is a 30-year-old human being, lives in Chapel Hill, NC, works as Vice President of newfangled.com, reads, writes, draws, and thinks about the future.
• Ask me anything Christopher Butler
1. I’m learning that there is a limit to the amount of information I can take in and synthesize properly. Rather than just cutting some out, I want to give serious thought to what I take in. Particularly in regard to reading web content, the echo chamber is a significant factor. I want to impose a rule, something like “don’t read pseudo-writers.” Now about that definition of “pseudo”… oh, and “writers.”
2. Trust and knowledge. In many ways, human knowledge is a house of cards. Trying to dismantle it carefully, getting to the root, fundamental, non-negotiable concepts without which everything else you know cannot be is an exercise not to be undertaken at bedtime. During walks to work is probably better…
3. Workspace. Finding a balance between efficiency/productivity/inspiration.
4. Design simplicity for tomorrow… My last twoarticles have dealt with this - what the underlying purposes should be for web design and marketing and how we should strive for increased simplicity. My next one will be out this week and hone in on the idea of respecting attention.
5. Time travel. Because I often am, and because of this.
Right. I’ve given myself 15 minutes to get this out. No editing, just a brain-dump of a thought I had at lunch today.
My feeling at the moment is that the app marketplace is, for the most part, comprised of applications that are not valuable. They’re not worth paying cash for, nor are they worth the time spent developing them at all. Their worth should be a measure of how helpful they are, but if you have to try hard to integrate them into your life or workflow, then they are not helpful. A good tool is indespensable and proves itself by use.
So what does that mean for iPhone/iPad apps? I guess it means that the app marketplace is an essentially (brute) capitalist market. The validation is purely a matter of whether someone will buy the app, not whether the app is useful, or valuable by any objective measure. Are we alright with that? For developers and designers of these terrible apps, there must come a point - pre-launch, of course - at which they realize they are creating useless junk. Yet they proceed anyway, not out of any malice, I imagine, but just out of a desire to make something and hopefully profit from it. But how unsatisfying. For consumers, I get the sense that people consider apps to be throwaway purchases. They’re mostly so inexpensive that if the app doesn’t become indespensable to them, the loss isn’t a concern. But what about in the aggregate? I’d love to know how much the average apps marketplace customer has spent since it’s launch - both in terms of cash and in terms of the number of apps downloaded.
My worry is that this structure degrades critical thought, creativity, care for objective value, and a whole host of other things pertinent to regard for humankind. It certainly can’t be sustainable.
“This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth…which of us has it enriched? We have sumptuous garnitures for our life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors, but in the heart of them, what increase of blessedness is there? Are they happier, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call ‘happier’? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God’s Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so…We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.”
— Thomas Carlyle, 1843 (writing of England, but his words could easily be applied to present-day America)
“Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another - which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver. The new car will rapidly be absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where we will hardly register its existence - until the night when a burglar does us the paradoxical service of smashing a window to steal the radio and brings home to us, in the midst of the shattered glass, how much we had to be grateful for.”
“There is no wealth but life, life, including all its powers of love, of joy and of admiration. That country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his posessions, over the lives of others…Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy are, in reality, no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth.”
“Rousseau’s Discourse goes on to sketch the history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but as one of regress, from a priviledged state in which we humans lived simply but were aware of our own needs to a state in which we are apt to feel envy for ways of life that can claim little connection to our true selves. In technologically backward pre-history, in Rousseau’s “natural state,” when people lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a newspaper, men and women alike better understood themselves and so were drawn towards the more essential features of a happy life: love of family, respect for nature, awe at the beauty of the universe, curiosity about others and a taste for music and humble entertainments. It was from this state that modern commercial “civilization” pulled us, according to the philosopher, leaving us to envy and yearn and suffer in a world of plenty.”
“However disgruntled or puzzled a social hierarchy may leave us feeling, we are apt to go along with it on the resigned assumption that it is too entrenched and must be too well founded to be questioned. We are led to believe, in other words, that communities and the principles underpinning them are, practically speaking, immutable - even, somehow, natural.”
— Alain de Botton on political change, in Status Anxiety, pg 203
“We’re stuck with this very deep problem, this 800-pound gorilla: If it’s all just mechanical stuff everywhere we look, and if every part of the brain is connected to, and driven by, other parts of the brain, then where’s consciousness?” For most folks, the answer might be, “Well, it’s in my mind.” But that begs the question of what we mean by the mind, beyond the physical brain. What is a mind? (Your brain weighs about three pounds. How much does your mind weigh?) Eagleman has no clear way to frame the question of consciousness, much less a way to describe subjective experience: “There’s no equation that can give us the taste of feta cheese.”
“Libraries absolutely cannot keel over and let Google replace them. They are our collective bookshelves, the memory theater for a community. As Robert Darnton suggested in the December 17, 2009 New York Review of Books, the U.S. government might do well to acquire Google Books outright. France, after legally blocking Google’s plans to scan its books, is undertaking a digitization initiative of its own. This is, after all, a basically political matter; the bookshelf is a political arrangement. It carries our words, ideas, convictions, memories, identity, and language—the imaginative substance of any political order. Just as a personal bookshelf becomes the extension of one’s body, a democratic society must ensure that its books are held democratically.”
