking, otherwise. I want to offer myself, fully, as your test target and/or guinea pig, if you will. If you’re looking for a phone number upon which to set the sights of any of the methodologies shared here (or otherwise, for that matter,) here is mine: +1 (573) 823-4380. If you’re on a mobile device, definitely try out this link to my full contact card, and consider this brief list of some other potential targets of mine:

• Telegram
• Email
• Twitter
• Mastodon
• Discord
• Everywhere...

I won’t share any of your identifying information anywhere, nor will I respond unless you ask, but I guarantee I will be utterly delighted to receive any volume of Fuckery in any inbox you’re capable of sending it to because I have been so at the half-dozen or so message strings I’ve received over the past few weeks. Even if you somehow manage to find a means of undelighting me, that would be a far better scenario for all involved parties than my catching word you used one of my shortcuts to send Mein Kampf to a prayer request line or some shit. I promise it will always be more fun to shoot for constructive disruption over edgy bullshit, especially in this New Age when nothing is certain and nobody is talking. As much as the person who wrote the Yelp! review, below, would’ve loved to advocate for contribution to the noise for the simple sake of it, he’s fucking dead.

Hopefully, we’re now free to get specific. Here’s my definition from the “Text Fucking” entry in The Psalms wiki:

text fucking 1. Text Fucking verb a.) hardcore text manipulation. b.) destruction of usable digital text.

1. Text Fuckery noun the discipline of text fucking.

2. Text Fuckery noun the output... the result of the verb.

disruption

I might also append an esp. in either neutral or constructive applications. Again, a Zalgoed Tweet every once in a while is funny, but mass spamming strangers in peer-to-peer spaces is not. Not funny in any sense. To draw a medium parallel with audio – as I will several times in this guide, you’ll find – genuinely disruptive text manipulation is like choosing to push your pirate radio out on the volunteer-run community station’s frequency instead of the corporate-owned hits channel’s. Any sense you might be doing something worthwhile dramatically vanishes and the possibility of accomplishing something a bit original, even, is nullified in the womb.

I won’t say Text Fucking is an art. Indeed, perhaps it is anti-art. It is a discipline, nearly. At least enough so that I believe this Post is worth it[^1]. Like most disciplines, it can be used for your particular definitions of “good” and/or “bad.” I would like to think most of my use over the years has been toward my own of “good,” but – as per the unsearchable nature of Fucked Text, generally – this is not easily verifiable or citable. Regardless of my performance, however, I genuinely believe Text Fucking can be an endeavor that leads to more “positive” outcomes, whoever you may be. As I did, you might find yourself with a greater appreciation of and a desire to learn more about those individuals and organizations working in the Accessible Technology industry, ever toward a more inclusive digital future. It’s my hope that the weaponization of such an otherwise banal part of life might empower you with the simple fact of your capabilities, even if you don’t ever choose to actually implement them in a single instance.

History

As detailed in the audio account embedded above, I believe my Text Fucking career began somewhere around the 7th grade, at 13-14 years old. It was my second or third time flunking MS02 – the Microsoft Office II course – taken on fairly outdated school desktop machines in the 2007-2008 era, all running Windows XP. Because of some inexplicable ability to simply do what I was told, I would spend class periods trying to create the largest possible text file in Notepad by copying and pasting huge, exponentially growing globs. Eventually, I did crash a machine at least once. Though it could very well be simply the self-exaggerated recollection of preteendom, I even remember crashing the school server with one of those files. They were ginormous for plaintext.

if you don’t think Z̸͔͈̮̠̓͋ͧ̚̕͞͡a̡̨͇̳̹̯̞̓ͦͨ͢͡͝l̞̭̻̃̚͠҉͙g̩͒̀͗̾͏̶͇̮͍̋̄̀̄ͬo is the digital text form of audio clipping, I want you to call me right now. +1 (573) 823-4380

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 20, 2022

My Text Fucking reached its peak proliferation in the Drywall Era, when I first discovered the magic of Zalgo Text. The original generator at eemo.net has been replaced by an exact duplicate at eeemo.net. I have actually managed to successfully duplicate it on my own NeoCities website, as well. You might say that this original Zalgo Generator is The Original Text Fucking Tool. It can still generate quantities of fucked digital text information that will Fuck Shit Up on any social network, and as far as I can tell, the entire program is contained within a single HTML file.

As Drywall’s first and second albums – Hamura and Suburban Anarchy, respectively – were studies in audio clipping, I felt strongly at the time that Zalgo Text was the digital text equivalent, though there were others. The latter’s most wildly-entitled track, “ͣ͆̄̓̇̿͛͏͎͍ͬ̃&ÍÌµÍ‡Ì Ì¥ÌªÌ„ÌÍŒÍ¯Ì“​$​̯̻̣͚͒̉́͑,” does not actually include any Zalgo text in its title’s final form, on Bandcamp[^6], yet I think we can agree it is thoroughly Fucked. Beyond The Rails was my cringey “label” name, directly describing, technically, the matter of clipping audio. Indeed, Zalgo Text goes beyond the “rails” of text input/display fields reliably, depending on the intensity of the configuration you’re using to create it.

?́́ ̷͢?́?͜?̛
͏̸?̢҉
̶͟?͝͡
̢͝?͜?̛?̴
͟͠?̶͡
̀?̀
́?̛

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 14, 2022

When iMovie for iPhone first became available, making actual video editing and creation possible on iPhone OS in the iPhone 4 era, I took advantage of a very particular – but extremely powerful – function that was originally allowed creators on YouTube’s iOS app. It’s very hard to describe without being able to show, but it allowed for the rapid addition of tags to any video via an autocomplete-ish feature, up to the full tag limit. The series of Drywall videos that were essentially just vlogs shot from our high school lunch table – entitled Men and Women of The Armed Forces, This is What You are Fighting For[^7] (MAWOTAFTIWYAFF) – were all thoroughly tagged this way.

The most notable event in my personal text history, though, happened on Mastodon – as much does these days, if you weren’t aware. I was posting about Zalgo text’s creation when its actual creator, Dave Higgins – with whom I’d unknowingly been mutuals for some time, apparently – replied:

If there is a living God/Ultimate Sage/Premiere Authority/Professor of Text Fucking, surely it is they, so to have a conversation with them was quite an honor, especially to be able to call them father, of sorts. I continue to pursue this discipline in a largely automated way, as we’ll discuss in depth. It’s not an especially practical or beneficial one, no, but it is mine. (And Dave Higgins’, to be fair.)

Apps

The core necessity of any good Text Fucker is a robust text editing and/or word processing application. Zalgo text is a real bitch for Electron apps like my dearest Typora, unfortunately. On iOS, this summation also applies to Obsidian, I’m afraid. I recommend native apps like Drafts (big surprise) – which astonishingly has its very own native Zalgo action as developer Greg’s gift to me! – and Bear (no less of a surprise.) In terms of default configuration intensity, the Drafts action hits the sweet spot out of the box.

N̡̥̬̆͏͊҉̷̧̧o҉̗͖̣ͨ̽͝͏͗̀̿̕t̡̰͢ t͋o̬̟̙ h̲̲̹̓̑ͨạ̸̧̡̨ͯ̋̊r̶̛̩͍̖̹ͥ̽͜d̲̙ͬ?̶̛̱͉̓ https://t.co/2W0ZJTtkbV

— Drafts (@draftsapp) February 12, 2022

If you don’t believe me, here are some more particularly robust text editors on iOS:

• Kodex
• Koder
• Taio
• Typewriter
• Runestone (Beta)

If that’s not enough for you, I suggest perusing Brett Terpstra’s iTextEditors Wiki.

I have previously reviewed two wonderful Text Fucking iOS apps on this blog: UniChar and Zalgo Generator. There’s now a macOS version of the latter which is particularly powerful – or at least has particularly powerful implications. There are a few more to be discovered, though:

Textcraft

Textcraft, by Aviary and Mast creator, Shihab Meboob, has become my goto Text Fucking app – even above Zalgo Generator, I’m somewhat sad to say – on both iOS and macOS.

Textcraft offers a customizable list of 90 live “transformations” to the text you’re entering. Here’s a directly-quoted list of use cases from the app’s press kit:

• For a casual tweeter who wants to TyPe LiKe ThIs with minimal effort.
• For an influencer needing to add hashtags before all of their words in a massive word cloud sentence before uploading to Instagram.
• For the coder/designer needing to strip HTML or encode/decode strings in Base64.
• For the blogger wanting fancy text in bubbles, squares, cursive, or stylised differently on their website.
• For the website designer who wants to add underscores between all words for use in code, or change the format between cases.
• For the journalist who wants to redact or underline some text.
• For the cryptographer who wants to convert strings to SHA128 and SHA256.

In my personal use, I’ve noticed it’s by far the quickest way to add m u l t i p l e c h a r a c t e r s p a c e s I’ve ever come across, all enabled by the app’s one-touch-to-copy function. As I said in my App Store review, the iOS app weighs in at a featherweight 3.7 MB and a reasonable $4.99 one-time purchase fee, which is high value for someone like me.

TextExpander

Another cross-platform application – this one extending to Windows, too – TextExpander has very recently (and quite swiftly) become an integral part of my day-to-day creative life. It’s used by professionals at companies with “thousands of people,” supposedly, to “expand” any sort of text, set off scripts (on macOS,) and paste fill in-able templates. These functions are divided into “snippets” as part of “snippet groups.” In fact, I’ve created a dedicated snippet group to accompany this guide. You can view all my TextExpander snippets in this GitHub Repository.

It’s not much just yet, but if you “subscribe” to my dedicated Text Fuck snippet group from your own account, you’ll be treated to whatever I come up with in the future, delivered to your devices in real time.[ ^5] The great pro of TextExpander is its target pro usergroup, for which it is built to be reliable and very powerful. It enables quick macros for strings as short as ⁌•-¬䷂☃︎𝄫𝄢⟫L𝔒’⌤⌄∔×−฿🄕𝄢 up to entire book chapters. It also has more complex functions, likely the most relevant to our use of which being clipboard insertion anywhere within a snippet. Crucial to the strong Text Fucker, this function has high potential for multiplied volume. One might set up a snippet that duplicates the clipboard’s content nine times on new lines and attach the macro \9.

Automation

Debatably, my personal history with automation began with the release of IFTT (now IFTTT) somewhere around 2010-2011. Once it was integrated with Twitter and Evernote, I set it to save all of my Twitter favorites in separate, tagged Evernotes. The result was quite tremendous, as you might imagine, and is partially immortalized in my current Twitter Raindrop collection. Tremendous, but not in a Text Fucking sense. Sometime just after high school, though, I configured an IFTT recipe that posted “WHEN IM COMIN DINE IN MY FOREIGN AND IM ROLLIN ONE DEEP THAT SHOULD TELL YA BOUT ME” across my social networks, every morning at 6:10 AM.

holy fuck this is disturbing. https://t.co/7a96mgYELI pic.twitter.com/fr9dorHtsO

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 13, 2022

It was in the same era that one of my handful of lifetime genius ideas came to me: it occurred to me that I could automate the Drywall Tumblr page entirely by signing up its “post via email” address for all the spam lists I could find. The result is axiomatic. It is also Text Fucking, emphatically. Though I certainly didn’t know it by the name “automation,” then – nor did I associate the term with anything digital, really – contemporary personal automation enables virtually infinite Text Fucking possibilities. No longer does one have to manually copy the entirety of a huge Wikipedia page in order to break their friend’s phone for 5 days – now, they need only configure a native app on their cellular telephone to send the whole of the Spy Kids 3 screenplay, for instance, to said friend, in the background, even, as they continue scrolling through the Ticking App.

Of course, while the means of distributing Text Fuckery have gotten vastly more robust, capable, and sophisticated, so too have the terminals by which intended targets experience the Fuckery. The friend’s handset and elemental carrier plan in our example may very well be perfectly capable of receiving an entire film script, line-by-line, also in the background, perhaps even without the target ever noticing or suffering a single consequence.

Siri Shortcuts

A standalone method of general Text Fuckery on iOS is achieved through its relatively “new”[^2] personal automation system, Siri Shortcuts. In fact, Apple includes what I would define as a genuine Text Fucker™ of a shortcut in its default shortcuts gallery, called “All the Single Ladies ASCII” which can be used to create rather adorable text snippets like this:

(•_•)
<)   )╯DAVID BLUE
 /    \ 

  (•_•)
 \(   (> WROTE
  /    \

 (•_•)
<)   )╯THIS.
 /    \

Through a Reddit thread I’ve never been able to find again, I discovered a method of randomizing strings of text that led to the creation of the Shortcuts you see at the bottom of this section, all with native actions (aside from the outputs of those with specific services.) If you’re willing to splurge on the whole 3.3mb, free (for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS) Actions app, you can accomplish the same task, but much more quickly and with less resource consumption. I think you can spare the space.[ ^3]

Perhaps the best place to start would be with the most documented (and perhaps most unique) Text Fucking Siri Shortcut I have to offer you. “The Fastest Route to Twitter Jail” in fact details the workings of my Twitter Jail shortcut, which uses Tweetbot’s shortcuts actions to send 310 Tweets of random text in less than four minutes to an account of your specification.

If you’re new to Shorcuts entirely, what you see above will result in a string of random text copied to your clipboard, so that you can paste it whereever you might “need” to. Notably, I’ve been extremely lazy with the strings, despite having the absolute best app for creating them on my iPhone. I’d suggest you download it and play around yourself. As I said in my review, UniChar is a beautiful celebration of the diversity of Unicode. If what I’m talking about isn’t straightforward-sounding to you, let me know! I absolutely will sit down and build something just for you.

Text-Fucking Siri Shortcuts with Actions

These three shortcuts require the Actions app, but the single action used across all of them – called Random Text – is one that works across all platforms.

• Random Characters ⇨ Clipboard
• Random Characters ⇨ Mastodon
• Random Characters ⇨ Tumblr

Text-Fucking Siri Shortcuts with Toolbox Pro, Actions, and Aviary

Here are three shortcuts that may or may not be useful to you, each using Shihab Meboob’s Aviary to Tweet images en masse. The third also requires you have LookUp and a populated collection.

• Tweet Symbol Images
• Tweet Color Images
• Tweet Vocabulary Images

Native Text-Fucking Siri Shortcuts

• Random Text ⇨ Twitter (Tweetbot)
• Random Text ⇨ Twitter II
• Random Text ⇨ Clipboard
• Random Text ⇨ Drafts
• Random Text ⇨ Mastodon
• Random Text ⇨ Tumblr
• Random Text ⇨ WordPress

Text Case

Christopher R Hannah’s Text Case is by far the most modern of all the dedicated text manipulation applications I have to share with you. Available (separately) on both macOS and iOS, it’s a “flow”-based, Siri Shortcuts-resembling text formatting app with some very powerful functions.

I know that’s basically word-for-word what anyone else’s had to say about it since its debut, four years ago... I apologize for the redundancy, but the way it works is extremely hard to describe in a way that makes any sense, especially just with a few video clips and/or static images.[ ^4]

Without being able to share my own “flows” (unfortunately,) all I can share with you is this Siri Shortcut which is called from this Drafts action to reformat selected text (or the entire contents of the current draft) into proper MLA Title format before amending the results to a specific draft. I also created and published a shortcut called “Speak Word Count” which uses Text Case’s Word Count “format” and Siri Speech Synthesis to speak aloud the word count of either the current selection (from the share sheet) or the contents currently in the system clipboard.

I’ve also created Fuck – a Siri Shortcut with three of my favorite Text Case formattings so far in succession: “Mocking Spongebob” (ick,) “Upside Down,” and “Clap Case.” It acts upon – and replaces – any text you’ve copied to the clipboard. Here’s an example:

ᴉ┴ 👏 ∀ɔʇs 👏 nԀou 👏  👏  👏 ∀up 👏 ɹƎd˥ɐɔǝs 👏  👏  👏 ∀u⅄ 👏 ┴Ǝx┴ 👏 ⅄On’Λǝ 👏 ɔoԀIǝp 👏 ┴o 👏 ʇɥǝ 👏 ɔlᴉdqo∀ɹp

Drafts

Though I already mentioned Drafts’ Zalgo action earlier, the app worth its own heading, here, because it’s what enabled me to generate the text images embedded in this Post with a single keyboard shortcut. The magic is not in fact happening within Drafts, but rather in the Siri Shortcuts it calls and provides text for. These two are customized for me (so you’ll need to delete the actions you don’t want/need,) but will faithfully reproduce the style of the images you’ve seen as configured for Toolbox Pro users.

• DraftsImage
• DraftsImageSmall

If you plan to leave the titles the same, you might just directly install their corresponding actions: DraftsImage and DraftsImageSmall. There are a few actions from other creators I have yet to mention. Tim Nahumck’s Text Modifier action – as pictured in the screenshot embedded below – is a handy one, as is Greg’s own Unicode Fun. He also published Emojify and Fake Wordle, which I find hilarious.

Other Tools

Thanks to Taro Yabuki’s project to display all graphical unicode characters in a single page, I created and uploaded a PDF of them all, hosted on my NeoCities. If you have trouble viewing it there, you should be able to download it from this iCloud Drive share link. There’s quite a myriad of available “weird text” tools available on the open web, found easily with the most basic bitch search engine queries. MegaCoolTest.com is an old favorite of mine[^8] that functions a lot like Textcraft, come to think of it.

I originally intended to thoroughly test some of the results found when searching the App Store for “weird text,” but they’re far too numerous and – for the most part – far too janky to be worthwhile.

Discuss...

#software #spectacle

[1] Whaddya think‽‽‽ Should I write a book‽‽‽ [2] I say “new” here because of how many users genuinely have never encountered the concept, whatsoever, even going on five years since Workflow was made native. [3] A few of the single images embedded in this Post are larger than that. [4] Nevertheless, I shall do my best to remain ashamed of my redundant inadequacy. [5] If you find yourself trying it out, you may as well check out my main Snippet Group, Extratext, which is documented here. [6] You might be interested to hear how human Siri Voice 2 sounds attempting to read the title aloud. [7] It just now occurred to me that the series title wasn’t exactly gender-inclusive, but the series, itself, wasn’t actually of any value, anyway. [8] I’ve also duplicated this one on my NeoCities.

A quick review of Apple, Inc’s first venture as a textile company.

Now that Apple, Incorporated is a textile company, I thought it might be pertinent of me – someone with incredibly filthy hands – to review its first textile product, the Rag. Back in my day, we were taught not to touch the screen. It’s not good for it, they’d say. Now, that’s all we do, and it makes me profoundly uncomfortable. I have used a fleet of microfiber cloths (ashamedly sourced from Amazon until recently) to rigorously scrub away the CRUD that results from my disgusting, gorgeous hands touching anything for any duration. I also use Vinegar-based Windex (which is just vinegar,) which has definitely eroded my 12 Pro Max’s Oleophobic coating away entirely. It smells wonderful, though.

What’s brought me great grief since the Apple Rag’s debut, notably, have been the discussions I’ve heard on Apple-adjacent podcasts like Connected[^1] post-release of the Rag, detailing just how sparsely Touchscreen Pros like Federico Viticci actually clean their Pro Screens. Less than once per week, if I recall correctly. I asked this question in the MacStories Discord to only a single response:

Never, really. Sometimes with the side of my hand, but that's only when I really notice the screen being dirty.

I’m assuming silence from the rest of the crowed indicates embarrassment. I clean my 12 Pro Max’s screen once every two hours, bare minimum.

Methodology

I must admit – it took me a bit to understand the correct methodology for the Apple Rag. At first, I was trying to use the Rag like I’ve used other microfiber cloths, but it’s uniquely suited to flat rubbing upon mostly already cleaned glass screens, which makes sense, I suppose. Unlike regular microfiber cloths, its surface does not lend well to liquid cleaning solutions or scrubbing non-glass surfaces. Nor does it to cleaning truly grubby surfaces. As far as I know, it’s not washable – I probably shouldn’t have thrown the packaging away, but I didn’t expect to review it.

pic.twitter.com/RwvB1lKcIH

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 26, 2022

I would advise a strong, rotational approach under moderate pressure when using the Rag on your device’s screen. I would not advise you use it on your face or hands. I also would not advise you use it to clean your dog’s paws after a muddy bout. More reasonably, it’s not even all that great for cleaning glasses lenses. (It might just be that mine are particularly dirty.)

Conclusion

It sounds a bit silly, but $20 is actually a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a single microfiber cloth. I’d link you alternatives, but I’m committed to never sharing Amazon links on this here blog. For what it’s worth, the Apple Rag appears to have a strong resistance to liquids (they just fall off,) and a truly unique competency at cleaning glass screens.

Discuss...

#hardware #spectacle

[1] No, I don’t remember the specific episode I’m talking about, sorry.

I can think of little more reductive, repugnant, reckless, or racist crusades as a model figure than indoctrinating your child with an inherent distaste for their own culture, and nothing more deeply alarming to hear from the mouth of someone born in the 21st century than shit like “Queen was better than any rapper will ever be,” or “real musicianship will die forever with Eric Clapton.” It's unfair and unnatural: imagine if your high school classmates had consistently turned up their scrunched nose at the living whole of rock & roll, declaring Scott Joplin to be the last musician they could stand.

I am in no position to act like a culture writer,[^1] nor have I ever been enough of an authority on any sort of music to be a real music journalist. As I sat attempting to zoom back out and quantify precisely why I wanted to include this in the second chapter of this particular book (writing by hand, for once,) in a notebook by hand for once, though, I arrived for the first time upon the realization that this subject has genuinely, profoundly disturbed me for a very long time — definitively longer than any of the others. I was sharp when I touched upon it in The Bandcamp Essay, but actually going back and revisiting those experiences with very young men evangelizing classic rock as the penultimate musical expression of mankind suggested that I was really concealing a deep-set, alarming concern behind the peeved wit.

This issue is not unique to American society nor to men, really, but is entirely the sickness of white boomers and gen Xers. It is an anomaly that has genuinely and profoundly perturbed me for virtually the entirety of my existence as a culturally literate entity — certainly longer than any of the other disturbances addressed in this volume. – From my notes on the subject, today.

If I have progressed on this issue in the past two years, it's been with an acceptance that it really is and has been happening at scale in this country and far too many others for decades, now. That is, the natural progression of a whole generation's cultural identity has been dramatically molested.[^2] Never in the history of Western civilization has an elderly generation managed to convince the proceeding several that their culture is objectively superior to that of the descendants. Yes, there have always been those young people who comfortably and unironically describe themselves as old souls — hiding behind this foul moniker from their perception of cultural/technological progression's pressure to assimilate ideas too challenging to acknowledge, but never have they occupied a double-digit percentage of the youth, nor have they been so romanticized by mainstream culture.

Scott Joplin evangelists overtaking high school bands in the 1960s has been my favored hypothetical for far too long, so let me instead step a foot into another medium and use the television series Stranger Things. According to its Wikipedia page (I am not going to spend my time actually citing correctly, sorry,) the first season premiered on July 15th, 2016, which is 33 years ahead of its quoted original setting of November 1983. An equivalent: imagine if American sailors stationed at Pearl Harbor in 1941 were obsessively watching/discussing the original, silent 1908 film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I no longer have any sources who were alive during that era, but I can imagine such obsession would be seen as odd, especially among 18-25 year-olds.

Discuss...

[1] Though I have been doting on what an excellent job I did with “The Case for Chuck Klosterman,” lately. (I doubt I will ever encounter another subject quite as personally provoking.) [2] Probably more than a single one, if we're honest with ourselves — perhaps two or even three.

#music #spectacle

A powerful iOS utility for fucking digital text with ruthless efficiency.

A warning siren sounds louder still for the current state of the Digital Divide than the profoundly ignorant spectacle of Mark Zuckerberg’s drooling, ghoulish interrogators last year from the digital hole of none other than W3School’s trusty web validator, which would surely be rated as the Most Anxious Being in History if it were to acquire sentience. The CSS file this very webpage referenced returned no fewer than 350 syntax errors at the time of this writing; Facebook dot com’s login page set off only 55. For going on a decade, now, the web has continued to expand into a grotesque, diseased mass.

Yet another piece of software I have notably been using for 10 years: the infamous eemo.net Zalgo web text fucker. Ideally, I’d now proceed to embed some special examples of the hedonistic online text vandalism which the tool enabled me to inflict widely throughout my adolescence. However – as you can probably imagine – searching for these criminally-broken posts using standard tools provided by the services that have hosted them is virtually futile. In retrospect, I do not recall ever eliciting any acknowledgment of Zalgo’s effects, yet I’m positive that at least the majority of my victims set eyes upon the mess at some point – their silence is actually more entertaining than not, I think. Despite my extensive use of the format, I made a point to maintain my total ignorance about the origin of “Zalgo” for the past decade – only spoiling it in the name of good journalism for your sake and this review.

On forums and image boards, scrambled text began being associated with Zalgo with phrases like “he comes” and “he waits behind the wall.” David Higgins revealed that the text is an ~abuse~ of a Unicode feature that enables the user to combine multiple superscript and subscript characters into a vertical line.

By bizarre coincidence or some ridiculously obscure, intractable common cultural thread (which would probably take a lifetime to successfully trace,) Dave Higgins and I were already mutuals on Mastodon before I had any idea his name was at all associated with Zalgo. More bizarre still: Dave must’ve been watching his timeline at the exact moment when I posted the above quote mentioning him.

Unfortunately, it seems his blog has moved, killing the hyperlink citation in one of the two relevant search engine results for “zalgo”: its Know Your Meme page. Searching the same term on his new WordPress blog yields absolutely nothing, so perhaps “I deny everything” was a more sincere response than one expected. A thread on Stack Overflow entitled “How does Zalgo text work?” explains the fuckery in more detail than I ever could:

You can easily construct a character sequence, consisting of a base character and “combining above” marks, of any length, to reach any desired visual height, assuming that the rendering software conforms to the Unicode rendering model.

There is something artistic about destroyed text like this – something that's more than just edgy chaos. I believe in “surreal memes” that can break Facebook and Twitter posts. I believe in Zalgo, and I believe you need Zalgo Generator for iOS on your phone right now.

#software #spectacle

Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.

The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocre Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Diluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-Long Quirk the Church! Sovereignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.

Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.

God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)

I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.

(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)

The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.

I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS

Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)

#POLL:
If the Second Coming were to occur today, which handset would Jesus Christ buy?#tech #smartphones #faith #john316 #MAGA

— ※ David Blue ※ (@NeoYokel) January 30, 2017

The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings

I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhood's Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.

Discuss...

#spectacle #software

Yes, I am still managing to waste my time digging up and re-arranging some very old content, but I just couldn't resist. Somehow, it didn't occur to me until yesterday evening that I could sort through the original video files of my old vines fairly easily in fucking Google Photos and blast them through iMovie for iOS into a full montage relatively easily.

Some of these are very cringey...

Yes, I'd love to finally get around to my ultimate romantic editorialization on that most dearly departed social network, but things are way too jumbled right now, obviously.

#meta #spectacle

The genius of one Chuck continues to perform to the refreshing benefit of scholars in American culture.

Thanks to an episode of Peter Kafka's Recode Media, I've just now discovered that former New York Times Magazine Ethicist, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and longtime men's interest media-affiliated sports and music columnist Chuck Klosterman pronounces his surname kloa-ster-men instead of klaw-ster-men as I have been, shamefully – even within earshot of other human beings on a handful of occasions. I am willing to submit myself for punishment for these transgressions under the single condition that I be allowed to call him Cuck Klusterfuck the next time he ends a spoken sentence with “or whatever” in an interview – an unfortunate habit he's maintained for years. If my own byline had any pedigree in the world of literary criticism, I would now collect his penance simply by including those hateful, 90s stoner-kid buzzwords in every quote, unedited, but it most certainly does not. I've searched moderately hard for any reason to bother contributing any criticism of books or their authors and returned with very little. I've read The Broom of the System and White Girls this year, yes, but I'd have to be a Fuck Boy to write anything about David Foster Wallace, and Hilton Als’ elegant, genre-busting masterpiece is so far beyond both my societal rights and perceptive capacity that I wouldn't dare utter a single editorialized peep about it – aside from a log line-length recommendation – even under immediate threat of certain death.

Given my recent voluntary relocation to Portland, Oregon and the word-y pursuits on which I choose to spend all of my money and energy, I should adore everything about Chuck Klosterman and in turn he should be completely invisible across the under-30 demographic, yet I’ve found a special originality in his voice since first exploring it and I think it might be worth requalification. A good friend of mine once dug his first novel Downtown Owl out of a bulk box of bargain books she’d bought as a preteen, long ago and became an enthusiastic fan of his perspective and a harsh, but fond critic of his persona. It was her copy of his second that I read first: The Visible Man – ultimately a surprisingly-original take on the psychologist of a gifted outcast tale that classically exemplifies the easy-to-digest yet thoughtfully-exploratory reputation of his craft. Thanks to her library card, I was able to follow it up immediately with Chuck’s latest, most topical work – an anthology of past essays written for publications like The Guardian, Grantland, and GQ entitled X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century, which proved an impossibly entertaining, even more polished execution of The Quaint Chuck’s Explanations in non-fiction form, beginning at onset with refreshing brevity in its introduction.

I’m not fully accredited by either side of the professional equation (sportswriters think I’m too pretentious and music writers don’t think I’m pretentious enough,) but I’m able to write about whatever I want, as long as it actually happened.

Using “pretentious” even when just vaguely and loosely expressing other readers’ thoughts about your work is the first of many miniscule technical infractions against convention laid down in X’s arrangement which proves to act toward the benefit of its experience. If you substitute car nerds for sportswriters, I’d personally identify with this picoautobiography in a big way, but more importantly as a reader I had never encountered anything written about sports which I would describe as pretentious, per se, and that realization could very well have birthed enough curiosity to land the sale, had I been skimming in a bookshop, which I would’ve eventually been pleased with.

Now, during what we should hope to be the first dawn of a new microera of sincerity, we must recognize how valuable it is for Klosterman as an observer to be comfortably engaged with his subjects, emotionally, and confident in the value of his commentary in middleage without the need to insist upon his eccentricity, as so many cringey, culturally-daft Dads do, these days. He uses keywords in his writing and spoken publicity that should dismiss him immediately as one of these – a nostalgic, out-of-time dork – but are instead somehow magically manipulated to serve him in articulating reasonable, even profoundly-innovative insight. As I have explored his bibliography and his publicly-expressed thoughts, I have been caught up and hinged on a single supposition: Chuck Klosterman is the only white, 46-year-old bearded Portland Dad you should be reading. Do mind that I am in no way exempt from this lens, but it’s still my job to determine his viability as an intellectual – a “thought leader,” even – for those of us who were conceived around the same time he was wrapping up his collegiate sentence at the University of North Dakota.

For a solid hunk of the American reading audience, a quick, elemental vector of quality and mastery we look for in an essayist is the ability to “transcend” their subject matter for even the most presumptuous and conceited among us, usually to deliver a more abstract sentiment to leave with. Here, Klosterman’s significant career experience is irrefutably evident – in X, he achieves this transcendence organically with a fluidity unlike anything I’ve read before. We can already check a single box: convincing even a young professional twenty-something to shell out for a physical hardback of contemporary non-fiction requiring any sort of academic effort to consume is going to be nigh-impossible, even though X actually happens to be the best-looking specimen of print product design I have ever handled across cover, type, and layout. It’s been difficult having to convince myself to give this copy back.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must take special care to emphasize just how highly I regard Peter Kafka as editor and interviewer extraordinaire within the Media beat – well-proven to be capable of hitting consistently hard on both novel and old guard industry personalities with refined, seemingly unimpeachable stone-faced skepticism. However, this Chuck Klosterman interview for Recode Media is an uncharacteristically disarmed display of serious admiration: he introduces X with an outright confession: “It’s great. I bought it. I bought a signed copy,” which is an unexpected oddity (though not an unwelcome one – I’m glad Peter enjoys his life.) Their conversation dips briefly in personal history (Chuck and his wife moved to Portland from Brooklyn for its proximity to family) before plopping down upon the substance of his clearly superb and matter-of-fact interview technique. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a conversation between Kafka and any previous guests with whom he was quite so obviously alike in general disposition.

The only reason I’m able to ask you these questions is because I’m a reporter and I can ask you questions now that I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable asking you if we were friends, so I’m not going to pretend that we are and I’m not going to create some fake thing where we’re going to have a relationship beyond this conversation. I’m just going to ask you the things I want to know about and I hope that you respect the fact that I’m just being straight with you. I find that that works much better.

From the broadest possible pop cultural lens, Chuck's most spectacular and widely-circulated work, demographically (I assume) is his 2015 interview and cover story for GQ with Taylor Swift – then “the most popular human alive.” Yes, it really is worth dwelling on the image: this guy... this very Dorky Dad, just hanging out with the most highly-demanded teen idol who's ever lived, sitting awkwardly next to her in the backseat of her car as she maniacally panics to accept a call from Justin Timberlake. When one Chucks such a distinguished contrast upon such a high-profile contemporary medium, the weight of the potential scrutiny becomes palpable, but Klosterman anticipates and braces for this (very risky) business in the only manner he can: acknowledging it over and over and over again in the second paragraph of his every interview appearance.

It doesn’t matter if it was complimentary or insulting necessarily. It would seem as though I wasn’t taking her seriously as a musical artist, and the idea is that I do. That’s why I’m writing about her is because I do think she’s a meaningful, significant artist. It’s not worth the risk of having the story then get shifted by other people who perhaps just perceive themselves as somebody who’s a watchdog for certain signifiers or certain elements of the culture and that their job is to be on the watch for this. If your story then gets moved into that silo, that’s all it’s going to be remembered for... It’s a touchier thing now. It’s a more dangerous thing.

In the print itself, the cover story is prefaced by a very short but uncomfortably-telling complaint about changing expectations for culture writers. One might reasonably suggest that Klosterman regards the practice of calling out or remarking on “creepy misogyny” as “dumb” – nothing but the byproduct of changing “times.”

Something you may notice in the following 2015 feature on Taylor Swift is that I never describe what she looks like or how she was dressed, even though I almost always do that with any celebrity I cover... If I did, it would be reframed as creepy misogyny and proof that I didn't take the woman seriously as an artist. It would derail everything else about the story. It would become the story.

But… is it? Note how desperately close his language comes to the common white guy whining about feminism classification without actually fitting the bill. Right…? It doesn’t? Surely, it must be certified Awake through some combination of keywords or format I’m unfamiliar with or unable to visually register because Klosterman’s ass would have long been grass, otherwise. These 224 words are X’s most contentious, which you could call impressive, all things considered – he appears to care enough about his public image to curate it somewhat diligently. When a motherhood blogger published an open letter in 2013 citing three very ableist uses of the R-word in his work, it only took him two days to respond: “I was wrong. You are right.”

More than any other writer of his demographic, Chuck Klosterman has a close, wary relationship with the everchanging contextual boundaries of public expression. He knows when to be transparent with his feelings on progression, and he's careful to avoid what could be “problematic” for the sake of functioning better as a writer (I assume.) For Slate's I Have to Ask podcast, he managed to speak extensively about these mechanisms for nearly an hour without bellowing anything definitively cringey.

I can’t say it’s better or worse. It’s just different, and because it’s different, it makes me feel uncomfortable, but there’s actually like an adversarial relationship with the history of anything, and that somehow that history is seen as oppressive. And you shouldn’t even know about it. It’s better to live in now.

A quick jaunt from pretty horrendous to almost-ideal, then. If we are to place our faith in Chuck as our last bearded champion, we must hope that last sentence is sincerely intended to be his lens to the changing world. Granted – even if it is the truth – it’s not as if persistent acknowledgement of one’s position can miraculously wash away any systematic patriarchal dynamics involved in authoring (or reading, for that matter) a high-profile feature of a young woman on cover of a magazine which explicitly seeks most to speak to “all sides of the male equation,” (are you sure about that, Condé Nast?) especially considering how unlikely it would've been for me to read anything about Taylor Swift outside of this very white man's anthology. Fundamental themes of power and control are threaded throughout both his fiction and non-fiction, which is especially prevalent in the Macho Big Boy cultures of the athletics and music industries. In profiling Taylor Swift – the undisputed apex of the latter in 2015 – Klosterman provided a firsthand account of the grueling maintenance of a public and private personality under tremendous strain from said factors as they were magnified to the max by the most extreme celebrity.

Here we see Swift’s circuitous dilemma: Any attempt to appear less calculating scans as even more calculated. Because Swift’s professional career has unspooled with such precision, it’s assumed that her social life is no less premeditated.

I’m right there with Chuck: I’ve even found a fundamental pillar in Power and Control relationships supporting my own fiction experiments: how we attain them, how we lose them, and how best to make use of them – all of which had apparently been quite problematic for Taylor Swift for most of her adult life, though we wouldn’t be allowed to really comprehend how deep her inner turmoil had drilled until it overwhelmed even her expertly-designed self-control four years later, boiling over entirely with such unexpected violence that all of America’s pseudorural glam-pop-country-glossy-chode-hipsters let out a simultaneous, dangerously-alarmed holler of OH FOR PETE’S SAKE that was actually heard and recorded from the overflying orbit of the International Space Station.

It’s somehow different when the hub of the wheel is Swift. People get skeptical. Her famous friends are marginalized as acquisitions, selected to occupy specific roles, almost like members of the Justice League ('the ectomorph model,' 'the inventive indie artist,' 'the informed third-wave feminist,' etc.). Such perceptions perplex Swift, who is genuinely obsessed with these attachments.

No, it’s not only worthwhile as an exercise in superbly athletic self-awareness – the Taylor profile is profound. I’d recommend reading and treasuring it with or without the rest of the anthology because bizarre intersections like these are rare to come by from anybody else. Short, sharp, and occasionally somewhat petty notions are what Chuck Klosterman does best and most originally. Thanks to a digression of Kafka’s beginning with “you and I are about the same age…,” he arrives (by way of REM, believe it or not) at a significant statement about youth and identity.

It seems strange to me to be into music for its coolness outside of high school. That seems like that’s the only time when you’re a young person and you’re using art basically to create a personality because you don’t have a real personality yet.

Klosterman is debatably exempt from the traditional academic abstract of “objectivity” for the vast majority of his notable work because of its stated primary subject: his “interior life.” Perhaps the success of his voice could be at least partially attributed to his development of an existential muscle – a perspective unique enough to entertain, yet no less recognizably Midwestern with which he’s been able to reflect particularly clearly on the profession in tandem with the experience he’s accumulated over the course of his career.

You know, when you’re young, you’re a real emotional writer if you’re a writer… If I was a young person now, I would be incredibly attracted to the idea that when you’re 22 you can be a national writer, which was impossible when I was 22.

In a way, Klosterman does surmise that it was indeed its objectivity that media lost, and that writing is no longer a “one-way relationship,” but a sort of ridiculous dance in which “many people feel the reason they’re consuming media is to respond to it… that it’s not for the content.” I would remind old Chuck that there are very few functioning adults outside of academia or retirement in the United States who spend much of their time reading anything solely for the sake of absorption, and the disparity between those who were and weren’t was exponentially greater in the past. The story of American media is defined by its cycles of waning and waxing democratization, but many of the more traditional avenues in the business have bet on the “two-way relationship” to keep them relevant.

My own favorite chapter of the collection is a 2500-word personal essay constructed for Grantland to answer a single incongruity: “Why is watching a prerecorded sporting event less pleasurable than watching the same game live?” Some form of this question has at least mildly troubled every American since the 1960s, including myself, and Klosterman manages to provide an entertaining and concise analysis of this plight through his own wisdom. In its short preface in the volume – which was written “in 2008, in Europe, when [Chuck] was pretend depressed” is the story of his encounter with a house-painting stranger, to whom he explains the meter for success in his opinion-manufacturing profession, as he sees it: “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”

Last weekend I was in a hashish bar in Amsterdam. It was post-dusk, pre-night. The music was terrible (fake reggae, late-period Eric Clapton, Sublime deep cuts.) I was sitting next to a British stranger with a shaved head and a speech impediment. Our conversation required subtitles, so I imagined them in my mind. He told me he had lost three family members within the past year: his mother, who was sixty-six; his uncle, who was fifty-six; and his sister, who was forty-six. He said he'd just turned thirty-six. He asked if I saw a pattern developing. “Yes,” I said. “But only numerically.” I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a housepainter. He asked me the same question about myself. “I manufacture opinions,” I said. “Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?” “By the number of people who agree or disagree,” I said in response. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.” “That’s interesting,” said the bald British man who could barely speak. “I guess house painting is a totally different thing.”

Rarely are situations or discussions that begin with back in my day actually constructive in any sense, but Chuck Klosterman appears to be the exception. If you’re willing to indulge him, you may find yourself reassured. He now writes from a remote cabin (with WiFi,) was tortured – like all of us – in sifting through and compiling his old work for X, and finds its index to be his favorite part.

Exploring the index from a book you created is like having someone split your head open with an axe so that you can peruse the contents of your brain.

He is willfully and completely ignorant of the Harry Potter franchise, yet able to sincerely witness and convey the nuances of back-to-back Creed and Nickelback concerts in a confident, fascinating technique of which any other music or culture writer would deprive you. He is “almost embarrassed” by his emotional attachment to the Charlie Brown peanuts. (See: Chuck Klosterman on Charlie Brown.)

I haven't watched A Charlie Brown Christmas in at least twenty-five years, solely because I can't emotionally reconcile the final scene.

You’ll notice that his entire answer to the live television debacle is – again – entirely about control (or the lack thereof.) In fact, his relationship with and desire for control also contributed to his choice of profession.

Part of the reason I became a writer is because it was this completely controlled reality where I could do this thing by myself where you’d go out and you’d do the interviews and stuff, but then you’re back by yourself, transcribing and then writing. Then, when the story is done and you send it off, that’s the end. Now that’s the middle. Now it’s like, when the story is published, it’s the middle of the process very often because the consumer feels differently now.

While Klosterman’s voice is pleasant to someone like me, neither it nor himself necessarily belong to The People. In his X review for Paste Magazine, B. David Zarley proclaims essays to be “a love letter to a moment,” concluding that Chuck is “’effectively narcissistic,’ proving that culture essays can teach us something about ourselves and the people around us.” For The Washington Post, Justin Wm. Moyer notes “it’s hard to think of another writer who could make a 30-page, deeply reported essay about a North Dakota junior-college basketball game interesting,” suggesting that this new collection marks Klosterman’s ascendance from critic to philosopher. From what I’ve read to date, I would counter that he has always fulfilled the term to the extent of its usefulness in the 21st century and is even now beginning to redefine it. Last January, he braved the “dystopic” Google Gates to speak critically for a crowd of Googlers, describing them as “an umbrella over the entire culture,” and urging caution and reflection in the coming future to keep them from doing “something bad.” His engagement with them – especially during the Q&A – is a fascinating insight into the Greater Google Mind, and I would encourage any invested parties in Chuck Klosterman’s role as a philosopher to watch the talk in full. I was unfamiliar with “the boat-sails-wind analogy” before I read James Murphy’s interview for LCD Soundsystem’s “last album.”

Your life is a boat, the sails are your emotions, and drugs are the wind. When you're a kid, your boat is small and your sail is huge, and drugs are like a hurricane.

Control x Time = the Klosterman beat. I suppose this must be what other entertainment writers are referring to when they accuse Chuck of nostalgia trafficking, but I can’t be so sure. Though I’d like to think my own snout for the stuff is especially well-tuned, I am undeniably from a different planet – even auditorily. All but one or two of the musicians interviewed throughout X were entirely unknown to me by name, which Klosterman’s voice managed to make even more compelling – not to mention the included stories of athletes and the sports industry, which include stories of the human ego, paranoia, and complex drama that always manage to transcend their setting when articulated with such dexterity.

I’ve never before written a book review of any sort – nor am I defensibly qualified to compare culture writers – but with good ole’ Chuck, I dove much further in order to tackle one very important question: should Klosterman be recommended reading for anyone under 30 above or alongside bestsellers like George Saunders or groundbreaking essayists of color like Hilton Als? In many a case, I must conclude by saying, simply, that something of value would be forgone if we shunned Chuck, even if his insight is old news to all but the most rudimentary yokels. I have little to offer women or people of color, but I’d bet X would prove itself worth a library trip for any idiot white guys in their lives who may be falling far behind. I don’t know of any other voices who are in a better position to introduce these issues, nor any who are quite so practiced at handling them delicately. While Jenna Wortham-level readers will gain little to nothing from this examination or the ecology of its subject (and will likely find themselves pausing momentarily for a deserved jest before moving on and returning to their high-level plane of complex neoliberal commentary,) but most of their less-aWoken fathers should find in Chuck a man they can truly trust, who manages to consistently distill and articulate the need-to-knows of the most complex pop culture and pop science conversations without using any of the academic language found in most institutional discourse which daddy finds too condescending and superfluous to bear. Those readers who’ve absolutely fucking despised my voice so far in this essay should give Klosterman a go – I take as much time as I can muster to fiddle with and season the words in context like this work because I basically *enjoy* the bullshit, yet I’ve found both X and But What If We’re Wrong? remarkably refreshing and impressive exercises.

[These are] the cultural conditions in which I was raised under and which I pursued journalism under. That was part of the thing that drew me to the idea of being a reporter was I was like, this is something I can do, I think. My ability to detach my personal emotions from what I am investigating, while not perfect, I can do this. And now it turns out that the opposite is what’s desirable. I think it’s really going to change the kind of person who goes into media going forward.

Reading Chuck Klosterman is going to be perturbing, but true sincerity is almost always uncomfortable. Comprehensively, his nonfiction represents perhaps the most important possible behavior to encourage from both the critic and his readership because it incubates and exudes sincere curiosity and a genuine interest in learning to listen. From the perspective of quantified societal contribution, I’d argue that Klosterman’s craft is a significantly more honorable and worthwhile pursuit than greater academic literature in its unique and entertaining treatment of subjects the establishment tends to pulverize into minutia. Unless he’s broke and/or bookish, buy X as a gift for your Dad and at least give it a try when he’s done. If nothing else, at least read the Taylor Swift interview, okay? If he doesn’t enjoy the book, I’m always available if one or both of you need to blow off some steam: give me a call at (573) 823-4380. (Normal text messaging / talktime rates will apply.)

#media #spectacle

Discuss...

An autobiographical overview of my personal history with technology and its contributions to my current perspective.

Incalculable odds were against my arrival in this world happening in early 1994, positioning my life within a timeline that would allow me to bridge my two species’ most significant millenniums in the first grade as a student in the first class at Fairview Elementary school to receive curriculum-mandated exposure to brand-new Windows 98 PCs in its brand-new, fluorescent-lit computer lab in the center core of its 50-year-old rectangular brick structure. The lab also meant that ours was the first Fairview class to have the available relief of air conditioning during the school day. It’s unlikely that I would be home sick and watching the last television ever allowed in my mother’s living room as the second plane hit.

My peers and I would form a picogeneration without a name (perhaps we should be called the 9/11ers) — 91s and 92s wouldn’t have regular access to public school machines until they’d eclipsed the true prime of their development, and were just that much further along, mentally, to being able to comprehend the huge and terrifying concepts of 1) New York and 2) burning alive — while 98s like my niece were spared any such comprehension of death at all, yet now have to face the existentially future-sundering, darkly-mirrored reality of the Tump Presidency during the most critically uncertain period in the last stage of their brain’s transition to adulthood.

If there is truth in the cross-cultural supposition that souls have some sort of choice, pre-conception, over when they’re born, my own must have either cleaned out the house, or lost horrible, though I suspect I’ll never be able to confidently wager either way. This question of how lucky or unlucky am I to be alive right now is one which I find most fascinating — not just within myself, but within others my age. I declare us a generation largely because of my experiences under the assumption that my mid-Missouri upbringing represents the ultimate average in the American experiences of the time as the area has been a reliable sample of the clearest average of the country’s cultural, political, and economic life. Technically, it was quite unlikely that I arrive here as a new human being instead of China or India, and what if that, too was my choice?

Though less so, it was still against chance that I would be born to parents who would divorce very quickly after my birth, before my mind was able to form any tangible long-term memories, sparing me whatever pain could’ve resulted from their greater togetherness later nullified in front of me. I could’ve chosen them as well for the variety of experiences their situation would allow me as I grew up between my father’s 800-acre farm and my mother’s suburban house in Columbia, the college town an hour’s drive south. I write about my experiences now — so young — because I’ve likely already born witness to more extraordinary changes in human development than your parents, their parents, and their parents’ parents combined. At 24, my life has already spanned by far the most profound and expedited informational renaissance in human history — greater progress was made between the day I first rode a bicycle and the one on which I took my driver’s test than in thousands of years before it.

The sum of my father’s ordeals between 1950 and 1974 — from his birth until the age I am now — would indeed include watching a man set foot on a spatial body other than Earth for the first time, but would be mostly defined by work on the family’s soybean, corn, and wheat farms in central Illinois, driving carbureted tractors pulling cultivating equipment of the same basic design and function as had been pulled by horses, mules, and oxen for hundreds of years, and other implements — like the mechanical multi-row planter — that were new technology at the beginning of the century. For neighbors, he would walk behind the path of a square hay baler next to a moving flatbed trailer, upon which he would throw the 70–100 lb. rectangles of dead compacted grass by their twine through thick cowhide gloves. All of this I would get to experience in the next century on his farm, using the exact same equipment.

At home, he would watch NBC, ABC, and CBS on a CRT TV, as I would for several years until wireless television was legally transitioned to digital statewide in the summer of 2009. As an adolescent, he would form a business with friends cleaning out old abandoned barns in exchange for the rights of ownership to any finds inside, which led to his discovery of a hay-preserved 1929 Buick Sedan containing hand-written records of its every service. This car would change hands into his Uncle’s care as he went off to school in Champaign, married in Georgia, and eventually settled on the flat clay soil of the farm where I grew up, right on the border between Audrain and Monroe counties, Missouri. I was about 10 when we drove back to the family hub with a trailer in tow to collect the car from my Great Uncle, to my manic excitement.

Up until my mid-teens, my life was defined by my extreme reverence for historic cars, airplanes, tractors, and watercraft, and the time I spent operating, maintaining, restoring, or simply studying the assortment of these which I was allowed — often because of extraordinary circumstances — would form the component of my psychology which seeks to experience different cultures, ideas, and eras through the medium of engineering and design and relies on these to understand them. Like my father in his youth, I would learn to clean water out of a carburetor after the Oliver 88 had sat silent for too long, and I would piss in a chamber pot to avoid waking up my Grandfather by walking down creaking attic stairs and turning the lights on. I would learn how to shoot and drive before 10-years-old, and I would have the freedom to do both as I pleased on the miles of gravel roads that ran around home.

Though my stepfather bought me a PC of my own just as my first-grade computer class was ending, I could not conceive of a reason to occupy the dial-up line and block his incoming calls or faxes, so my use of the machine was limited to sparse writing and aggravating attempts to run Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 at approximately one frame per second on a 300MHz single-core Pentium II CPU. Though I was extremely fortunate compared to most middle-class kids my age at the time to have my own computer in my room, my relationship with it was not significant or particularly involved. I would leave it powered down for weeks at a time until my last two grades at Fairview, when homework assignments began to require it.

Perhaps the greatest gap between my mostly-suburbanite classmates and I was an exposure to Japanese entertainment and video games. I was once disallowed from a lunch table because I’d never heard of Pokémon or Luigi, but I did have a Sony Playstation at home on which I occasionally loaded A Bug’s Life to wander around its first level, perhaps in basal awe at the idea of manipulating what I saw on a screen in realtime. In self-imposed isolation from children my age, I wouldn’t develop any need to be socially competitive with video games as many of my peers would to carry with them into adulthood. I thought my interests in mechanical engineering to be above all of them, so I spent my time alone with heavy picturebooks on 20th century cars, tractors, and airplanes.

On the farm, my consistently agriculturally-proactive father was one of the first to have satellite internet for farm futures and weather reports on a pre-GUI machine which I don’t remember. As I was becoming computer literate in school, he would become extremely frustrated with the Windows XP-running machine he’d bought from a one-man, one-room computer shop in Centralia, and I would often solve some problem with bloatware or the goddamned printer. He would also subscribe to and install a first-generation DirectTV receiver, which had the first on-screen program guide I’d ever seen. In the evenings, I would watch hours of Modern Marvels on The History Channel, which presented the history, abstract functional theory, and implementation of a particular technology, both past and future. This single program — which has aired nearly 700 episodes since 1995 — is probably responsible for the majority of my at least rudimentary general knowledge in a variety of historic and “future” technological schools, and my curiosity about culture’s relationship with innovation.

Though my father’s interests differed significantly from mine — he thought more about growing and raising than of the tools one used to do it — he would indulge my many questions about how engines, hydraulics, and electrical systems worked, and indulged my curiosity by exposing me to the hidden communities of the most elderly, most obscure historic machinery enthusiasts like those of the Midwest Old Threshers Reunion in Mount Pleasant, Iowa — the Concours d’Elegance for antique tractor and reciprocating engine collectors. It was a similar event closer to home where I first operated a steam tractor — great, field-going locomotive-like vehicles that supplanted a need for horsepower in the late-1800s up until the Great Depression which chug, whistle, and puff along just like rail locomotives with a huge, gritty, iron steering wheel. As I recall, I was also given the opportunity to drive an unrestored Model T truck around the grounds that day — the knowledge from which I gained I cannot imagine being of much use ever again.

I was proud to the point of arrogance of my technical knowledge and experience in all the different things I had driven and operated, which my schoolmates were in no position to understand. I was elitist and anti-social about this as late as 8th grade, when I had just moved in to stay with my mother, who bought me a first generation iPhone which I proudly wore in a leather belt holster to Junior High. It would represent a shift in my fascination from very old technology toward the present and future.

I started talking online with a friend I’d first met years before at Fairview, who spent most of his time fiddling with his first-generation MacBook Pro. He originally exposed me to gadget bloggers on YouTube like Mark Watson and Jon Rettinger (both of whom are still full-time tech personalities.) My mom bought me a 13-inch aluminum-bodied MacBook (which would be sold as MacBook Pro after a single year,) and my lifestyle radically shifted inside my room, my computer, and my Xbox 360. My friend and I would both obsess together over software, design, and gadget – experimenting with our own tech YouTube channels until high school, where I would be adopted by a new friend group who would finally socialize me.

Recently, I have written about the contrasts and discrepancies of consumer technology development as its progress has disconnected from the upward linear trajectory in use, quality, and genuine innovation for the End User in a departure which has been especially visible from my perspective as an academically-untrained, but intensely demanding user in the past five years. When hardware was still the industry focus before ~2012, there was a tremendous amount of optimism among journalists and enthusiasts because each successive generation of devices had added more tangible capabilities. Publications like Gizmodo and Engadget made a fortune publishing reviews and comparison tests of hardware offerings across every segment of tech, and the discourse they generated had a noticeable influence on design. I remember this time well because it accented my last few years before adulthood, when I had plenty of spare time, energy, and curiosity to keep up.

The general consumer technology narrative since Steve Jobs’ death has become increasingly more about the companies who design and sell hardware and software than about how and why their consumers actually use them, and the result has been a series of new product segments with little defensible place in my own linear timeline of innovation, especially where productivity is involved. Augmented and Virtual Reality are quite explicitly escapist industries, yet to fill any significant need which was before unfilled. The same could be argued about voice assistants and smartwatches — neither of which remove obstacles in most users’ day-to-day lives but instead contribute to the array of tasks and devices which already seek their attention.

Of course, there are defensibly sound business incentives behind the industry’s new, fragmented direction, but I would also argue that there are those, too, for genuinely revisiting both what we should be doing and what we should be seeking to learn to do with technology. In a more abstract sense, I have written about whether or not we should want to be living in this particular now, and how the way we feel about the future should inform what we do in the present.

I cannot help but observe human progress from a perspective of powerlessness, acute alienation, and amused awe, which has already lent to a significant quantity of occasionally original thoughts as I watch, having witnessed an odd diversity of American life and culture. I’ve published them to entertain and to demonstrate a few methods of reflection on what it is you really want from the times you are living.

Discuss...

#meta #software #spectacle

What I have long predicted is now coming to pass: Google believes it should assume control.

Out of all the technology companies that have made my knees knock and my voice hoarse and my Tweets manic as a technoheretic in the past several years, Jumbo Google would easily take home the winning trophy for Dystopian of the Millennium. I have been rehearsing an especially dear pet prophecy of mine, unsolicited, to family, friends, and podcast guests since 2011 in which I end up arguing quite convincingly that Google is a dead ringer for the 16th-century Vatican: an inherently self-isolating organization with an absolute monopoly yielding gargantuan levels of essentially passive income from a service which nearly everybody transacts with, but only Google understands (and is therefore assumed to be its only possible provider,) which inevitably develops such a distance from the rest of the populace and their way of life (in tandem with total notoriety and celebrity among them all) not intentionally out of malice, but from the delusion of mythically-bestowed philanthropic duty that is borned of and compounded by this economic and cultural isolation in a perpetual accumulation of power and wealth that radicalizes the monopolizers — the majority already highly predisposed to zeal as they would’ve needed to be in order to find themselves in this singular, universally powerful position over every other class — and leaves their egocentric minds to wander exempt from all criticism save for that of fellow radicalized monopolizers, who together begin to feel more and more comfortable wondering aloud about themselves in increasingly fantastic presumptions: what if all of this was bestowed upon us because we are superior to them? What if it is our divine responsibility as superior beings to take charge and shepherd the common people as our sheep — for they cannot possibly know as well as we what is truly best for them?

You see it, right? And you can feel a very specific flavor of terror that is both awed by the scale of the circumstances created by so few human minds and sincerely amused by the absoluteness of your own inability to alter them in any way. Perhaps you even recognize this taste as one perfected by Christianity’s ancient advertising business, but Google knows so much about you that it’s rumored to’ve been selling user data to the Judeochristian God for some time now at a 10% discount, and so we extrapolate and anticipate, yes?

Of course, it’s admittedly satisfying for me to deliver you to this godfearing place in the most perverse look what I saw first that you didn’t see because you’re just not as bright but lucky for you, I’m so fucking generous with my wisdom sort of thinking around which the entire personas and livelihoods of fringe movement fanatics are built upon, but this is my one thing, okay? I’ve been waiting years for the right time to formally argue this theory in depth, and — thanks to this year’s public spotlight finally pivoting on the giants who’ve been silently swallowing their competition and relentlessly forcing their already ridiculous margins higher and higher in relative obscurity for decades, the time has come, indeed. The common people’s trust in Google had a godawful week.

Don’t Be Evil

On Monday, Gizmodo reported that twelve frustrated Google employees were quitting the company in protest of their work assisting the Department of Defense to “implement machine learning to classify images gathered by drones” for the detail fleeting Project Maven, despite some 4000 employee signatures on a letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai requesting (in full) that he “cancel this project immediately,” and “draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology,” citing the infamous “Don’t Be Evil” motto, which Google then proceeded to remove from its code of conduct for the first time in 18 years the day after the New York Times article went to press, on April 5th.

On initial approach to the abstract of this story, from the ass to our thoughts arrives an easy narrative of a Silicon Valley mutiny comprised of twelve brave, conscientious souls who’ve been eaten up inside by their complicity in the filthy deals made by their power-obsessed CEO over scotch and cigars in a dark D.C. study — kept awake for months by the sound of his puffing cackles at satellite images of dead toddlers in a bombed-out street.

Ah ha, we say. That man is no good, and he just wouldn’t listen! They knew they didn’t have a choice… They only did what they had to do…

The reality of internal disagreements at Google, though, manages to be even more theatrical. The sheer volume of correspondence must surely be beyond anything capable of the enduser’s imagination, so let’s phone a friend: my favorite peek into the day-to-days of inter-Google existence is an old blog post by Benjamin Tilly on his first month at the company in which he was compelled almost immediately to describe in great detail how best to “deal with a lot of email in gmail” at peak efficiency using shortcuts and labels.

“As you get email, you need to be aggressive about deciding what you need to see, versus what is context specific.”

Now we have a bit better idea of the aggressive emailing that was a sure constant on a normal workday at Google in 2010, so it must’ve been deafening after 8 years of Gmail development as 4000 employees no doubt vented, debated, and decided to organize last month, though without making much headway because the leadership’s response was apparently “complicated by the fact that Google claims it is only providing open-source software to Project Maven,” this new knowledge having significant effect on our mind’s image of Sundar Pichai’s activities in Washington: he is now swapping seats with a frustrated Colin Powell in order to install OpenOffice onto his desktop from a flash drive, and we recall that Google’s Googleplex headquarters resembles nowhere in modern life more than a brand new playground built in a design language borrowing heavily from Spy Kids. And though these Twelve disciples are unnamed for the moment, a few of them could immediately land book deals by going public, and every single one would always have by default not only the badge of “I landed a job at Google,” (which is really to say I have hit Life’s maximum level cap,) but “I worked at Google for a while, but ended up quitting to do something else,” which is guaranteed to make you the most interesting, intellectually superior person present in whatever crowd for the rest of your life. The ultra-cool Sarah Cooper quit Google to become a comedian and even got to talk to Kara Swisher!

I won’t pretend to understand big tech’s diminutive bastardization of prestige, but “more than 90 academics” jumping to publish an open letter (adjacent to a huge DONATE: Support the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots button) in which they “write in solidarity with the 3100+ Google employees” who’s terrible boss decided to help some lackeys in the Pentagon set up their email and didn’t text back for a whole hour doesn’t sound 100% sincere. Notably, I don’t know how or why the fuck 90 people would go about collaborating on a single document, but if it really was managed, they definitely used Google Docs…

At one point, it was fun to think about the history of the friendly side-scroller-playing garage ghouls and dorm dorks who gave cooky, wacko names to their dot com startups in parody and defiance of the lame-ass surname anagrams on the buildings of their established competitors, but those who’ve stuck around have only done so by becoming expert at SUCKING UP EVERYTHING around them, and it pisses me off every day how worried I am that my species will finally be done in by a company with a name like Yahoo! and be known only to a bunch of adolescent interdimensional silicon blobs 30 million years in the future as that bipedal race who remained dignified until the last 0.01% of their reign on Earth, when in way less than a single generation, they all just went FUCKING INSANE and blew themselves up because they suddenly hated all sense.

“Google” is perhaps the worst of these to have to shout in fear and/or anger in your last moments as it sounds in American English like you’ve startled your subject with a ticklish pinch followed so immediately by an esophagus-busting chokehold that the two events appear simultaneous, and in real English English, it almost always sounds like a parent speaking of a character on a pre-K children’s television programme whom they find quite foul and upsetting, but will manage to refrain from expressing so otherwise because they know that Teletubbies shit is the most quickly forgotten stage of television viewership. It’s fascinating how exclusive the word “Google” is to American English because in everything else it really is complete nonsense, but lets halt all etymological discussions right now because we’ve only now just finished with Monday.

The Soul Ledger

On Thursday, all of my Google experiences, suppositions, and soul-detaching screenshots were usurped when a thoroughly alarming internal company video called The Selfish Ledger was leaked to The Verge, which I watched once then and do not want to watch again for the sake of this piece, but I will. Though the big V has been disappointingly timid for years about editorializing — when tech journalism desperately needs some confident, informed opinion more than ever — Vlad Savov’s accompanying article should be read in its entirety, to which I can add my own terror where he perhaps could not.

The production style is technically identical to that of the very popular thinkpiece-esque, motion-graphics-paired-with-obligatory-sharpie illustrated videos which you find playing at max volume on your mom’s iPad from where she’s fallen asleep on the couch at 9PM, but the repeating stock string soundtrack multiplies one’s discomfort as such that we would all end up in the fetal position without remembering the transition were it not for the appearance of trusty old Dank Jenkins, who’s face I thankfully associate heavily enough with his infamous down-and-out Tweet to be a welcome respite in attention before the very scary hypothesis for which it’s been buttering me up, as best summed by Vlad:

The system would be able to “plug gaps in its knowledge and refine its model of human behavior” — not just your particular behavior or mine, but that of the entire human species. “By thinking of user data as multigenerational,” explains Foster, “it becomes possible for emerging users to benefit from the preceding generation’s behaviors and decisions.” Foster imagines mining the database of human behavior for patterns, “sequencing” it like the human genome, and making “increasingly accurate predictions about decisions and future behaviors.”

The next time the what if they do something scary question comes up in a casual conversation about Google, you’ll have something a lot more substantial than just speculation. Or will you? The Verge reached out for comment and got an awfully convenient response.

This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a technique known as ‘speculative design’ to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate.

Wow! Leave it up to grand ole Googe to reveal the ultimate excuse for just about any suggestion or behavior, though it does seem almost deliberately uncomfortable, doesn’t it? No matter — whether or not this video was ever about a project or tangible product development, or simply to explore uncomfortable ideas because it is proof that the company has reached that critical Vatican stage — if you’ll remember — where they now feel comfortable exploring Very Bad, but Very easily made Real Ideas amongst themselves about what would happen if they allowed their system to nudge its users around a different, slightly less optimal route to the bar, let’s say — without their knowledge — in order for the system to collect traffic data for the sake of its own interests? Which would be, technically, in the interest of all Ledger users now and in the future, so why not?

The ledger could be given a focus, shifting it from a system which not only tracks our behavior, but offers direction towards a desired result.”

This, my dear privacy-obsessed friends, is the real issue with data collection — its power over huge groups by way of their behavior and it is never going to be remedied in any significant way by ad-blockers or VPNs because the EndUser shall always out number you 50 to 1, even decades from now. EndUser does not understand — or, crucially, have any desire to understand anything technical about what leads to the PewDiePie videos playing on his filthy screen. Here’s a great opportunity to escape Silicon Valley’s technolibertarianism and resign your Darwinian empathy in favor of meaningful and truly-effective action: if you want to avoid a future Google Church (or Google Government, more worryingly,) you should invest your time, effort, and knowledge into electing officials more capable of understanding and regulating Big Tech.

Google Government

The internet as it stands is made possible by Google as the goto resource for online advertising. In 2016, “Google held 75.8 percent of the search ad market, bringing in $24.6 billion in revenue from search ads,” according to Recode. By 2019, “that’s expected to grow to $36.62 billion in revenue, or 80.2 percent of the market.” Google’s edge in user behavior and targeted advertising combined with their extensive resources available developers to integrate independent platforms with Google’s software services at various levels makes it very difficult for any advertising-funded individual or organization to compete online without dipping in to the Google universe. YouTube — a Google property since 2006 — has actively invested in and supported a new career path entirely within their own platform that is rapidly becoming popularly aspired-to by young children, while the reality of existence as a full-time YouTuber is far less glamorous than the immediately-visible surface would indicate, and the effort already expended by my generation in its pursuit has already made us insane.

thanks google. pic.twitter.com/1jRtrD77R3

— David Blue (@NeoYokel) October 2, 2017

So, what would the internet look like if Google didn’t exist? We know they’ve been working with the government now on various projects, but what if some terrible exposed transgression of theirs suddenly warranted an immediate shutdown and seizure of all Google properties? Well, we know from a post on Quora by Googler Ashish Kedia that even 5 years ago, the sudden absence of Google for “2–3 mins” set the internet into a bit of a panic, reducing overall traffic by 40%. In the time since, we’ve all grown exponentially more dependent on Google properties: billions of people rely on Google Maps for directions and, thousands of companies (including the Pentagon and other government institutions) rely on Gmail and GSuites for intercommunication, file sharing, task management, etc., and more and more academic institutions rely on Chromebook devices running connection-dependent operating systems. It’s not much of a stretch to argue that Google’s sudden disappearance would constitute a Civil Emergency in the United States, which will only become a stronger and more serious incentive for regulatory bodies to look the other way.

Though the tangible results of advertising have been quantified significantly in the past 20 years, one can’t help but wonder after watching YouTube ads for the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class on toy unboxing videos if the companies who spend big bucks on Google advertising understand where their money is going, but they know that if they don’t advertise there, their competitors will. This, of course, is a fundamental practice of a monopoly, and it’s yielded Google so much fucking money that they cannot possibly spend it fast enough, as evidenced by their investments in life extension — so that, perhaps, they will have more time on Earth to figure it out.

When you build a collection of the world’s smartest people in a self-sufficient environment that discourages exploration of other lifestyles and ideas, and you sustain the society with a gargantuan, relatively low-maintenance revenue stream, you create a culture which is not only well-primed for isolationism, but is also extremely inefficient. In fact, with its vast collection of abandoned products and properties, Google must surely be one of the most inefficient companies in history. Thinking back on recent software releases along with its recent entries into the hardware space, Google is also one of the worst competing tech companies. Very little aside from Gmail, Google Photos, Google Maps, and Chrome have found their place or garnered significant usership. Google Play Music is unintuitive and impossible, Google Allo and Google+ are all but forgotten addendums to other services, and Google Search — its core, original function — has been out of control for years, and all of them are designed blandly and excruciatingly tiring to look at.

Google Shun

If this all has stirred nothing more in you than a desire to eliminate Google from your own online life as much as possible, there are alternatives in almost every one of the sphere’s they dominate. As of late, DuckDuckGo has accumulated a fair amount of buzz and coverage as a private, more relevant alternative to Google’s plain old search engine. Though it is clever enough to list us as the first result for “extratone,” I’ve found it simply insufficient as a replacement in my own life because, essentially, it rarely delivers what I’m looking for. By contrast, Dropbox Paper is such an elegant cloud notetaking and word processing software that it makes Google Docs look simply idiotic (and warrants its own review very shortly.) For getting around, know that MapQuest is not only still around — it’s now a very competitive mobile navigation app.

I, myself, have allowed Google as complete of access to my information and behavior as possible because I believe “privacy” is a completely futile endeavor if one wishes to be a part of society, though I do often use alternatives to Google services simply because I fucking hate the way they look. If you want a more complete list of services and software that allow one to shun the Google God entirely, you’ll be forced to seek out less dignified sources like Lifehacker and Reddit and decide if the additional time you’ll spend using most of them to accomplish the same tasks is really worth your digital angst.

If Google were to be more explicit with its users and staff about its aspirations to take over control of our lives, there will be little to do but accept the future they intend to create because they’ve long been too powerful to control. In the meantime, I’d suggest you continue to use whatever software works best for you and refrain from wasting your time fretting on conspiratorial suppositions of what the tech industry may be doing to “invade your privacy,” because there is no longer any such thing, nor will there be ever again. However, I would also urge to you worship your own Gods, whomever they may be, for Google will never be worthy. I, for one, shall only pray to our Mother Sun.

Discuss...

#media #spectacle

Everything you’ve ever heard or read about Portland, Oregon is true. It is an authoritative and pseudofascist money machine that hides behind an insultingly thin veneer of celebrated individualism. These are the sentiments I see reflected in the people and organizations around me. I originally posted this on r/Portland and it made white people mad.

In my despair about the complex nature of the World as it is changing, I shall create for myself and those like me an Island where the things about us which I think should be celebrated can be so freely — where Me (among us) means something again. Where our money will mean something again because meaning is — above all — what people like me should seek. I write this prospectus for my Island — let’s call it White Island — on a thirty-year-old typewriter because the physicality of these words is almost the entirety of what imbues them with meaning, and I believe the particulars of analog existence are lost on the World in a tragically big way as it is changing. On White Island, at least, the physical shall be most Holy, and its intrinsic worth shall be worshiped freely so that the treasures of our past are not lost.

As it is changing, the World is growing noisy with voices that are unlike mine, and the grasp on the conversation which I was promised in my upbringing is slipping alarmingly away with each new day. I believe these new sounds detract from my celebration of the things in life that give mine meaning: bicycles, beanies, body art, brewing, electric guitars, and the hair that grows on my face. Every day, I am more and more afraid that my voice will be lost in them, and if it is lost, I am afraid there will be nothing left of Me or my meaning. This thought worries me like none other, and — as long as people like me have sufficient economic and social resources to do so — we should make for ourselves an Island away from the new World and her noises so that we may continue to live comfortably in a soundscape of only our own creation, as is our birthright and grand tradition.

Our parents and their parents before them were born into a more careful and physical World where respect for their crafts, their voices, and their beards was a universal right. If we are to follow in their generous footsteps and give wholeheartedly our own equivalent of these to the World, we should be unequivocal in our expectation of its continued reciprocation and appreciation for them. As long as we are able, we should not have to imagine an alternative way of life in which our effort is less recognized or generally important. This we should refrain from doing not only for the sake of our own comfort, but for the good of the whole World, even if it is no longer interested in recognizing the value of our contributions to it.

As our trusted methodologies are washed away in their new noise, our Island shall be a bastion for them. We will remember that a cup of coffee should take at least twenty minutes to prepare. We will not forget the culturalizing nuances in the taste of the most diminutive brews. We will sacrifice whatever is necessary in order to purify our foods from the poisonous nutritional sins of the processed masses. We shall enforce our own wise, time-honored priorities as we can only within a space that is truly ours, where only people like ourselves will feel and be sincerely welcome.

Discuss...

#spectacle