#tech industry ennui

[soft-epilogue-continues]

5.10.23

Ok so I got nothing done yesterday except the project update and filing my nails. In my defense, the novel-length fic I was reading was really good and brought me lots of joy.

I have spent the past half an hour working on my own fic so that I could get it out of my system, though this has made me even more excited to work on it and I hope I can keep that excitement up this evening. With any luck I'll be able to edit this chapter and post it tonight!

Also in my defense of yesterday's zero output, I started looking for a new job, which I do every once in a while when the ennui gets to be too much.

My thought is that if I transition away from being a software engineer and go to being a product manager I would have all the same bullshit I'm dealing with now but with none of the inferiority anguish I feel from being a shit programmer. I have a few options in this regard:

Apply for a product manager role I don't necessarily want just to have the interviewing practice and see if I can get such a job.

Attempt to transition to a similar role at my current company to see if I even like it.

Put my nose to the grindstone and become a better programmer even though every bone in my body is screaming that while I am capable of this, I do not want to do this.

At the moment I want to do option 2 though I suppose I should also make more of an effort at option 3. Regardless I think I'm giving myself until next March for a few reasons:

I don't want to give back my new work laptop and it will officially become mine in March 2024.

All of my stock options will have vested by then and I will have had the opportunity to exercise as much of them as possible (need to get on this this year actually so taxes are less of a headache).

I will have gone through another review cycle which, according to my last one, means I might get promoted if I get my ass in gear since the only thing holding me back is how slowly I deliver completed projects, a fixable thing.

The length of time will give me a chance to "design my work life" (as per that book of the same name that I will be going through) and see, in the most risk-averse way possible, if I even like the work required of a product manager. To that end there are a few things I can start doing now that I know of without even going through that book's work sheets, such as attending my working group's assessment meeting tomorrow and maybe checking out the work done by the current product team, of which I am not 100% certain that we even have one as such. All of this I will record in the incredible Japanese notebook/bullet journal with my incredible Japanese pen (pictured above) that I bought on my work trip to Tokyo two weeks ago (just another thing to be grateful for about this job - I get to go on awesome trips!)

Ok! Enough outlining grand plans, the to do list!

Work:

Quantitative experiment analysis

Qualitative analysis

Phone roaming charges reimbursement I have checked on this and I have not yet been charged for international stuff

Work trip photos, part 1 Done though I will take a break here and actually share them with my coworkers another time, I've spent enough time on this today

Read the assessment before tomorrow's meeting

Investigate the product team

Go through mountain of receipts for reimbursements

Registration form for upcoming all company meet up

Personal Admin/Life:

Exercise

Cook dinner

Health expenses substantiation

Budget

Personal Creative:

Work on fic #1

Work on digital painting

Self portrait?

Volunteering!!! (I am so behind on this. This is actually a programming project of the computational linguistics variety which is its own possible career exploration, not to mention actually interesting, so I can't neglect this!)

[dankusner]

The Dumbphone Boom Is Real

Will Stults spent too much time on his iPhone, doom-scrolling the site formerly known as Twitter and tweeting angrily at Elon Musk as if the billionaire would actually notice.

Stults’s partner, Daisy Krigbaum, was addicted to Pinterest and YouTube, bingeing videos on her iPhone before going to sleep.

Two years ago, they both tried Apple’s Screen Time restriction tool and found it too easy to disable, so the pair decided to trade out their iPhones for more low-tech devices.

They’d heard about so-called dumbphones, which lacked the kinds of bells and whistles—a high-resolution screen, an app store, a video camera—that made smartphones so addictive.

But they found the process of acquiring one hard to navigate.

“The information on it was kind of disparate and hard to get to. A lot of people who know the most about dumbphones spend the least time online,” Krigbaum said. A certain irony presented itself: figuring out a way to be less online required aggressive online digging.

The couple–Stults is twenty-nine, and Krigbaum is twenty-five—saw a business opportunity.

“If somebody could condense it and simplify it to the best options, maybe more people would make the switch,” Krigbaum said.

In late 2022, they launched an e-commerce company, Dumbwireless, to sell phones, data plans, and accessories for people who want to reduce time spent on their screens.

This wasn’t Stults’s first attempt at entrepreneurship; his past efforts included a made-in-America clothing brand in Colorado

(“That went under,” he said) and a coffee shop in the back of an ill-attended Hollywood comedy club (“A doomed enterprise,” Krigbaum said).

Dumbwireless, however, has been much more successful.

The couple’s home, in East Los Angeles, has turned into a kind of dumbphone emporium, with five hundred boxed devices stacked up in what was supposed to be a dining room.

Stults takes business calls on his personal cell, and on one recent morning the first call came at 5 A.M.

(As the lead on customer service, he has to use a smartphone—go figure.)

They pack each order by hand, sometimes with handwritten notes.

They have not yet quit their day jobs, which are in the service industry, but Dumbwireless sold more than seventy thousand dollars’ worth of products last month, ten times more than in March, 2023.

Krigbaum and Stults noticed an acceleration in sales last October, which they speculate may have had something to do with the onslaught of holiday-shopping season.

Some of their popular phone offerings include the Light Phone, an e-ink device with almost no apps; the Nokia 2780, a traditional flip phone; and the Punkt., a calculator-ish Swiss device that looks like something designed for Neo to carry in “The Matrix” (which, to be fair, is a movie of the dumbphone era).

The growing dumbphone fervor may be motivated, in part, by the discourse around child safety online.

Parents are increasingly confronted with evidence that sites like Instagram and TikTok intentionally try to hook their children.

Using those sites can increase teens’ anxiety and lower their self-esteem, according to some studies, and smartphones make it so that kids are logged on constantly.

Why should this situation be any healthier for adults?

After almost two decades with iPhones, the public seems to be experiencing a collective ennui with digital life.

So many hours of each day are lived through our portable, glowing screens, but the Internet isn’t even fun anymore.

We lack the self-control to wean ourselves off, so we crave devices that actively prevent us from getting sucked into them.

That means opting out of the prevailing technology and into what Cal Newport, a contributing writer for The New Yorker, has called a more considered “digital minimalism.”

The Light Phone débuted in 2017, before smartphone exhaustion became a mainstream ailment.

The company’s co-founders, Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier, have sold tens of thousands of phones.

The Light Phone II, released in 2019, features a monochrome touch screen that allows users to make calls, send text messages, and use a few custom apps: an alarm and timer, a calendar, directions, notes, music and podcast libraries.

There are no social-media apps or streaming apps.

“The point is to create useful utility that does not have the attention economy built in,” Tang said.

Like Dumbwireless, Light Phone has recently been experiencing a surge in demand.

From 2022 to 2023, its revenue doubled, and it is on track to double again in 2024, the founders told me.

Hollier pointed to Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” about the adverse effects of smartphones on adolescents.

Light Phone is receiving increased inquiries and bulk-order requests from churches, schools, and after-school programs.

In September, 2022, the company began a partnership with a private school in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to provide Light Phones to the institution’s staff members and students; smartphones are now prohibited on campus.

According to the school, the experiment has had a salutary effect both on student classroom productivity and on campus social life.

Tang told me, “We’re talking to twenty to twenty-five schools now.”

To Tang and Hollier’s surprise, some of the most willing Light Phone converts are Gen Z-ers.

Some of them are younger than the iPhone.

Digital technology has been an inevitable feature of their lives, yet they are also better equipped, or better motivated, than generations past to confront its negative impacts.

Apple recently allowed third-party developers to write software that accesses the iPhone’s Screen Time function, meaning that some new programs can now help users limit their screen time by blocking apps.

T. J. Driver and Zach Nasgowitz, two engineers in their early twenties, took advantage of this change to create an iPhone accessory called Brick, to fight their own excessive phone usage.

Brick, which launched in September of 2023, is a magnetized plastic cube with a corresponding app that allows you to select which features you want to block on your smartphone.

Tapping the brick activates or lifts the blockage.

Driver and Nasgowitz started with one 3-D printer to produce the accessories; now they have fifteen machines running around the clock and are shipping a few hundred products a day.

There is no one dumbphone solution for everyone.

Each digital addict is addicted in her own way.

Stults, of Dumbwireless, uses an app called Unpluq, which works similarly to Brick, blocking specific apps from his smartphone while allowing him to maintain the store’s customer-service channels, including e-mail and Shopify.

Krigbaum has been a committed Light Phone user for the past two years.

She said that she doesn’t miss her smartphone, but that her new device can cause some awkwardness when she meets other young people who ask how to keep in touch.

They mean on social media, of course; for the vast swath of Gen Z-ers who don’t use dumbphones, exchanging numbers to text message or, God forbid, call seems archaic. “I’ve been saying, ‘I guess I’ll see you if I see you,’ ” Krigbaum said.

When I want to escape from my iPhone, I pop the SIM card out (which, unfortunately, is not possible on some newer iPhones) and install it in a red Nokia 2780 flip phone—the closing snap of which brings me back instantly to my high-school days, when flip phones were cutting edge.

After the surprisingly easy switching process, I take the simple device with me on my daily walks with my dog.

If I had my smartphone in hand, I’d be refreshing Instagram or compulsively checking my e-mail while my hound does her business or sniffs tree trunks.

With the Nokia, I’ve cut myself off from such meaningless digital stimuli but preserved my ability to answer texts or phone calls if necessary. (I’m too much of a millennial to actually leave the house without any phone.)

I find myself looking more at my surroundings, which are particularly enjoyable in springtime, and I am more relaxed when I return from the excursions.

When I switch the SIM card back into my iPhone, the device seems momentarily absurd: an enormous screen filled with infinite entertainment and information that follows me wherever I go.

Then I open all my usual apps in quick succession—e-mail, Instagram, Slack—to see what I’ve missed.

The Dawn of the Dumb House

When the interior designer Ken Fulk begins working with new clients, he asks them to fill out a “Fulkfessional,” a form with questions to help him understand what matters most to them at home.

Among his favorite questions lately is “Dumb house or smart house?”

The answer is everything.

The philanthropist Christine Schantz knew exactly what she wanted for her historic 1925 home in Marin County.

She tasked Fulk (and architect Andrew Skurman) with creating a residence that could last 30 years without another renovation.

All those smart flourishes that are the rage these days—automated fixtures, complex lighting systems, remote-controlled appliances, charging stations, electronic security systems, and, everyone’s favorite, Alexa—went out the window.

Schantz didn’t want a SpaceX command station but a family retreat.

“Technology doesn’t go with that,” she says.

Homeowners like Schantz aren’t hardcore technophobes.

They would just like fewer remotes, gizmos, and wires in their personal space, and they’re turning to their decorators, architects, and contractors to make houses that are, if not dumb, then dumbish.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the trend is gaining favor with the most ­cutting-edge cohort of all; call them the Low-Key Luddites of Silicon Valley.

“Many of my clients who work in the technology world tend to forgo highly advanced homes often because they are acutely aware of change,” Fulk says.

What they want, he adds, are environments that age gracefully without frequent, irksome updates.

The Design Rules of the Modern Dumb House:

Keep traditional kitchen appliances out of sight and focus on bold color–such as this vivid share of robin’s egg blue.

All fixtures and cabinet hardware are by the Nanz Company.

Rule: Go old school with cookware–very old school.

The collection of enameled cast iron pots and pans is from Staub.

The pendant lights are by Studio Van den Akker.

To step inside an anti-smart house like Schantz’s, seen here, is to find a feast for the eyes steeped in handiwork that feels closer to the past than the future: artisanal millwork, detailed plaster, light switches that look like old fashioned brass toggles.

The doorbell is manual (“a Victorian hand-turn that I purchased myself,” Schantz says), the bookcases are filled with hardbacks, and family knickknacks and photographs are not relegated to the attic or uploaded to an iPad but thoughtfully displayed.

“We often hear clients say that they don’t want a home that’s smarter than they are,” says the design legend Holly Hunt. “The appeal of being able to control your home while on vacation is obvious, but what happens when things go wrong and you can’t get through to tech support while you’re on the other side of the world?”

Rule:

Take the low-tech look to the next level with bespoke wallpaper illustrated with favored real and imaginary titles, executed in the powder room by Ken Fulk, and a custom, marble, wood, and leather vanity by Merritt Woodwork, with faux-book detailing.

The idea of the smart home goes back decades. In pop culture it is depicted everywhere from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab to John Lautner’s 1960 Los Angeles house the Chemosphere (the inspiration for The Jetsons and a longtime movie backdrop) to, more recently, the 2014 film Ex Machina. In Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) a health food store owner is cryogenically frozen and defrosted 200 years later in a glass house designed by Charles Deaton full of robots. In the real world, the launch of the first general-purpose home automation network technology, dubbed X10, came in 1975.

a living room with a chandelier and a couch Douglas Friedman

In the living room, a Silvio Piatelli chandelier, a table lamp by Cym Warkov Ceramics, and Chesterfield sofas by Coup d’etat.

In 1999 Microsoft’s “Home of the Future” promotional video imagined a middle-class family house with seamless voice-activated and integrated lighting, heating, security, and entertainment systems. By 2012 the ad was becoming a reality: 1.5 million home automation systems had been installed in the United States, according to data firm ABI Research, and by 2020 the industry was valued at $44 billion.

ken fulk house renovation in marin county Douglas Friedman

Rule: No TV, Alexa, or electronics in the bedroom. And keep lighting simple. The chandelier is by Fabio LTD, and the reading pendants are by Allied Maker. Rule: Prioritize neutral elements: fresh flowers and forest wallpaper, here by Cole & Sons. The wicker nightstands are by Portuguese design studio Emotional Brands.

The shift away from overly digitized homes, at least for some, has been a long time coming, spurred first by a growing awareness of the health risks of too much screen time and later accelerated by the erosion of work-life balance during the pandemic. The rise of artificial intelligence is a more recent cause for alarm.

“People that I’ve worked with in the tech industry don’t want their kids to have technology,” says the designer Lonni Paul, who has removed computers and other digital devices from the bedrooms and personal spaces in her own home and those of her clients. Erin Lichy, a New York interior designer, has also winnowed the devices in her home in favor of elements that put a premium on calm, not notifications. No cameras, Alexa, or Google Assistant for her.

a bedroom with a bed and chairs Douglas Friedman

In the primary bedroom, the wallpaper is St. Laurent by de Gournay, the ceiling fixture is by Fortuny, the antique desk features a Josef Hoffman lamp by Woka Lamps, and the nightstand lamps are by Lorenza Bozzoli for Tato Italia.

“Similar to in-home cameras, we don’t love the idea of a device constantly listening in on us,” she says. It’s an urgent concern for homeowners at a time when big tech companies are testing ambient intelligence, a concept that futurologists have been talking about for years, in which smart devices make their own decisions based on anything from biometric sensors to predictive behavior modeling.

“Just because it works doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,” Fulk says. “When I come home, especially to a beach house or a ski house, the last thing I want is to have to wrangle with technology.” In the modern dumb home, the only bits of technology present are usually ­hidden—starting with the TV and including details as small as a light switch. “Whenever I’m redoing a house, I can tell when a house was made in the 2000s, because it was this in-between of trying to be forward-thinking but things still felt really clunky,” says the designer David Ko, who receives an increasing number of requests from his Los Angeles clients to keep entertainment consoles out of sight. His solution: OG projectors, built-in custom furniture, and products like Samsung’s the Frame, which makes television screens look like artworks.

“There’s nothing luxurious about technology anymore,” says the designer Stephanie Roy-Heckl, who largely works in Miami and the Hamptons. Or beautiful, for that matter. A Roomba may be practical, but chic is not the first word that comes to mind to describe one.

a room with a table and chairs Douglas Friedman

In the entry, art works by Jack Wright and Charles Bianchini, a 19th century gueridon with a marble top, millwork by Merritt Woodwork and doorway by Theodore Ellison Designs.

Even if so-called dumb houses aren’t defined by a single aesthetic, they all represent a broader recalibration of homeowners’ relationships with technology. There’s less interest in the latest gadgets and more demand for conscientious innovation, especially in the realms of sustainability, green architecture, and solar power. “In California we’re having a big conversation around gas appliances and their impact on the environment and on our health,” Fulk says. That was a priority for Schantz, too, but her domestic digital detox was brought about by a simpler personal conviction.

“I also think technology dumbs us down,” she says. “It makes us forget what’s meaningful and lasting. It gives us terribly short attention spans.” Instead, her home has something AI never will: soul.

Lead image: The sconces and library lights are from the Culver City dealer Obsolete. The astrological ceiling mural, inspired by the famous one at Munich’s Villa Stuck, is by artisan Willem Racké. First editions and rare books line bookshelves backed in wallpaper by Zak & Fox, with flourishes by Racké. The CH20 Elbow chairs are by Hans Wegner. Artisanal millwork is by Merritt Woodwork.

This story appears in the April 2024 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "Welcome to the Dumb House." SUBSCRIBE NOW

Headshot of Kristen Bateman

Kristen Bateman is a contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar. Her first fashion article was published in Vogue Italia during her junior year of high school. Since then, she has interned and contributed to WWD, Glamour, Lucky, i-D, Marie Claire and more. She created and writes the #ChicEats column and covers fashion and culture for Bazaar. When not writing, she follows the latest runway collections, dyes her hair to match her mood, and practices her Italian in hopes of scoring 90% off Prada at the Tuscan outlets. She loves vintage shopping, dessert and cats.

[kunosoura]

you wish for your fairy godparents to get rid of all illegal drugs tomorrow and the service industry sees mass walkouts. truck drivers start regularly crashing trying to push their old upper-fueled driving schedules. warehouse workers stop functioning without the shit they take to mitigate pain without good healthcare. every tech company and finance offices collapses as the collective weight of their employee’s ennui catches up to them without their previous distractions.

[clowndensation]

You got me feeling things abt romanlukas. Tall weird nerd and his fucked up manlet

wake up everyone, new "rockstar and the mole woman" just dropped lkfjalsdjk.

listen i know we know basically nothing about lukas, and he got 10 minutes of screentime total, but that's not important. what's important is it's my gay little treehouse, and he and roman can wear matching rainbow bands if i want them to.

because literally if we look at both roman and lukas, they could genuinely be very complimentary people:

like lukas is clearly suffering from depression ennui over his own success. he's a tech guy who pioneered his own company, so he's a problem solver who enjoys a challenge, but he no longer sees his own industry as challenging. so now he's looking for some other source that will fill him with that same feeling of fulfillment and interest. based off how he was in s3e8, i am going to guess this isn't going great.

enter roman, who's first conversation with him was "hey wanna pee on my phone?" like. hello. i get the feeling that one of lukas's primary problems with getting "way to into people" and then being disappointed by them, is that they either pretend to be into his whole deal because he's the head of a successful tech company, only for him to find out they're full of shit, or they do actually have something in common with him, but are more satisfied with their success than he is, and so he's left feeling like they're stuck in a box that he's just freed himself from.

roman is a bucket of 800 problems stacked on top of each other, which is fun and engaging, sure, but more than that: he's just kinda weird. his sense of right and wrong are so thoroughly couched in his own upbringing as to sometimes be completely disconnected from a normal person's, he has the attention span of a goldfish and loves finding new ways to entertain himself, and outside of fucking over his family, there's really not much he's squeamish about. and also he loves attention, so someone being obsessed with him would be totally fine with him.

and lukas is straightforward, honest, and, again, just kinda strange. he's nonjudgemental, so roman wouldn't really have to worry about fucking something up with him, they'd be equally willing to do something strange that would almost definitely end poorly if they weren't rich, and also roman would get an emotionally-sound person in his life who would accept all his baggage without getting to hung up or bothered by it.

so lukas needs excitement and someone willing to step outside of normal societal expectations with, and roman needs someone who's willing to be honest, nonjudgemental, and attentive. match made heaven. case closed.

[olivemac]

heartbeat | chapter one | b.b.

Summary | When Steve Rogers asks Kate Stark to find the Winter Soldier, she gets too involved.

Notes | Captain America: Civil War re-write, essentially. Starts just after the events of CA: Winter Soldier.

Pairing | Bucky Barnes x fem!oc, Bucky Barnes x Stark!oc

Genre | romance

Rating | explicit

Story Warnings | mild angst, fluff, romance tropes, so many romance tropes, coarse language, alcohol use, canon-typical violence , smut (m/f), oral sex (f&m receiving), 18+ ONLY

Chapter Warnings | mild angst

master list | AO3 link

_____

"You have a lead on Bucky already?" Sam asks, climbing into the passenger side of Steve's car. It's only been a few days since Natasha gave Steve the folder containing information on Bucky Barnes's Winter Soldier transformation.

"Not exactly," Steve says, "But I know someone who might be able to help. We're going to New York."

"So, who's this mystery informant?"

"Kate Stark."

"Stark? As in Tony Stark?" Sam pushes, looking at Steve incredulously.

Steve nods, "Tony's younger sister. She's supposed to be some genius hacker and pretty good at tracking people. Nat says we can trust her."

"And you think Tony will be on board with this?"

"No, but from what Nat said, Kate won't have a problem keeping a few things from Tony."

_____

When they pull up in front of a brick townhouse in Tribeca, Sam whistles.

"I'm pretty sure Taylor Swift lives in this neighborhood," he says.

"I actually know who that is," Steve replies, climbing the steps to the front door, and Sam laughs.

Steve met Kate Stark following Loki's attack on New York, and the only thing he's certain of when it came to her is she is somehow both exactly the same as and vastly different from her older brother. She's quiet, a little aloof, and lacks Tony's easy charisma, but the Stark charm isn't completely lost on her and neither is Tony's sarcasm. Steve sees more of Kate's father, Howard, in Tony, but she shares their cockiness. Tony describes her as "too smart for her own good" and "prone to bouts of Millennial ennui" (always said with an eyeroll). She works for her brother at Stark Industries - mostly so he can keep an eye on her - but Nat told Steve that before SHIELD imploded, Nick Fury had been trying to recruit her for years.

"Captain America," Kate says with a smile, answering the door, "Natasha said you'd be dropping by."

Steve returns her smile.

"Come in," she says, opening the door further and ushering the two men inside.

She leads them to a small, dark study just off the entryway. Three walls feature floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, crammed with books, wrapping around the doorway and picture window. The final wall is covered in computer monitors. It makes for quite the contrast, and Steve has the feeling this room is a perfect reflection of Kate herself – both modern and old-fashioned, connected and cloistered.

"Kate Stark, Sam Wilson. Sam, Kate," Steve introduces, then continues, "Nat said you could help us find Bucky."

Kate nods once, "She filled me in on the details, sent me a somewhat redacted copy of the Winter Soldier file. But I can't make any promises. He's a trained assassin; he knows how to avoid detection. But I'll direct some Stark tech toward it, see what I can do. Tony doesn't need to know."

"Thank you," Steve says, "We should get going."

She shakes her head, "You drove all this way, stay for lunch. Do you like Thai?"

"Yes," Sam interjects before Steve can turn her down. He didn't sit in the car for four hours to have them turn right back around again.

"Brilliant. I'll order."

When the kitchen table is sprawled with empty takeout containers and Kate has pressed Steve for as much information on Bucky that wasn't in the file as he was willing to give and then pressed both Sam and Steve for a full play-by-play on their takedown of HYDRA, she shows them out.

"Thanks for lunch," Sam says.

"And thanks for your help, Kate," Steve echoes.

"Of course. I'll let you know if I find anything," she says, smiling.

Then she closes the door, locks herself in her study, and gets to work.

_____

"You found something?" Steve asks, looking at the wall of monitors in Kate's study. Each screen displays a continuous scroll of faces from CCTV footage around the globe. Kate's trying out her latest upgrades to Stark Industries' facial recognition software in her bid to find Bucky.

It’s been more than eight months since Steve asked for her help, and she’s finally had a minor success.

"Yes and no," she says, directing his attention to one screen, "I got a hit in Kiev last week, but I haven't gotten anything since." She pulls up a grainy CCTV photo of a man with long, dark hair and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. "My software is telling there's a 99.999% match, but since he hasn't shown up anywhere else in the city, I think he's moved on."

Steve sighs, "At least we have confirmation he's alive." He scrubs a hand over his face and continues, "He pulled me from the river, I know he did. And he wouldn't have done that if he didn't remember me."

"I'll keep looking," Kate says, "Now that my software has spotted him once, he should be easier to find."

_____

He wasn't easier to find.

Another eight months pass without a single lead in her hunt for Bucky. Kate is caught somewhere between obsession and despair. She flips through his HYDRA file obsessively. She stares at his military photo for hours, trying to reconcile the man with the soft eyes and smug smile with the horrors of the Winter Soldier. She reads books on Captain America and the Howling Commandos, and her stomach cramps at the thought of telling Steve she can't find his best friend.

In a bid to distract herself from what she considers her failure, she throws herself into her work at Stark Industries. Tony would be delighted if he weren’t facing his own regrets and heartbreak following Sokovia.

She leaves her software running 24/7 but stops checking it so frequently. She's practically avoiding her study and that wall of monitors that remind her that she hasn't succeeded in finding Bucky yet. She's set up a workstation at her kitchen table and run through the new updates for FRIDAY three times already when she hears the faint beep of her software finding a match. Her breath stalls.

Kate thinks about ignoring it. If she ignores it, she can't be disappointed when it turns out her software is wrong.

But she can't ignore it.

The beeping grows louder as she makes her way to her study, a mixture of hope and dread forming in her chest. She opens the door and flips on the light; and there he is on her monitor: Bucky Barnes.

_____

next chapter

_____

A/N | It's been quite some time since I've written anything creatively so let me know what you think. Just trying to flex that writing muscle again.

[vanishingpod]

We took a little break last week from our Podcast Rec Sundays because production stuff took over our lives a bit, but we’re BACK with four shows we think you should check out! 

The Amelia Project: With season 3 right around the corner, now is the perfect time to jump into this dark, British comedy headfirst like we have. The show is set at The Amelia Project, an agency where people go to disappear--if their story and reason for disappearing is deemed interesting enough by the staff. Every episode tends to take the format of a client making their plea to be disappeared, including the planning stages...at least, to begin with. The amazing thing about this show is how it slowly escalates and spins out in absurdity, without ever feeling like it’s made a huge leap out of the world it’s set up. It’s a world where a woman wanting revenge for a cheating husband, a cult leader in over his head, an advanced AI, a self-aware fictional character with an existential crisis, and the Loch Ness Monster, all end up seeming pretty much par for the course, and the genre can swerve from comedy to satire to conspiracy to meta-commentary to mystery in the blink of an eye. We couldn’t recommend this more--oh, and you’ll want cocoa on hand. Trust us. (Find them @ameliapodcast)

Seren: If you’re looking for a sci-fi exploration story about the human spirit, this is where you go. We start the story, and spend most of the run time, with Seren, our protagonist, who has been sent on a single-occupancy spacecraft away from her home to join a colony on a distant planet. Not much more is known about the situation than that at the outset, and we are only slowly revealed more through the audio logs of Seren as she makes the journey, cycling through boredom, fear, desperation, loneliness, regret, and hope as she parses through her life up to this point and what she thinks she’ll be heading towards. An incredibly intimate story set in the vast of space. Seren is bold yet subtle, bleak yet hopeful, incredibly lonely yet inspiring immediate connection with the protagonist. The design, production, acting, and writing are all gorgeous, paced beautifully, and deeply felt. This is a show that always feels like it is barreling towards something but isn't afraid to let you live with Seren for a bit, feel what she's feeling, breathe with her, care for her, become her for a moment--it's an incredibly cathartic show in so many ways. (Find them @serenpod)

Valence: Alright, who wants some urban fantasy? We certainly do! Who wants a ragtag bunch of characters? We also do! Who wants to do crimes, but like, for the good of humanity? WE DO! There’s a level of tense glee throughout Valence. You could attribute it to the hyper specific and all-enveloping soundscape that bring the world of New Candler to life or even the excellent vocal performances throughout that make this heightened sci-fi/fantasy world feel grounded and navigated by flawed, 3-dimensional characters. Whatever it is, Valence presents a full experience. Through the story of Liam Alden wrestling with his birthright as a Magic User (‘muse’ in the show) there is a palpable sense of us vs. them, science vs. magic, industry vs. human interest, haves vs. have-nots, that make the story feel relevant and accessible. Honestly I found myself thinking a lot of the Uncanny X-Men and Mr. Robot as I listened to the storylines involving tech heists (HEISTS, we LOVE heists) and assembling a ragtag group of outsiders (again, we LOVE a ragtag bunch!) who are all galvanized to action against a technology conglomerate set on making life easier for some, by jeopardizing it for others. It’s a grand adventure, a call to action, and a fuck you to capitalism, and who doesn’t love that? (Not on tumblr, but you can find them on Twitter here.)

The Godshead Incidental: It’s tricky to put The Godhead Incidental under any one genre because it juggles a little bit of everything while also subverting a lot of the expectations of the genres it uses. It’s a sitcom, but also a conspiracy drama, a slice of life story that also features a world filled with literal gods, a workplace comedy and an emotional dramedy that deals with stuff like agoraphobia and millennial ennui. Also, there are pigeons, just SO many pigeons. We got sucked in by their amazing cover art and stayed for the instantly lovable, vivid cast of characters. Some of our faves are Em, our protagonist, a perpetually Over This advice columnist at the titular publication; Lorem Ipsum (a particular fave of ours), a mysterious, fast-talking thief that takes over every single conversation; and Tervis, Em’s agoraphobic landlord, who has a backstory that is both incredible and underwhelming all at once. The show is brilliantly produced, beginning to end, and is SO easy to immerse yourself in--we really don’t see any way you wouldn’t like it, to be honest. (Find them @godsheadincidental)

If you love any of these shows, please consider leaving them a review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or wherever you listen to podcasts--you can also (depending on when you’re seeing this post) nominate them for Audio Verse Awards! 

Previous recs: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. 

[immedtech]

We need more tech satire like HBO's 'Silicon Valley'

When Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, it came out swinging as the Office Space of our time: a hilarious and sometimes all-too-real reflection of a tech industry high on its own supply. Over the past five years, the show, created by Mike Judge (Office Space, King of the Hill) and Alex Berg (Barry), lampooned everything from VC Peter Thiel's curious interest in young blood transfusions, to the smugness of Tesla owners. And it did so while weaving a dense (if often crude) tapestry of humor. Who could forget the legendary -- and mathematically-sound -- dick joke algorithm from the first season's finale?

Spoilers for the final season of Silicon Valley ahead.

From the start, Silicon Valley's core group were your archetypal bunch of tech types: Richard (Thomas Middleditch), the brilliant-but-awkward coder; Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), the capable Pakistani immigrant with something to prove; Jared, the eager-to-please operations guy; and Gilfoyle, the Libertarian Satan worshiper. Their combined talents, though, formed Pied Piper, a startup developing a groundbreaking compression algorithm, and later, a nearly flawless peer-to-peer (P2P) networking platform. It's all tech bro wish fulfillment, but Pied Piper also had an independent streak, one that prioritized their users and the well-being of the industry over selling out. They're the sort of scrappy startup I'd jump at the chance to cover.

While Silicon Valley's plot sometimes struggled to keep pace with the increasing absurdity of tech's stranglehold on our lives -- we now willingly invite audio surveillance devices into our homes, and Facebook still owes us answers for the 2016 election -- the show still served a vital satirical purpose. And now that it's over, there really isn't much else to replace it. Saying goodbye to the Pied Piper gang feels more meaningful than most comedy finales. We're not just losing these characters, we're losing a clear-eyed look at an industry that threw insane amounts of money at questionable companies like Juicero, Theranos and WeWork.

Eddy Chen

Sure, Black Mirror is still around, but its brand of commentary isn't exactly fun or always satirical (and I'd argue, it's also struggling to find relevant things to say). It's easier to find shows and movies being critical of tech today, compared to when Silicon Valley premiered, but there's still nothing as laser-focused on the industry. Comedy Central's Corporate is one of the best shows currently on the air, and while it's mainly focused on the unending ennui of modern office life, so much of that is rooted in how technology is making us miserable. (I suggest starting with the episode "The PowerPoint of Death," where a single presentation has the power to land a juicy CIA war supply contract.)

Even media aimed at kids can't help but say something about our very online existence — just look at Ralph Breaks the Internet. The original Wreck-It Ralph was about the final days of a vintage gaming arcade, but the sequel managed to directly reflect the online world kids are dealing with today.

What I'll miss is the casually brutal way Silicon Valley deconstructed an industry ripe for mocking. Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), the Lex Luthor to Pied Piper's tech heroes, starts out as the all-powerful CEO of a Google-esque company named Hooli. But he's quickly revealed to be an insecure manchild who has no issue with stealing Pied Piper's innovations, because he has no original thoughts of his own. (Belson's entourage includes a guru who only tells him what wants to hear, which reminds me of so many tech CEO's finding solace in Eastern philosphy.)

Eddy Chen

As much as I love the show, it wasn't perfect. In particular, it never found much to say about racial and gender discrimination in tech, an issue the entire industry is still struggling to deal with. It'd be nice to see a similarly smart and vicious comedy focused on people you might not expect to find in every single startup.

Silicon Valley's final season, fittingly enough, began at a Congressional hearing. Richard is grilled about Pied Piper's data collection practices over its proposed P2P network. And in typical awkward hero geek fashion, he makes a fool of himself while making a noble proclamation: His company will never sell user data. Today, that's something Apple is also declaring, in a bid to differentiate itself from Google, Facebook and pretty much every other big tech company out there. Just a few days before the Silicon Valley premiere, Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by Congress over the Libra digital currency, where he once again failed to engender any trust in a single word coming out of his mouth.

Privacy, and the need to use tech for good, was the driving force behind Silicon Valley throughout the season. Richard eventually learned that one of his employees was actually harvesting vast amounts of user data, including voice recordings from gaming headsets. And when a Chilean investor offers $1 billion for 10 percent of Pied Piper because of its data collection capabilities (valuing the company at $10 billion), the moral conundrum seems insurmountable. It's hard to imagine many tech founders rejecting an offer like that today.

Eddy Chen

While Richard ends up turning down the money, it's not long before he faces an even bigger dilemma. In the series' finale, the Pied Piper teams discovers that their AI solution for optimizing the P2P network has also broken several strong encryption solutions. If they launch, they could basically kill cybersecurity around the world, a literal Encryption Apocalypse. So, on the verge of finding true success, the team decides to kill their creation for the greater good. It's a hopeful ending that, sadly, doesn't seem particularly realistic. In a tech culture that's addicted to huge valuations and ever-growing engagement statistics, Pied Piper's noble death seems like an aspirational fantasy.

- Repost from: engadget Post

[jonfazzaro]

For every hair pulled out by the engineering manager in stress, six of her subordinates are aimlessly upvoting cat pics on Reddit.

But what if this managerial approach is exacerbating the problem? What if taking a complex job like engineering and trying to turn it into the mindless equivalent of flipping somone else’s burgers doesn’t work? What if taking all of the creativity out of an intrinsically creative job is the reason engineers keep searching for other employers like the famously ennui protagonists of a Hemingway novel traveling from place to place in search of happiness — only to find the problem isn’t location, it’s within.

Digital Taylorism preaches that engineers MUST be replaceable because they WILL quit. But maybe trying to make engineers replaceable, mechanical parts is what’s making job satisfaction in the tech industry slowly approach that of fast-food. Maybe the reason fast-food workers are so largely dissatisfied with their careers goes beyond just being paid non-livable wages. What if they don’t like being treated like a cog in a machine any more than anyone else? What if all they want is a little bit of freedom to put a ketchup smile-y overtop the cheese? Could it be that it’s a bad idea to reduce engineers to robots who ask: “Would you like apps with that?” I mean, do you really want your future-self commuting daily in a self-driving car coded by people who don’t care if you make it to work or drive off a cliff?

McSoftware [ Hacker Noon ]

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/when-will-you-next-buy-a-mobile-phone/

When will you next buy a mobile phone?

Image copyright Getty Images

The days when people camped outside stores to get their hands on the latest smartphone may well be numbered, if recent sales figures are anything to go by.

Despite a dazzling array of new devices on display at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: phones that fold, phones with buttons, phones with enormous batteries, expensive phones, budget phones, 5G-ready phones… they aren’t exactly flying off the shelves.

Samsung’s overall operating profits were down by 60% year-on-year for the first quarter of 2019.

Apple slashed its iPhone sales forecasts at the start of the year, blaming a slowdown, particularly in China.

It has since repositioned itself to focus on services rather than gadgets, unveiling a new TV streaming platform, gaming portal and credit card at a star-studded event in March attended by Oprah Winfrey and the actor Reese Witherspoon – with not a new device in sight.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionWATCH: Apple announces new services

Sales in China, the world’s biggest phone market, were down 20% year-on-year in February 2019.

That’s their lowest in six years, according to figures released by the state-affiliated research unit China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

Sales had already been slowing in Europe, says Marina Koytcheva, technology markets analyst at CCS Insight, and elsewhere, with the possible exception of India and Africa.

“I don’t think I have seen the market with such a negative outlook in the last 10 years,” she says.

“I don’t think we will ever again see the growth of five or 10 years ago.”

There are several reasons why.

Innovation (or lack of)

The top-end handsets have increased in price dramatically in recent years. In 2017, Apple boldly smashed the $1,000 (£775) price point with the iPhone X, followed by Samsung with the Galaxy Note 8.

“In less than a year, the $1,000 phone has become entirely normal,” noted Vlad Savov on tech website the Verge in August 2018.

Critics of the phone industry argue that at the same time, innovation has stalled. Each new handset might have a slightly better camera, slightly faster processors than the last, but for the average consumer, one black rectangle is pretty much being replaced by another.

In the last few weeks, both Huawei and Samsung have unveiled a new take on the black rectangle – the folding phone.

The Huawei Mate X folds out into an 8in device. It has split screen abilities, no notch and is 5G ready.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionWATCH: First look at Huawei’s folding phone

When it was unveiled, the audience gasped loudly at the 2,299 euros ($2,600; £1,996) price tag.

For those with that cash to spend on a new phone, is it exciting enough to break the global ennui?

“There will be a small number of big enthusiasts who will buy these phones but they will have to fall in price quite a lot to make an impact,” says Marina Koytcheva.

“They will have to start selling in large numbers.”

That will only happen if the device can prove itself useful.

“It’s impressive innovation,” says Ms Koytcheva .

“But why do you need it?”

And here’s another potential red flag: Samsung has now delayed the launch of its Galaxy Fold following reports of broken screens.

Big screens, small pockets

The traditionally male-dominated tech sector has been accused of ignoring at least 50% of its target market – women – in not acknowledging that women’s hands and trouser pockets are generally smaller than men’s while flooding the market with ever larger devices.

Image copyright Getty Images

When Apple announced it was discontinuing its iPhone SE, which has a 4in screen, Caroline Criado-Perez, author of a new book called Invisible Women, tweeted that the tech giant had “failed to update the only phone it makes that fits the average woman’s hand size”.

“Weak applause all round from my arthritic hands,” she continued in the now-deleted thread on Twitter in September 2018.

5G future

5G – the next generation of mobile internet – could give phone sales the vital injection they need.

Promises made for it include being able to download a 15-minute video in one second, potentially making home broadband redundant and getting all your smart gadgets properly connecting with each other.

However, there are no 5G devices on the market yet.

They are on their way – although global security concerns threaten to derail the rollout schedule.

Chinese firm Huawei is one of the few manufacturers of the infrastructure required for 5G and there are concerns from several countries, led by the US, over whether it can be trusted.

Mobile provider O2 said Huawei makes up only 5% of its UK 5G infrastructure, but it would take time and money to remove it all if the government orders it to do so.

“In October 2018, we expected 5G to have some positive effect on the market this year,” says Marina Koytcheva.

“We thought it would support it, but 5G is coming more slowly than we hoped.”

Phone freedom

And finally – a growing number of people are choosing to step away from their phones altogether.

Are you ready to break up with your phone?

Last year, France introduced strict rules around the use of smartphones in schools, banning them for all pupils under the age of 15.

Apple, Google and Facebook also released tools that show you the extent of your screentime – a move which was greeted with amused horror, and some criticism.

“It’s like locking an alcoholic in a booze cupboard and then helping them count how many bottles they’ve consumed,” said Catherine Miller, director of policy at the think tank Doteveryone.

The phone industry’s response to this desire to detach has been to unleash so-called companion phones – smaller handsets with more basic functions, designed to keep people connected without keeping them hooked.

Image caption The Punkt phone is one example of a companion device

Now whether the solution to you spending less time on your big phone involves you buying a smaller phone is perhaps debatable but it shows the industry is at least listening, having devoted years to producing devices specifically designed to maintain our interest.

Marina Koytcheva thinks the smartphone market is ultimately stabilising after a frenzied few years but predicts that 2019 is going to be “a difficult year”.

“Yearly sales of 2 billion mobile phones seemed so close just a few years ago, but might become a distant dream for the industry,” she wrote in a report on declining sales.

“Our new five-year outlook is for 1.9 billion units on an annual basis until 2023.”

[sheridanh0pe]

Blade Runner: Paranoid Androids

For a work of science fiction set in futuristic 2019 and produced in 1982, the film Blade Runner has borne out to be a timeless beauty despite the lack of any resemblance to our reality in 2017. Blade Runner outshines modern C.G. spectacles by virtue of Philip K. Dick’s masterful cyberpunk world-building and symbolic reveries in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ridley Scott’s virtuosic execution, codifying the perfect atmospheric ennui for the tech-noir genre. This tale of android-slavery in post-apocalyptic Shinjuku-Los Angeles blends science fiction’s A.I. fearing sermons on technology as a tool of war and political control with the cynical nuances of the hard-boiled detective mystery. Rachel plays a wide-eyed femme fatale fallen from grace as the assistant of the Tyrell Corporation’s CEO when exposed as a replicant; however, Deckard chooses not to turn her over to fellow cops Bryant and Gaff (contrary to the fate of a comparable femme in Maltese Falcon). Allusions to Deckard’s true identity as a replicant imply a bleak conclusion but there is a hopeful echo of Casablanca in which the cynical man later sides with the rogue replicants (but gets the girl in this case).

By tying the artifice of classic noir with a tech-jungle backstory, the former is refreshed as a narrative of oppression and survival between machine and man in lieu of good and evil. Industrial danger from the nuclear fall-out of radioactive dust and acid rain soaks the decayed and bleak city streets, a world reflecting the apathy and aggression inherent in Deckard’s character. The unseen wealthy abandoned Earth for off-world colonies advertised on billboards on monolithic towers and blimps, radiating a neon hue over the forsaken poor, rogue, and miscreant. Mega-corporations inhabiting mega-structures cast long canyon shadows, providing the signature low-key lighting. Noir tropes of amnesia, flashbacks, and misleading identities find new life in androids implanted with real people’s memories.  The fatalistic mood is heightened by the stopgap four-year lifespan of androids such as the Nexus 6.

Low-Key Lighting from Hitchcock’s I Confess

Much of the Philip K. Dick novel has been adapted into the film but the script diverges on important plot points such as the question of its retired cop and blade runner’s true identity; therefore, it makes sense to treat the film as a self-contained work when describing a few story mechanics that make Blade Runner such a compelling movie.

Stacked Symbols

By expressing the story’s moral arguments and themes in the background setting and its moods, as well as with props and its stacked metaphors, Blade Runner’s dystopic rhapsodies are spared the preachy undertones unlike when dished out as a monologue. With film being predominantly a visual medium, dialogue can elevate emotional force, subtlety and style or flatten through sluggish expositions.

Philip K. Dick’s metaphoric use of extinct animals is quite brilliant in its reveal of this society’s hypocritical values. The ownership of real animals is a class status symbol and a nostalgic token for one’s humanity. Less well-off humans and replicants aspire to possess real versions of android animals as pets while the wealthy aspire to own humanoid replicants, engineered by the Tyrell Corporaton as slaves. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery in this two-tiered metaphor.

Sebastian’s house of Franken-dolls, set in the historic Bradbury building, stockpiles incomplete iterations of android models. This mise-en-scene begs the question at which point do replicant lives become more valuable than the work they perform for humans or even become as valuable as human lives. As the gifted geneticist working closely with Tyrell, his collection provides a survey of his work leading up to the Nexus 6, the latter described to be perfect creations by Sebastian and Tyrell. Sebastian echoes the replicants’ fatal flaw with his own premature aging disorder, a ploy to elicit sympathy for the replicants with whom humans share the common desire of an extended lifespan.  

A Network of Opponents and Fake-Ally Opponent

Deckard’s main opponent is not the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation, who with his chief bio-engineer Sebastian were revealed to be red herrings with no solution for prolonging the replicant lifespan. Deckard must defeat the mutinous replicants who defied the Nexus 6 ban from Earth. Each represent some aspect of humanity’s complexity. What began with a rumble in the blighted and smoggy streets straining from the population explosion of seedy outcasts escalates up into cavernous high towers, a symbolic transition from the suffocating chaos below to the open skies above, freedom.

Deckard’s first victory, the sex goddess Zhora brings him discomfort after witnessing her desperate charge through store windows despite the futility of having been shot a few times in the back. Blood glistens on her transparent raincoat. The warrior, Leon, observes from the sidelines and corners the blade runner in time for Rachel to save Deckard’s life with a shot from Deckard’s dropped gun. Deckard becomes indebted to her but learns Bryant has marked Rachel for “retirement”. With Deckard’s revelation that he can love a replicant, he becomes a mirror to the Batty and Pris subplot in which Batty, the leader of the rogue replicants, also wants to save his lover’s life. Batty fails as trickster Pris is picked off by Deckard in the blade runner’s final climb up the high tower, chasing Batty to the rooftops.

After finding only disappointment in Batty’s quest for further life from his maker and father, Batty taunts Deckard but decides ultimately to rescue Deckard from slipping off the rooftop ledge. Batty shares a glimpse of his short life’s cherished memories. This replicant’s ability to express such beautiful emotions is Deckard’s penultimate revelation. Rushing home to help Rachel escape, Deckard receives his final reveal when Gaff, the fake ally-opponent, informs him that the cops know of Rachel’s whereabouts. One of Gaff’s origami calling cards is left on the floor of Deckard’s apartment, a unicorn like the one in Deckard’s dreams that appear now not to be his own. Deckard is a replicant after all.

Flipping the Dramatic Theme

What began as story on delivering justice between cops and outlaws evolves, after Deckard’s romance with Rachel and battle with the dying Batty, into an inquiry into the nature of humanity and of slaves and masters when replicants can pass empathy tests or at least come very close (e.g. the need for over a hundred questions to determine Rachel’s identity). The eyes are the replicants’ giveaway, a metric of the sincerity of their emotional responses also marred by defect to produce a red glare in certain lighting circumstances. This same radiance is briefly found in Deckard’s eyes the night he falls in love with Rachel. The replicants’ preferred method of murder by eye gouging certainty makes them appear resentful of that defect.  

A recent trailer for the sequel set thirty years after the original reopens the case on Deckard’s identity. The case seems pretty resolved to me but perhaps a rogue protagonist with a heart of steel just may not sit well with other fans.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

19 Nov 2018: The beginning or the end of retail? Technology is never neutral. Amazon’s HQ2s.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading and please do send ideas, questions, corrections etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading please consider telling a friend about it!

[Image: Lynn Davis, Amazon & newsletterbot]

Retail: the beginning or the end?

2,692 high street stores closed in the first six months of 2018. “Openings across the “experiential” categories haven’t been enough to offset closures in the more traditional categories. [...] While consumer spending has been holding up, we’re not going to stop shopping online – it is simply too cheap, too quick, and too convenient. It may well be a bitter pill to swallow, but London’s high streets may just need fewer shops”.

The end of the beginning is a good, fast-moving, numerate presentation on there being plenty of new worlds of consumer spending for the tech industry to get its teeth into. The grocery bit starts at 10:00, and it suggests that the interesting area isn’t so much logistics, which now feels increasingly a brute-force game of cap-exy optimisation now. Instead the interesting bit is retail as discovery, preference, intent and taste. The underlying thesis: why shouldn’t *all* retail be online eventually?

OK, imagine that nearly all retail had gone online. What would make it viable to run a local shop on the high street? Maybe geographic or temporal convenience, which is why busy consumers of milk and bananas use convenience stores and why plumbers dash to Screwfix to grab a sink kit. Unique products. Better experiences (curation, surprise, treats, comfort). Perhaps better information (discovery, shopper intent). Things that are hard to do online (haircuts, artisanal coffees etc). All of these could work.

If it’s the end of the beginning for tech retail, maybe it’s the beginning of the end for *pre-internet* high street shopping. Preserving the Great British high street as if the internet hadn’t happened isn’t going to be the answer. But it’s not the end of the high street. It’s just the beginning of the beginning for the post-internet high street.

Technology is never neutral

Why doctors hate their computers. “Digitization promises to make medical care easier and more efficient. But are screens coming between doctors and patients?”

That piece has some great stories that illustrate the way that digitising something reveals many existing ways of working which go beyond the expected use cases. Unusual fixes for problems, human methods and rituals that ease the way. Some of these methods are good and some bad (or both simultaneously: eg a form that works well for a doctor, but terribly for a technician). Whether it’s digitising an existing thing, or digitally transforming it into a new thing, technology exposes all of that. Tech is a talisman, a lightning rod for emotion: humans love projecting emotion onto tech. Another word for all of that might be “culture”.

Whether they’re on the “demand” side, as in this story, or on the “supply” side, like programmers who didn’t put users first or consider ethical questions, or etc, the unintended consequences are a key reason why technology is never neutral, though it is often indifferent.

Amazon’s HQ2s

Amazon announced two new HQ2s, New York and Washington DC, and expects to create ~25,000 jobs in each. Opinions vary on whether the decision was based on some dispassionate number-crunching, astute political positioning, or Bezos’s commute distance.

There is a sense that the US got slightly played by Amazon: it gathered a lot of free PR and info about how cities are placed. Amazon perhaps thought it might as well pick two HQs (and an ops centre of excellence) if it could get tax rebates from three cities. On the other hand, the game may have been slightly over-played, because 238 other cities pitched hard and will now feel a bit peeved.

Related: a proposal for the cities that didn’t win (not bad advice for other cities too). There are some civic-minded “Not in this town!” efforts to stop it happening. And The Onion has written the you’re all inside HQ2 joke.)

Facebook

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis. A long, punchy article suggesting the Facebook hasn’t always acted in good faith in the fake news/election influence era. The story was promptly rebutted. Facebook’s travails of the last two years are having an effect on employee morale: only half of staff now believe that FB is making the world better.

We’ve discussed before that the business model is an unresolvable problem. But now that it has achieved massive, networked scale, one of the common grow-at-all-costs arguments for not charging users is going away. “If you choose to pay X you get no ads and data privacy”: if FB offered a paid-for version of their service, they’d provide an option to users learn if other models were commercially viable while being better aligned with user interests. It may be that users don’t actually care that much about privacy, or that they are resigned to Facebook being how the world works these days.

Self-driving

Humans are becoming a more urban species, and cities are designed around traditional cars to some extent. Changes to transport (electrification, micro-mobility, ride-share, self-driving) could eventually lead to large changes in shopping, work, entertainment, cities and you know life, so transport is a common topic here.

This newsletter has reckoned many times that self-driving cars are a long way off. Well, here’s a rumour that Google’s Waymo will start deploying a self-driving car service as soon as December 2019 (it will compete directly with Uber and Lyft). Self-driving that isn’t going so well: Tesla has recently been going to opposite direction, updating car software to remove self-driving features that customers have already paid, and you read these scary comments about its Autopilot and think that ubiquitous self-driving must be decades away.

Some technologies seem to arrive suddenly because they quickly experience a tipping point, and then they’re everywhere, like Google, Instagram, Slack. Self-driving is likely to be the complete opposite of that: the deployment phase will be very long. Parts of Arizona in 2019, but US cities before Naples, dry conditions before blizzard conditions, and so on, and there will be many years of human drivers co-existing with self-drivers.

In brief

Manchester is planning to bring forward its ambition to become a zero carbon city by twelve years, with a revised target of 2038 - believed to be the first UK local authority to make such a commitment. Bravo.

Google Cloud AI boss on AI: “It very much isn’t the magic-dust type of solution.”

A flowchart explains different machine learning approaches.

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Co-op Digital news

One Co-op, one website.

Co-op responds to Xmas ad ennui by 'delaying' festive campaign and donating to good causes.

Events

Is a co-op right for you? - several sessions in several towns 11 Sep - 27 Nov.

Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 19 Nov 1pm at Federation House.

Engineering community of practice meetup - Mon 19 Nov 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 20 Nov 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.

Being Human with Ruth Purim - Tue 20 Nov 7pm at Federation House.

Web team show & tell - Wed 21 Nov 2.30pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Women in Technology North - Wed 21 Nov 6.30pm  at Federation House.

Manchester WordPress user group - Wed 21 Nov 6.30pm at Federation House.

Line management drop-in clinic - Thu 22 Nov 1pm at Federation House.

Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 22 Nov 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Digital Risk discovery show & tell - Thu 22 Nov 3.30pm at Angel Square 5th floor breakout.

From territorial to functional sovereignty with Frank Pasquale - Thu 6 Dec 2018 6pm at Federation House.

More events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

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Thanks for reading. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.

[sheminecrafts]

Mobile gaming is having a moment, and Apple has the reins

It’s moved beyond tradition and into the realm of meme that Apple manages to dominate the news cycle around major industry events, all while not actually participating in said events. CES rolls around and every story is about HomeKit or its competitors; another tech giant has a conference and the news is that Apple updated some random subsystem of its ever-larger ecosystem of devices and software .

This is, undoubtedly, planned by Apple in many instances. And why not? Why shouldn’t it own the cycle when it can — it’s only strategically sound.

This week, the 2018 Game Developers Conference is going on and there’s a bunch of news coverage about various aspects of the show. There are all of the pre-written embargo bits about big titles and high-profile indies, there are the trend pieces and, of course, there’s the traditional ennui-laden “who is this event even for” post that accompanies any industry event that achieves critical mass.

But the absolute biggest story of the event wasn’t even at the event. It was the launch of Fortnite and, shortly thereafter, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on mobile devices. Specifically, both were launched on iOS, and PUBG hit Android simultaneously.

The launch of Fortnite, especially, resonates across the larger gaming spectrum in several unique ways. It’s the full and complete game as present on consoles, it’s iOS-first and it supports cross-platform play with console and PC players.

This has, essentially, never happened before. There have been stabs at one or more of those conditions on experimental levels, but it really marks a watershed in the games industry that could serve to change the psychology around the platform discussion in major ways. 

For one, though the shape of GDC has changed over the years as it relates to mobile gaming, it’s only recently that the conference has become dominated by indie titles that are mobile centric. The big players and triple-A console titles still take up a lot of air, but the long tail is very long and mobile is not synonymous with “casual gamers” as it once was.

“I remember the GDC before we launched Monument Valley,” says Dan Gray of Monument Valley 2 studio ustwo. “We were fortunate enough that Unity offered us a place on their stand. Nobody had heard of us or our game and we were begging journalists to come say hello, it’s crazy how things have changed in four years. We’ve now got three speakers at the conference this year, people stop you in the street (within a two-block radius) and we’re asked to be part of interviews like this about the future of mobile.”

Zach Gage, the creator of SpellTower, and my wife’s favorite game of all time, Flipflop Solitaire, says that things feel like they have calmed down a bit. “It seems like that might be boring, but actually I think it’s quite exciting, because a consequence of it is that playing games has become just a normal thing that everyone does… which frankly, is wild. Games have never had the cultural reach that they do now, and it’s largely because of the App Store and these magical devices that are in everyone’s pockets.”

Alto’s Odyssey is the followup to Snowman’s 2015 endless boarder Alto’s Adventure. If you look at these two titles, three years apart, you can see the encapsulation of the growth and maturity of gaming on iOS. The original game was fun, but the newer title is beyond fun and into a realm where you can see the form being elevated into art. And it’s happening blazingly fast.

“There’s a real and continually growing sense that mobile is a platform to launch compelling, artful experiences,” says Snowman’s Ryan Cash. “This has always been the sentiment among the really amazing community of developers we’ve been lucky enough to meet. What’s most exciting to me, now, though, is hearing this acknowledged by representatives of major console platforms. Having conversations with people about their favorite games from the past year, and seeing that many of them are titles tailor-made for mobile platforms, is really gratifying. I definitely don’t want to paint the picture that mobile gaming has ever been some sort of pariah, but there’s a definite sense that more people are realizing how unique an experience it is to play games on these deeply personal devices.”

Mobile gaming as a whole has fought since the beginning against the depiction that it was for wasting time only, not making “true art,” which was reserved for consoles or dedicated gaming platforms. Aside from the “casual” versus “hardcore” debate, which is more about mechanics, there was a general stigma that mobile gaming was a sidecar bet to the main functions of these devices, and that their depth would always reflect that. But the narratives and themes being tackled on the platform beyond just clever mechanics are really incredible.

Playing Monument Valley 2 together with my daughter really just blew my doors off, and I think it changed a lot of people’s minds in this regard. The interplay between the characters and environment and a surprisingly emotional undercurrent for a puzzle game made it a breakout that was also a breakthrough of sorts.

“There’s so many things about games that are so awesome that the average person on the street doesn’t even know about,” says Gray. “As small developers right now we have the chance to make somebody feel a range of emotions about a video game for the first time, it’s not often you’re in the right place at the right time for this and to do it with the most personal device that sits in your pocket is the perfect opportunity.”

The fact that so many of the highest-profile titles are launching on iOS first is a constant source of consternation for Android users, but it’s largely a function of addressable audience.

I spoke to Apple VP Greg Joswiak about Apple’s place in the industry. “Gaming has always been one of the most popular categories on the App Store,” he says. A recent relaunch of the App Store put gaming into its own section and introduced a Today tab that tells stories about the games and about their developers.

That redesign, he says, has been effective. “Traffic to the App Store is up significantly, and with higher traffic, of course, comes higher sales.”

“One thing I think smaller developers appreciate from this is the ability to show the people behind the games,” says ustwo’s Gray about the new gaming and Today sections in the App Store. “Previously customers would just see an icon and assume a corporation of 200 made the game, but now it’s great we can show this really is a labor of love for a small group of people who’re trying to make something special. Hopefully this leads to players seeing the value in paying up front for games in the future once they can see the craft that goes into something.”

Snowman’s Cash agrees. “It’s often hard to communicate the why behind the games you’re making — not just what your game is and does, but how much went into making it, and what it could mean to your players. The stories that now sit on the Today tab are a really exciting way to do this; as an example, when Alto’s Odyssey released for pre-order, we saw a really positive player response to the discussion of the game’s development. I think the variety that the new App Store encourages as well, through rotational stories and regularly refreshed sections, infuses a sense of variety that’s great for both players and developers. There’s a real sense I’m hearing that this setup is equipped to help apps and games surface, and stayed surfaced, in a longer term and more sustainable way.”

In addition, there are some technical advantages that keep Apple ahead of Android in this arena. Plenty of Android devices are very performant and capable in individual ways, but Apple has a deep holistic grasp of its hardware that allows it to push platform advantages in introducing new frameworks like ARKit. Google’s efforts in the area with ARCore are just getting started with the first batch of 1.0 apps coming online now, but Google will always be hamstrung by the platform fragmentation that forces developers to target a huge array of possible software and hardware limitations that their apps and games will run up against.

This makes shipping technically ambitious projects like Fortnite on Android as well as iOS a daunting task. “There’s a very wide range of Android devices that we want to support,” Epic Games’ Nick Chester told Forbes. “We want to make sure Android players have a great experience, so we’re taking more time to get it right.“

That wide range of devices includes an insane differential in GPU capability, processing power, Android version and update status.

“We bring a very homogenous customer base to developers where 90 percent of [devices] are on the current versions of iOS,” says Joswiak. Apple’s customers embrace those changes and updates quickly, he says, and this allows developers to target new features and the full capabilities of the devices more quickly.

Ryan Cash sees these launches on iOS of “full games” as they exist elsewhere as a touchstone of sorts that could legitimize the idea of mobile as a parity platform.

“We have a few die-hard Fortnite players on the team, and the mobile version has them extremely excited,” says Cash. “I think more than the completeness of these games (which is in and of itself a technical feat worth celebrating!), things like Epic’s dedication to cross-platform play are massive. Creating these linked ecosystems where players who prefer gaming on their iPhones can enjoy huge cultural touchstone titles like Fortnite alongside console players is massive. That brings us one step closer to an industry attitude which focuses more on accessibility, and less on siloing off experiences and separating them into tiers of perceived quality.”

“I think what is happening is people are starting to recognize that iOS devices are everywhere, and they are the primary computers of many people,” says Zach Gage. “When people watch a game on Twitch, they take their iPhone out of their pocket and download it. Not because they want to know if there’s a mobile version, but because they just want the game. It’s natural to assume that these games available for a computer or a PlayStation, and it’s now natural to assume that it would be available for your phone.”

Ustwo’s Gray says that it’s great that the big games are transitioning, but also cautions that there needs to be a sustainable environment for mid-priced games on iOS that specifically use the new capabilities of these devices.

“It’s great that such huge games are transitioning this way, but for me I’d really like to see more $30+ titles designed and developed specifically for iPhone and iPad as new IP, really taking advantage of how these devices are used,” he says. “It’s definitely going to benefit the App Store as a whole, but It does need to be acknowledged, however, that the way players interact with console/PC platforms and mobile are inherently different and should be designed accordingly. Session lengths and the interaction vocabulary of players are two of the main things to consider, but if a game manages to somehow satisfy the benefits of all those platforms then great, but I think it’s hard.”

Apple may not be an official sponsor of GDC, but it is hosting two sessions at the show, including an introduction to Metal 2, its rendering pipeline, and ARKit, its hope for the future of gaming on mobile. This presence is exciting for a number of reasons, as it shows a greater willingness by Apple to engage the community that has grown around its platforms, but also that the industry is becoming truly integrated, with mobile taking its rightful place alongside console and portable gaming as a viable target for the industry’s most capable and interesting talent.

“They’re bringing the current generation of console games to iOS,” Joswiak says, of launches like Fortnite and PUBG, and notes that he believes we’re at a tipping point when it comes to mobile gaming, because mobile platforms like the iPhone and iOS offer completely unique combinations of hardware and software features that are iterated on quickly.

“Every year we are able to amp up the tech that we bring to developers,” he says, comparing it to the 4-5 year cycle in console gaming hardware. “Before the industry knew it, we were blowing people away [with the tech]. The full gameplay of these titles has woken a lot of people up.”

from iraidajzsmmwtv http://ift.tt/2DKMAzD via IFTTT

[1nebest]

Mobile gaming is having a moment, and Apple has the reins

Mobile gaming is having a moment, and Apple has the reins

It’s moved beyond tradition and into the realm of meme that Apple manages to dominate the news cycle around major industry events all while not actually participating in said events. CES rolls around and every story is about HomeKit or its competitors, another tech giant has a conference and the news is that Apple updated some random subsystem of its ever-larger ecosystem of devices and software.

This is, undoubtedly planned by Apple in many instances. And why not? Why shouldn’t it own the cycle when it can, it’s only strategically sound.

This week, the 2018 Game Developer’s Conference is going on and there’s a bunch of news coverage about various aspects of the show. There are all of the pre-written embargo bits about big titles and high-profile indies, there are the trend pieces and, of course, there’s the traditional ennui-laden ‘who is this event even for’ post that accompanies any industry event that achieves critical mass.

But the absolute biggest story of the event wasn’t even at the event. It was the launch of Fortnite and, shortly thereafter, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on mobile devices. Specifically, both were launched on iOS and PUBG hit Android simultaneously.

The launch of Fortnite, especially, resonates across the larger gaming spectrum in several unique ways. It’s the full and complete game as present on consoles, it’s iOS-first and it supports cross-platform play with console and PC players.

This has, essentially, never happened before. There have been stabs at one or more of those conditions on experimental levels but it really marks a watershed in the games industry that could serve to change the psychology around the platform discussion in major ways.

For one, though the shape of GDC has changed over the years as it relates to mobile gaming – it’s only recently that the conference has become dominated by indie titles that are mobile centric. The big players and triple-A console titles still take up a lot of air, but the long tail is very long and mobile is not synonymous with “casual gamers” as it once was.

“I remember the GDC before we launched Monument Valley,” says Dan Gray of Monument Valley 2 studio ustwo. “We were fortunate enough that Unity offered us a place on their stand. Nobody had heard of us or our game and we were begging journalists to come say hello, it’s crazy how things have changed in four years. We’ve now got three speakers at the conference this year, people stop you in the street (within a two block radius) and we’re asked to be part of interviews like this about the future of mobile.”

Zach Gage, the creator of SpellTower, says that things feel like they have calmed down a bit. “It seems like that might be boring, but actually I think it’s quite exciting, because a consequence of it is that playing games has become just a normal thing that everyone does… which frankly, is wild. Games have never had the cultural reach that they do now, and it’s largely because of the App Store and these magical devices that are in everyones pockets.”

Alto’s Odyssey is the followup to Snowman’s 2015 endless boarder Alto’s Adventure. If you look at these two titles, three years apart, you can see the encapsulation of the growth and maturity of gaming on iOS. The original game was fun, but the newer title is beyond fun and into a realm where you can see the form being elevated into art. And it’s happening blazingly fast.

“There’s a real and continually growing sense that mobile is a platform to launch compelling, artful experiences,” says Snowman’s Ryan Cash. “This has always been the sentiment among the really amazing community of developers we’ve been lucky enough to meet. What’s most exciting to me, now, though, is hearing this acknowledged by representatives of major console platforms. Having conversations with people about their favorite games from the past year, and seeing that many of them are titles tailor-made for mobile platforms, is really gratifying. I definitely don’t want to paint the picture that mobile gaming has ever been some sort of pariah, but there’s a definite sense that more people are realizing how unique an experience it is to play games on these deeply personal devices.”

Mobile gaming as a whole has fought since the beginning against the depiction that it was for wasting time only, not making ‘true art’, which was reserved for consoles or dedicated gaming platforms. Aside from the ‘casual’ vs. ‘hardcore’ debate, which is more about mechanics, there was a general stigma that mobile gaming was a sidecar bet to the main functions of these devices, and that their depth would always reflect that. But the narratives and themes being tackled on the platform beyond just clever mechanics are really incredible.

Playing Monument Valley 2 together with my daughter really just blew my doors off, and I think it changed a lot of people’s minds in this regard. The interplay between the characters and environment and a surprisingly emotional undercurrent for a puzzle game made it a breakout that was also a breakthrough of sorts.

“There’s so many things about games that are so awesome that the average person on the street doesn’t even know about,” says Gray. “As small developers right now we have the chance to make somebody feel a range of emotions about a video game for the first time, it’s not often you’re in the right place at the right time for this and to do it with the most personal device that sits in your pocket is the perfect opportunity.”

The fact that so many of the highest profile titles are launching on iOS first is a constant source of consternation for Android users, but it’s largely a function of addressable audience.

I spoke to Apple VP Greg Joswiak about Apple’s place in the industry. “Gaming has always been one of the most popular categories on the App Store,” he says. A recent relaunch of the App Store put gaming into its own section and introduced a Today tab that tells stories about the games and about their developers.

That redesign, he says, has been effective. “Traffic to the App Store is up significantly, and with higher traffic, of course, comes higher sales.”

“One thing I think smaller developers appreciate from this is the ability to show the people behind the games,” says ustwo’s Gray about the new gaming and Today sections in the App Store. “Previously customers would just see an icon and assume a corporation of 200 made the game, but now it’s great we can show this really is a labour of love for a small group of people who’re trying to make something special. Hopefully this leads to players seeing the value in paying up front for games in the future once they can see the craft that goes into something.”

Snowman’s Cash agrees. “It’s often hard to communicate the why behind the games you’re making — not just what your game is and does, but how much went into making it, and what it could mean to your players. The stories that now sit on the Today tab are a really exciting way to do this; as an example, when Alto’s Odyssey released for pre-order, we saw a really positive player response to the discussion of the game’s development. I think the variety that the new App Store encourages as well, through rotational stories and regularly refreshed sections, infuses a sense of variety that’s great for both players and developers. There’s a real sense I’m hearing that this setup is equipped to help apps and games surface, and stayed surfaced, in a longer term and more sustainable way.”

In addition, there are some technical advantages that keep Apple ahead of Android in this arena. Plenty of Android devices are very performant and capable in individual ways, but Apple has a deep holistic grasp of its hardware that allow it to push platform advantages in introducing new frameworks like ARKit. Google’s efforts in the area with AR Core are just getting started with the first batch of 1.0 apps coming online now, but Google will always be hamstrung by the platform fragmentation that forces developers to target a huge array of possible software and hardware limitations that their apps and games will run up against.

This makes shipping technically ambitious projects like Fortnite on Android as well as iOS a daunting task. “There’s a very wide range of Android devices that we want to support,” Epic Games’ Nick Chester told Forbes. “We want to make sure Android players have a great experience, so we’re taking more time to get it right.“

That wide range of devices includes an insane differential in GPU capability, processing power, Android version and update status.

“We bring a very homogenous customer base to developers where 90% of [devices] are on the current versions of iOS,” says Joswiak. Apple’s customers embrace those changes and updates quickly, he says, and this allows developers to target new features and the full capabilities of the devices more quickly.

Ryan Cash sees these launches on iOS of ‘full games’ as they exist elsewhere as a touchstone of sorts that could legitimize the idea of mobile as a parity platform.

“We have a few die-hard Fortnite players on the team, and the mobile version has them extremely excited,” says Cash. “I think more than the completeness of these games (which is in of itself a technical feat worth celebrating!), things like Epic’s dedication to cross-platform play are massive. Creating these linked ecosystems where players who prefer gaming on their iPhones can enjoy huge cultural touchstone titles like Fortnite alongside console players is massive. That brings us one step closer to an industry attitude which focuses more on accessibility, and less on siloing off experiences and separating them into tiers of perceived quality.”

“I think what is happening is people are starting to recognize that ios devices are everywhere, and they are the primary computers of many people,” says Zach Gage. “When people watch a game on Twitch, they take their iPhone out of their pocket and download it. Not because they want to know if there’s a mobile version, but because they just want the game. It’s natural to assume that these games available for a computer or a playstation, and it’s now natural to assume that it would be available for your phone.”

Ustwo’s Gray says that it’s great that the big games are transitioning, but also cautions that there needs to be a sustainable environment for mid-priced games on iOS that specifically use the new capabilities of these devices.

It’s great that such huge games are transitioning this way, but for me I’d really like to see more $30+ titles designed and developed specifically for iPhone and iPad as new IP, really taking advantage of of how these devices are used,” he says. “It’s definitely going to benefit the AppStore as a whole, but It does need to be acknowledged however that the way players interact with console/PC platforms and mobile are inherently different and should be designed accordingly. Session lengths and the interaction vocabulary of players are two of the main things to consider, but if a game manages to somehow satisfy the benefits of all those platforms then great, but I think it’s hard.”

Apple may not be an official sponsor of GDC, but it is hosting two sessions at the show including an introduction to Metal 2, its rendering pipeline, and ARKit, its hope for the future of gaming on mobile. This presence is exciting for a number of reasons, as it shows a greater willingness by Apple to engage the community that has grown around its platforms, but also that the industry is becoming truly integrated, with mobile taking its rightful place alongside console and portable gaming as a viable target for the industry’s most capable and interesting talent.

“They’re bringing the current generation of console games to iOS,” Joswiak says, of launches like Fortnite and PUBG and notes that he believes we’re at a tipping point when it comes to mobile gaming, because mobile platforms like the iPhone and iOS offer completely unique combinations of hardware and software features that are iterated on quickly.

“Every year we are able to amp up the tech that we bring to developers,” he says, comparing it to the 4-5 year cycle in console gaming hardware. “Before the industry knew it, we were blowing people away [with the tech]. The full gameplay of these titles has woken a lot of people up.”

[zenruption]

Find Your Flow: How to Ditch Procrastination for Good

Image source

By Jerry Mooney

It's the last push before the Christmas holidays, and for lots of us, that can mean that our focus is at a low ebb. With the year on its way out, the weather much drabber and the feeling of slowly freewheeling downhill towards the festivities, motivation becomes a much more elusive beast. And if you’re self-employed, or running your own start-up business and starting to build a team, that can be a real challenge.

How do we push procrastination to one side and step towards our goals in the last months of 2017? How do we keep momentum rather than waiting for a new year to kick in?

The good news is, a few simple steps can really help you to carry your motivation right through until the close of the year. Just the simple fact of getting on with things can be hard, but it's easily overcome once you get in motion.

In fact, you may even be procrastinating reading this article...if so, get reading and get to work!

Name the Issue

Often the problem stems from the fact that we don’t allow ourselves to realise we’re putting off getting to work. In the hyper-connected, digital space we inhabit, everything is designed to grab our attention, and to feel urgent. We can easily convince ourselves while we’re checking social media updates or responding to every email alert that pings into our inboxes that we’re doing something vital. So the first step is very much to acknowledge what’s exactly is going on - and become accountable for it. Don’t waste time in guilt -  accept that procrastination is something that happens to us all from time to time.Make a conscious resolution in your head ‘I am now moving forward with an action’ and redirect your thoughts. Naming the issue allows you to see if for what it is and move on from it.

Start With the Biggest Challenge

Instead of leaping straight into emails, filing or some other form of busy work, begin by tackling the biggest and most challenging item on your to-do list. It could be looking at accounts, writing a long report or even writing a tricky email you’ve been putting off, but you’ll never get into your flow if you don’t address that elephant on your task list. If it seems too momentus, take a moment to break the action down into manageable chunks. Items like ‘draft annual report’ have no place on a functioning task management system. You need to name small, individual elements, such as ‘plan out index’ or ‘produce Year On Year comparison table’. By taking a few of these smaller actions and establishing an initial progress, momentum will build.

Learn What you Can Outsource

Most of us get into business because we have a passion - be that design, photography or web development - but often running a startup means becoming a jack of all trades by necessity. The paradox is that the more focused and talented you are in one area, the more likely you are to want to start your own company, to bring a particular vision to life. Which means that a lot of small businesses founder being run by a specialist who finds themselves unhappily bogged down with the administration and processes of getting a business off the ground. The secret here is to recognise your own value. You are the creative engine of the business, and without that, nothing else works. So the earliest profits you bring in should be focused on taking the pressure of by outsourcing the worst elements of business life. Nowadays, tech based solutions mean virtual accounting or PA support are cheap and only a few clicks away. Knowing when you aren’t an expert in something is vital.

Try Mini Breaks From Your Desk

If you work alone, you can often be faced with long stretches of time alone, and for a lot of people that situation doesn’t put them at their creative best. Yes, you do need focused time to go deep on certain projects, but try to achieve a balance by breaking up the monotony of a long day alone. Every 30 minutes, make sure you get up from your desk and do some simple stretching - this keeps the blood pumping and helps you to zone out less often. Also, make sure you try and take a walk outdoors at lunchtime. Look for local networking events in your industry too. Making contacts can be invaluable as you build your business, but it can also give you a fresh injection of enthusiasm for what you’re trying to achieve, which is vital for feeling continually inspired and ready for work. Break away from the email and make sure you’re calling business contacts to talk through your latest developments - simple things can reinvigorate you and help shake off any creeping ennui that saps productivity.

Create Your Own Deadlines

When creating work for clients, there will always be deadlines attached, but sometimes these are so looming and far ahead, they don’t have much of an impact in terms of motivation. So for each project create a scheduling using a collaboration tool like Trello and set up milestone goals along the way. This series of mini deadlines can keep things moving along, they can be helpful in terms of framing the project to outsiders and even in helping you know what to charge if the business is new. You can also stack them with personal perks. For instance, promising yourself that if you achieve this deadline, you’ll take the afternoon off. Your time is your own to manage when you work for yourself, and you should take advantage of that. Many of us use the lack of outside boundaries to spiral and drift, and end up working longer but being less productive. Use time to motivate yourself and provide a reward and you’ll find it seems a lot more valuable - making you tick those tasks off faster. Whatever interests you’ve always wanted more time to pursue, you can now do so - as long as your time at work is truly spent working.

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[clubofinfo]

Expert: The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased. — Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot At the rounded tune of $1.0 million each. Times 59 missiles shot from the belly of American beasts of war — that is, as of Saturday April 8. That’s the wonderful thing about parasitic, predatory, military-IT-prison-legal-punishment-media complex America. Stocks go up as missiles kill Syrian civilians. The replacement value of those racist missiles (Calling them Tomahawks? Do white Americans think a 600 mph, computer-guided, white supremacy manned projectile with flesh, brain, innards busting-burning-imploding explosives is akin to a hand-to-hand, look-in-the-eyes-of-your-enemy weapon of real warriors?)… think of a new Tomahawk 2.0, costing us  $1.5 million a piece! Think about this country’s 20 percent – the ones making it, in their Uber rich and Uber upper middle class bullshit ways. Working as engineers, software designers, paper-pushers, personnel middle men/women for Raytheon, or for one of the other thousands upon thousands of industries and high tech places that put screw and hard drive and turbine and pneumatics and shrouding and decals to these perversions of the modern USA-EU-Star-of-David-Aussie warring coalition of the dead! The 20 percent, oh, that bullshit meme of “We Are the 99,” gone into the wind of a Republican-Democrat sulfur-infused bellowing that has come to symbolize USA since before 1776. These are the directors of non-profits, the tenured faculty, the industrialists, the managerial-dean-admin society. The planners and doctors, the investor (sic) class, the money managers (thieves), the insurance sellers (rip-off artists), the mid-level hierarchies of   fortune 1000 companies. All big and little Eichmanns, for sure, and I can say I have met and spoken with so many in so many fields, who are bred from the libertarian, neo-liberal, faux humanitarian, fake intellectual class of white Americans who have always looked down on the OTHER(s). Yet, those missiles launched by the perverted-thinking/acting/living  president with the superstructure and management teams of the military and generals, they symbolize the death of this culture way beyond a Truman bombing Japan, or leveling Korea, or the chorus of others attempting bombing back to the Stone Age in Vietnam, or the parade of Yale-Harvard misanthropes like Bushes-Clinton-Obama who helped launch dozens of penetrating “wars” in Latin America, Middle East, Eastern Europe. Police actions, Reagan and his sick mind and war games, Trump and his frontal cortex atrophying before our eyes. The military are the mercenaries, guns for hire, vigilantes, from private up to Colonel, with their supreme commanders and retired triple-dipping generals colluding with the arms dealers, all those graduates of tech programs, colluding with the war inventors, all those chemicals and kill switches and job-stick hero-makers, the American scum rising to the top of the proverbial Capitalist barrel. Yet your everyday American gets teary eyed thinking about those mercenaries in Navy whites off-shore launching death to people missiles. American might and right and never a naysayer allowed to breathe in any position of power! So these scions of industry, these propagandists on TV, sketched in movies, scribing in print, gesticulating on airwaves, punishing in the HR departments, in the schools, in the courtrooms, & in the boardrooms, after decades of unfettered access to the hearts and minds of the masses (not all of us, mind you), we have come to a point where people daily just stick chin to sternum and go about their days as number pushers, scribes of structural violence, or call them “intellectual workers,” never lifting a finger or raising a voice in their overly PC-ed worlds of American business, blue-pink-white-camo-black collared, it doesn’t make a difference. The masses have sucked the high fructose corn syrup of the controllers, the great Doctor Jekyll-Mengele-Moreau-Frankenstein juice of our age: consumerism as gateway drug to insomnia, obesity, unhappiness, prescription abuse, disassociative behavior, ADD, on-the-spectrum birth, allergies, racism, hatred of the other, mis-education, functional illiteracy, exceptionalism, boredom, ennui, madness, insanity, delusion, walking dead-ness! I tried to fire up something, yesterday (April 7), just in our weekly meeting of so-called social workers. You know, ice breakers for thirty people supposedly in the game to not only assist the homeless, the drug-addled, the psychologically different, but to change the culture of hate toward the poor, criminally defined, homeless, displaced. Oh, so, one social worker, me, plays the ice breaker differently: “What’s your favorite movie, your dream vacation, your favorite band, your favorite hobby, etc.?” they ask us. “My hobby, my movie, my band, my vacation is about politics, and today, I am angry this country – us – have once again bombed another country with the power of yet another mis-elected, perverted LOTFW (sic): leader of the free world (sic).” No solidarity, no discussion, no support, not even rebuttal or nuancing: just sticking chins to sternums and moving on. This is the culture of the walking wounded, dead people, one paycheck away from hawking it all, one misstated thing in the workplace away from the two-hour-and-you-are-gone firing. My fellow social workers at this place I perform miracles, for the most part, go to college, get MA’s not for the love of inquiry, not for the robust nature of a social work graduate program, not for the heady stuff of revolutionary practice, not for the communicative skills needed to think outside the box or articulate through a wet paper bag. They go to school for a raise above the $18 an hour with paid time off. And they can’t mourn for the death we heap upon nations, can’t mourn for the bloated, perverted illegal, disgusting budgets of the militarists, and can’t rebel against the perversion of yet another rotten leader with golf blistered hands pushing the button for more ship-to-surface (human flesh and bone) launched madness. The USA has billions of dollars invested in, AKA, ripped off of the state-municipal-county coffers for those perversions called Tomahawks. And now the chorus of nobodies on TV and in the Press (sic) chant “war-war-war makes the shitty little casino-hotel magnate (bankruptcy queen, AKA, welfare king) look and sound and smell presidential.” Ahh, the smell of napalm, cordite, nitrogen soaked TNT, black powder, white phosphorus in the morning makes a TV pundit and White House stalker orgasmic. Here, from yet another perversion of American think-talk-discourse, Popular Mechanics, on the Tomahawk: While the basic design has been around for decades—they were used as far back as the 1991 Gulf War—the Tomahawk has seen numerous upgrades over the years. This new tweak could improve the Tomahawk’s striking power through the power of what you might call extreme mixology. It’s all about fuel-air explosions. Ordinary high explosives such as TNT do not require any oxygen. The big molecule simply breaks apart, releasing energy. By contrast, a fuel-air explosion is a form of combustion in which the fuel combines with oxygen in the air and burns more rapidly. As any gearhead will tell you, the fuel-air mixture is all-important for efficient combustion. If one reads on in the article —  that is, one  who is both anti-establishment/revolutionary and critical of this regime and the empire of illusion vis-à-vis the corporate war lens  – it’s an easy rhetorical analysis of how war and bombs and that shit-hole of vaunting military and explosive might (all channeled in youth through violent movies and video games) gets embedded in everything the mass media produces, even Popular Mechanics (or especially PM). Nary a word about civilians paying the price (their implosions) of USA-EU-Star-of-David perversions of war and war games. My own team would rather find out the favorite movie in an icebreaker than ask, as social workers, how we are taking yet another mass manufactured consent of illegal warring, whereupon every stitch in the safety net is unraveling not just by-because-for Trump, but because of the chin-to-the-sternum PC lobotomized ignorance the so-called educated  class has self-served for decades! The emotional and spiritual lobotomies occurred decades ago. Each muted mouth in the face of slavery, in rallying around Indian War campaigns, in the obscenity of that theft of lands here and abroad have created the state of the United States of Nothingness. That lingering perpetual stupidity of a collective consciousness in this cheating nation of Capitalists has reached its low water mark with the perversions of this man-sexual assaulter prez spewed from the belly of the beast we all know is unchecked casino capitalism and the narcissism of an eroded culture. There’s no mistaking these people I call fellow Americans—they have all been created through the gun-sights of the insane: generals, captains of industry, money leveragers, the big and small-time Media, cultural perversions and insignificance. Do we prols worry about anything other than which side the butter on the bread gets spread, about mortgages, about how to self-actualize with this or that perversion of hobby-past-time-distraction? ls this where we are now, an endless pipeline of heads in the sand “liberals,” great social cause followers who speak no evil, but who hear-see-feel all the evil that is the root of the cause – the white race’s perpetual supremacy, the white race’s busy-body brains wanting more land raped, more cultures smashed, more ideas outside the narrow business-techno mind meld quashed? Is this country and the other white countries —  monarchs ablaze on flags, Star of David handkerchiefs used to shine the holy cross of Christianity – destined for collective dementia because of the nanosecond of pain inflicted with both physical and structural assaults? I try and understand the chin to the sternum complacency and fear and perpetual non-involvement of people on the margins, including one might expect to know better: social workers, those with liberal arts educations, people who once were poor or are still struggling with marginality. I have to give it to Gandhi’s grandson, whereupon his basic premise is peace begins with our children – teaching them the light of what it means to be human outside the world of drug-addled consumerism and Predatory Capitalism: Once there was a great king and he wanted with all of his heart to know the meaning of peace. He called people from his kingdom from all walks of life, but no one could satisfy him with their explanation. One day, a man from another kingdom came to the king and told him that if he wanted to know what peace was, he would have to ask a very old sage who was no longer able to travel long distances, so the king would need to leave his kingdom and visit the sage in his own home. The king agreed and off he went on his journey. When he met the old sage, the king asked him to please, finally, give him the meaning of peace. The sage put something into the king’s hand. It was a grain of wheat. He took the grain back to his kingdom and put it in a box. He then called upon the man who told him to visit this sage in the first place. He gave me a grain of wheat. Now I need you to tell me what this has to do with the meaning of peace? The visiting king replied, Peace is like this grain of wheat. If you plant wheat, one day you will have a great field of it. If you keep it in a box, for yourself, it benefits no one. If you keep your peace locked up in yourself, it does not fulfill its purpose, it does no good, for you or for others. But when you nurture it, it grows and spreads, nourishing all who come by it. The folly of our age is ignorance – planned, coopted, codified. This self-glorified ignorance is manifested at the so-called top, from Trump to Tillerson, from  the pundits to the think tanks, from the managers to the CEOs, and from the controllers to the prols who have no time for smarts but are fully throttled for  just doing, scraping by and razing earth and systems of humaneness, bent on building, pushing brooms and pushing papers. This is a country with no time for thought, for discourse, for energized education, outside the parameters of work or doing something that makes the engines of capitalism and earth destruction hum and synchronize. So I am schooled everyday, aged 60, once more steeled to think of how corrupt and corrosive this society is, more ready to engage the acts of stopping physical violence and structural and systems assault by using the Molotov, the very thing Doctor King spoke of 50 years ago: how we are the most murderous nation on earth, and maybe King saw the deeper structural homicidal pathways of Capitalism as more deeply death-incurring than the blasting of lung cavities of the children of Vietnam with civilian-manufactured munitions and university-invented chemical weapons and corporate-sold biological arms. Here, his anti-America-the-military-punishment-psychopath speech: My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years–especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?” They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. Ahh, in the future, ever-approaching future, when I have time in between my hard-assed social work job, and the job of looking to move on from this agency to another, from the Seasonal Affective Disorder of living in Portland, Oregon, which is experiencing more rain and overcast days in 100 years, I plan a decent interview of John Steppling – playwright, ex-pat, intellectual of the uncommon kind – and posting it here at DV, but for now, I end this diatribe with his words just posted in his piece yesterday, The average white American, that educated thirty percent who cling, ever more tenuously, to what passes for middle class life, is seemingly motivated most by hatred. Propaganda works because it grants permission to hate. Now, Trump provides the perfect figure to hate right here at home. His appointments are horrible, no question. But as I’ve written before, Obama’s were horrible, too. Only just a bit less horrible. Tim Geithner? Rahm Emanuel? Hillary Clinton? Joe Biden? Scott O’Malia or William Lynn? I mean Hillary Clinton’s under secretary Victoria Nuland is married to arch neo con Robert Kagen. How can one hate Bush and the neo cons but heap praise on Hillary Clinton? But as much as Trump is hated, the figure of the Muslim terrorist is even more hated. And even more than Muslims, Vladimir Putin is hated. But where does this sense of entitlement to meddle in the affairs of other countries come from? It is remarkable how little questioned is the practice of involving the U.S. state in the matters of other countries. Russia elected Putin. Syria elected Assad. And even if, EVEN IF, the elections were fraudulent (they weren’t, but this is a thought experiment) what concern is that of the United States? (Not to mention U.S. elections were not exactly models of probity of late). The U.S. has 800 plus military bases around the world. There is no corner of the globe where you will not find the U.S. military. Do Americans think other countries WANT the U.S. military on their soil? I suppose some do, the fascistic current regime in Poland probably does. And even here in Norway, a nation of inestimable achievements and daily sanity, the general feeling is that having U.S. and NATO around serves as protection. But protection from what? This is really the question, or rather two questions. Who can possibly be thinking of invading Poland or Norway or Japan? The U.S. has bases in Italy, South Korea, Djibouti, Spain, Bahrain, Kuwait, Greece, it has 38 bases in Germany, and bases in the Bahamas, and in Brazil and Honduras and Singapore and Belgium. The list just goes on and on and on. Why does the U.S. have a base in Bulgaria? The answer is, global hegemony. Total and absolute control of the world. That is the goal. And yet this topic is never ever raised in electoral debates or in mainstream media. Never ever. Why did the U.S. go into Haiti to remove Aristide? Why was there a coup in Honduras? Why was Gadaffi murdered again? Does anyone care? http://clubof.info/

[viralhottopics]

Amazon isn’t solely to blame for wreckage in the retail industry

Many retailers are set to have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.

Image: Getty Images/Tim Boyle

Is Amazon really the killer everyone says it is?

More retailers are on the brink of death than any time since the Great Recession, according to ratings firm Moody’s. Hundreds of department stores are closing, and once-chic clothing brands are barely treading water or, in the case of American Apparel and The Limited, recently departed.

In that kind of atmosphere, it’s easy to point a finger at the 800-pound gorilla the one with a history of eating bookstores for breakfast (and now, ironically, building its own).

Amazon has a stranglehold on the e-commerce market, and there’s no doubt it’s draining a growing portion of real-world sales as consumers take their shopping online.

But many experts argue that the go-to narrative of tech disruption alone doesn’t always tell the whole story.

One is Brendan Witcher, a retail and e-commerce analyst at research firm Forrester. He categorically denies the notion that Amazon can meaningfully explain the flux in the retail space.

“It’s simply not true,” Witcher said. “It doesn’t make sense when you look at the numbers.”

Witcher is referring to the fact that online shopping still makes up less than a tenth of the country’s total retail sales, despite doubling in the past five years, an oft-cited stat from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The figure can be a bit misleading on its face because it’s overly broad for most purposes. For one, it includes gas stations on the retail side, which obviously don’t have any online equivalent. It also lumps together everything from groceries to auto parts and furniture, among which the ratio of online to offline sales varies greatly.

Point taken though. Those qualifiers withstanding, online shopping still remains a relatively small portion of the total market, despite absorbing most of the industry’s overall recent growth. Too small still, Witcher contends, to entirely account for massive industry shifts.

Online’s share of total U.S. retail sales.

Image: ycharts, u.s. census bureau

Kirthi Kalyanam, who directs the retail management institute at the University of Santa Clara’s business school, agrees.

“Amazon has certainly contributed,” he said in an email. “[But it] is only one factor.”

In other words, online spending is on track to blow up the retail industry, but it’s not quite to the point where it actually can. Whether or not companies are anticipating and reacting to the threat by closing stores is another matter.

And clearly, even Amazon believes that brick-and-mortar stores of some form will still matter in the brave new world it’s envisioned.

Either way, the real-world industry might be headed towards a bloodbath, Kalyanam said.

“There is a very good possibility of this happening,” he said. “Too many negative forces affecting retail.”

So if Amazon isn’t the only thing driving stores to the cliff, what else is there?

Problem 1: *yawn*

One widely held opinion: A lot of stores are simply too boring.

Say you were blindfolded and led into the middle of a Macy’s, Witcher proposes. Remove the blindfold, and you probably still wouldn’t know where you are; The store is nearly impossible to distinguish from any of dozens of other similar places.

That’s precisely the problem. Very little sets stores like Macy’s, Sears, JC Penny and other vanilla department stores apart from one another.

Nothing to see here.

Image: wikimedia commons/coolcaesar

Has-been or hopelessly-dull clothing brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, J. Crew and The Gap (kept afloat by bargain-bin subsidiary Old Navy) are in a similar boat, though one possibly more tied to changing fashion tastes.

And in a market filled with an overwhelming number of online and offline choices, bland can be a death sentence.

Success is now less about what’s on the shelves and more about the act of shopping itself, retail pundits say Is there a chance you’ll discover something new? Do you see a distinct and consistent vibe? Are you actually having fun?

“The problem is that companies still think that the products that they carry matter. Consumers know that they can get a power drill…at any one of a hundred places. The products dont matter,” Witcher said. “They need to focus on experience.”

Doug Stephens, a consultant who describes himself as a “retail industry futurist,” helpfully takes this idea to logical extremes.

In his forward-looking vision, the evolved new iteration of big-box stores will reach a point at which they provide such a rousing good time that both the brands whose products line the shelves and the customers will pay to be there.

“Imagine if you will, the Best Buy of the future,” he begins, intriguingly.

“It’s a store where Best Buy doesn’t really sell anything. Most of what gets sold is either sold directly from the brand or it’s sold online.”

“But the store is just something that is just absolutely incredible. You walk in, you see products you’ve never seen before, you’re able to see demonstrations and take classes, and you’re able to try things out, and it’s virtually such a great experience that you would pay a membership fee just to belong to it to be able to go whenever you want.”

The geek squad has a long way to go in that respect.

Problem 2: Too many stores

Remember the halcyon pre-recession days of the mid-aughts? The days of McMansions, Hummers and rampant consumerism?

That was also the peak of a decades-long expansion of retail real estate that left the industry “overstored,” as they put it. Thanks to years of rampant growth, retailers now have one billion square feet more than they need, according to a recent report from CoStar.

“Simply put,” the firm’s director of US research, Suzanne Mulvee, said in a statement, “it all comes down to productivity. Retailers on average are generating fewer sales per square foot than they did during the decade leading up to the recession.”

The amount of sales made per square foot plummeted for years.

Image: costar

The amount of new retail real estate construction plunged during the recession, but it’s now inching upwards again though not at a rate anywhere near where it was before.

Many established companies have significantly more square footage than they are able to fill. Hence, constant waves of store shutterings.

Problem 3: Technical issues

Sure, most retailers failed to jump on the online shopping train before it left the station years ago. But many struggling stores have also slept on in-store technology that could make them more competitive with data-heavy online outfits.

“Everything has changed because of tech,” Witcher said. “But the way we shop in a store has been the same for 200 years. So why would people want to shop there?”

One of the chief advantages that e-commerce companies currently wield over their real-world counterparts are vast troves of detailed data on purchases and shopping habits. But these sorts of capabilities don’t have to be restricted to the internet.

Investment in physical technology to match this strength has picked up in recent months. One of the most notable recent pushes came from Intel, which committed $100 million to developing a web of connected gadgets that would help stores more closely track inventory, collect data on consumer preferences and eventually tailor offerings much like their online rivals already do.

Simbe Robotics’ ‘Tally’ is a robot designed to roam store aisles and collect inventory data.

Image: intel

Of course, any in-store tech system will also have to compete with the state-of-the-art one with which Amazon is outfitting its own brick-and-mortar stores.

Problem 4: Outpriced

Many of the retailers that are actually doing well at the moment are successful for one simple reason: they’re cheap.

Discount stores TJ Maxx, Marshalls and Home Goods all subsidiaries of parent company TJX have bucked the ennui gripping most of their peers with bargain-bin prices that other stores just aren’t willing or able to match.

The otherwise-failing clothing brand Gap has also been propped up by the sustained success of its low-price property Old Navy.

These stores are successful, according to Witcher, because people know exactly what to expect from them. Customers come in looking to dive into racks full of miscellaneous items and dig up the best deals or discover new products. It’s an experience that wouldn’t necessarily work in an online setting.

Aside from TJ Maxx’s cheap deals, people just like rooting around its racks for new things.

Image: Paul Morigi/Getty Images

This type of model isn’t as easy to pull off as it looks, says Richard Passikoff, founder of marketing research firm Brand Keys. When other retailers try to compete with comparable big sales, they oftentimes just dump unsold products into discount piles, neglecting the sort of value more experienced cheap brands are sure to offer.

“Everyone has tried to play the value game at one point or another,” Passikoff said. “But it’s value in terms of what things cost and what I perceive things to be and what I perceive them to be worth.”

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Read more: http://on.mash.to/2mOMUsO

from Amazon isn’t solely to blame for wreckage in the retail industry