Want You To Know

✩ Want You To Know: Contains No Traces Of Trump Tacos

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in media res

Perhaps because participation in reading groups is perceived as a female activity, some all-male book clubs have an outsize need to proclaim the endeavor’s masculinity. In addition to going by the name the Man Book Club, for instance, Mr. McCullough’s group expresses its notion of manliness through the works it chooses to read. “We do not read so-called chick lit,” he said. “The main character cannot be a woman.”

From a New York Times trend piece on Manly Men’s book clubs.

There’s also a real problem with setting up a book club devoted to manliness in which writing by women is excluded. Because the fact is, in my experience as a man and (dare I admit) a reader, the most daring, thoughtful, and insightful discussions of masculinity have been written by women.

This isn’t some sort of bizarre accident. It’s rooted in the same cultural givens which led some significant number of men to think that they’d look more manly if they put the word “MANLY” in the title of their book group. Women, for their own well-being, have to know how masculinity and the patriarchy work; men, for their own perceived well-being, have to keep themselves ignorant.

From a response to the New York Times trend piece on Manly Men’s book clubs.

There’s a hashtag, because of course there’s a hashtag. #ManlyBookClubNames. The Gripes of Wrath is simple yet beautiful and destined to become a classic.

Speaking of the New York Times, it’s come up with a rather odd / inspired plan to deliver ingredients to people’s homes so they can cook the recipes it prints. Go on, get those jokes about snackable content out of your system now.

I’m not a large media conglomerate so I can’t get into the headspace where launching a print publication in February 2016 for an audience who have ‘fallen out of love with newspapers’ was a good idea, especially as the same group shuttered Ampp3d and UsvsThem just under a year ago. Both of these are now widely and mostly badly copied across the digital publishing industry but, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Apple steals your music. Or does it? Either way, get used to the concept of renting, consumers. I’m comfortable with regarding the cloud as someone else’s hard drive they’ve lent to me in exchange for some personal information, and using it as such, but when the cloud wants to tidy up my hard drive I feel the cloud may have overstepped the mark a bit.

Finally, there may be a totally unstable government cobbled together in Ireland later today. Everything points to it being powered primarily by neo-liberal garbage juice. So there’s a cheery thought for your weekend.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

‘Borderline, Frontiers of Peace’

Totally Confused

A moist cringe, water in voxels, this is fine, ping pong and hippos eating watermelons.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: What A Load Of Teatox

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The weather forecast here is precipitation for the weekend. Probably beyond the weekend too and possibly even stretching into the next decade. I got this forecast from the Accuweather app, which big meteorology says is a liar.

Hooking up on the Internet has been mostly solved. Making friends hasn’t.

“The teatox industry is enormous … paying as much as a quarter of a million dollars per post …promoting teatoxes has become one of the fastest growing businesses on Instagram.” You learn something new, and a new word, every day. Teatox is also a load of unscientific teatox. There’s an impressive number of layers of shadiness on show here, from celebrity woo endorsements to the mystery of whether these ostensibly competing companies are actually all the same. Of course there’s a Mormon connection.

In this age of easily spread misinformation, who will debunk the famous debunkings of yore? Chuck Tingle?

Bad software has partially digested cars and maybe it might be better if we just admit defeat and let the self-driving ones take over.

Turns out the best Pixies cover version ever is by a bunch of yelling animals. It had never crossed my mind before, but this is just what a song about surrealism needed to complete it as a fully realised piece of art.

For your further listening pleasure here’s a couple of podcasts.

The latest episode of Let’s Make Mistakes is called ‘hashtaggarbagefire’ and is about writing good copy for the Web, which not enough people know how to do. C’mon folks, Jakob Nielsen has been wittering on about this for twenty years now. Also digs into how to do superficial customer service well on Twitter. Placating angry people rather than fixing problems works, for a while at least.

‘Pls Pee On Me’ from The Heart covers an app that lets people talk about sexytimes with their partners without directly talking to them. Raises an interesting point about how comfortable people have become with talking via text as compared to face-to-face.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

‘Daily Life: April 2016’

Totally Confused

First mall contact, flirting responses, Rube Goldberg forms, wood pulp caused bad journalism and on bullshit jobs.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: Bits And Bots

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All the breathless tech world chatter of the moment is about bots that chatter back at you and, more importantly, try to sell you things and / or replace customer support jobs. The feeling seems to be that the public have had a taste of the botty future through interacting with the digital butlers on their phones over the past couple of years and are now ready for swarms of the things to pop up, often unbidden, in every corner of their digital spaces.

Full disclosure of my experience in this field – I have made a few somewhat generative Twitter bots, taught Slackbot to be a snobby grammarian and display doomy demotivational quotes on startup and rejected all the advances of the personal assistant on my phone.

heller-slack-quote.png-large

After reading that there were now bots in Skype that would talk to me I tried a few out. The results were uninspiring.

Anyway, here are a few articles cleverer people than I have written about the coming bot supremacy.

Conversational UI is now trying to be a thing because, I think, enough people have said they want it to be a thing. At present the main outcome of this is that it increases the amount of clicking, tapping and guessing required to get something done. But at least the end user had a stilted experience along the way.

… messenger apps’ apparent success in fulfilling such a surprising array of tasks does not owe to the triumph of “conversational UI.” What they’ve achieved can be much more instructively framed as an adept exploitation of Silicon Valley phone OS makers’ growing failure to fully serve users’ needs, particularly in other parts of the world.

It turns out that a lot of these bots are actually people masquerading as bots, which is an interesting, or perhaps nonsensical inversion of the whole idea.

The goal for most of these businesses is to require as few humans as possible. People are expensive. They don’t scale. They need health insurance. But for now, the companies are largely powered by people, clicking behind the curtain and making it look like magic.

Just to reiterate, most of these bots aren't very good.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve played with a handful and have struggled to make much use of them. I recently needed to make a reservation for a work lunch. I fired up Operator to find me a table, and it quickly sent back a pleasant but unhelpful reply — declining my request, as it didn’t yet have that capability.

Mostly forgotten Philly psych-soul maestro Billy Paul died and the Guardian lists five of his best. Do also listen to this bass line which is one of the most elastic ever laid down.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Making Matzo in the Lower East Side'

Totally Confused

Uber Ex, new sarcophagus, incompetent robots, positive impostor syndrome and snow leopard show off.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: Get It Over With

It’s been a while, apologies for that but there was a serious amount of election ignoring, and then post-election to be done. My big pile of ignorage has probably never been so swollen. Yet still it continues.

Last night I listened to a live stream of a local Minnesota radio station. They were playing Prince‘s entire back catalogue in chronological order, interspersed with listener and staff anecdotes about him. Despite frequently being a garbagefire of despair the Internet can still amaze and move in surprising ways.

The ‘Purple Life’ mixtape on Mixcloud by Dave Wrangler and DJ Alykhan, done to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Purple Rain is worth squeezing into your earholes today. Next week’s New Yorker cover is beautiful.

Sort of continuing on that theme of what the Internet has wrought, this piece by Rex Sorgatz about growing up isolated in a very small town, leaving and returning is fascinating. There was no Internet so the source of knowledge was the library with subscriptions to a whole five magazines. Now everything has changed utterly, information-wise, whilst the town has mostly remained the same. There’s a great story about a scandal involving the naughty words in ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ as well.

Here are a few more things I’ve enjoyed reading over the last while, mostly about the intersection of media and technology.

Emily Bell wrote this piece about Facebook and the future of media and journalism, and it really sums up everything I’ve been thinking over the last few years about this. Tough times for publishers, certainly, but they have handed over control of the distribution of their product with barely a squeak of protest. As discrete items of content become separated from major media brands and appear free-floating in the streams of media consumers, where now for the brands?

There are huge benefits to having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound.

‘Don’t Trust Your CMS’ is a sobering look at the realities of publishing workflows inside media organisations. Learn to write in markdown folks.

“Can I share this video with my family?” ‘The Secret Rules Of The Internet’ delves into content moderation and the still haphazard and often exploitative way it is carried out.

While public debates rage about government censorship and free speech on college campuses, customer content management constitutes the quiet transnational transfer of free-speech decisions to the private, corporately managed corners of the internet where people weigh competing values in hidden and proprietary ways.

The New York Times gave an insight into how the media sausage is made nowadays with ‘How The Times Covers Breaking News: The First 12 Hours of the Brussels Bombings’. Eyewitness David Crunelle gave a rather startling view of this process from the other side of the newsdesk.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

‘Lost Parisian Cafes In Rainy Nights’

Totally Confused

Celebrity mountain lion, alsatians in totalitarianism, film dialogue broken down by gender and age, 38.0000,-97.0000 and making a bot that isn’t racist.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: It’s Data Privacy Day

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Today is Data Privacy Day and the Irish Data Protection Commissioner issued a press release to mark the occasion. The focus on lack of compliance within the public sector is timely, as this area is just as at risk as the private sector of leaking people's sensitive information. A strong independent overseer of data held and processed by both private and public sector organisations is just what is needed. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner is in a particularly important position here as so many multinationals which use personal data as a de facto commodity are headquartered in Ireland.

Meanwhile the Irish Times tells us that Digital Rights Ireland will be serving papers on the Irish Government and the Attorney General shortly, questioning the independence of the Data Protection Commissioner's office.

The papers note that the office of the commissioner, Helen Dixon, is integrated with the Department of Justice and that the commissioner and all her office’s employees are civil servants.

The story goes on to mention the repeated criticisms that have been levelled at the commissioner's office for being 'soft' on regulation. That so many data-thirsty multinationals provide so many jobs in Ireland may contribute to this light touch. An added irony is that this comes just a day after the report into the banking crisis, caused and fuelled in part by a similar lightweight regulatory regime, was published.

So we have a watchdog staffed entirely by civil servants which is responsible for policing the civil service's data protection practices, in a state which is highly dependent on multinationals whose entire businesses are based on loose data protection controls. What could possibly go wrong?

Here's some more recent food for thought.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'FLATLAND'

Totally Confused

Regrets, they've had a few, a very sick unicorn, no ads Twitter, crying children and failure as a pro gamer.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: Disruptology

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Well now. Gerry Adams is publishing a book of his best tweets. This is a thing that is actually happening.

As the surveillance row involving GSOC rumbles on, Karlin Lillington took her colleagues in the media to task for ignoring the issue until it was about them, and then making it all about them.

Presumably Irish political strategists have read this. If you want to reach people online and you have the budget, Facebook ads are the way to do it.

Oh, and there's a new PJ Harvey album on the way.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Illustrated Portraits of Famous Artists by Irina Kruglova

Totally Confused

Leaky thermostats, lost phones, transplanted monkey heads, fuck off funds and spin me right round Palin.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: Might As Well Trump

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Slim pickings today as I've been busy removing all the Amazon apps from my cheap as chips Fire 7 in case I purchase something I don't want by mistake. I'm willing to bet this is a not uncommon occurrence.

Anyway, re: that tennis thing, remember when folks used to mock Buzzfeed because they thought it was all listicles and cats and Internet-friendly content ready for rapid delivery straight into the maws of an unimportant audience that wasn't interested in serious journalism? Much of the mocking came from older media who were also very jealous of the massive traffic Buzzfeed was getting. Many of these outlets are now creating or repurposing their own readily clickshareable junk content, and usually not doing it as well as Buzzfeed was in 2010 or so.

Sean Penn and journalism went head to head and journalism came off worse.

The Gsoc snooping kerfuffle continues. For some reason this article doesn't mention that the underlying law is the subject of a High Court challenge by Digital Rights Ireland.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Images of Afghanistan'

Totally Confused

Palin in plain text, Palin on a loop, TrumpScript, terrorist house, and Area Satiric Publication The Onion Sold To Univision (Seriously).

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: Fake Friday Face Harvesting

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Fake Bundy. Fake journalist. Fake rats. It's almost as if you can't trust anything you read and rebroadcast on the Internet these days.

Apple wants to know how you feel. The FT article, which is paywalled, quotes Emotient as having the ability to harvest faces. I'll bet that's an ice-breaker at parties when someone idly asks what you do for a living.

From the Mildly Eyebrow Raising Desk, T-Mobile's CEO took a somewhat unorthodox approach to corporate communications yesterday. Don't know about you but I'm looking forward to this brave new future of executives swearily shouting about civil rights groups who they feel are being mean to them.

Oireland

The Indo tells us the Gardai have declared war on nerds. Because the only people who use near-ubiquitous consumer technology are nerds. This is also very much not a new development.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Painting Two Boeing 737s

Totally Confused

Good picture tweets, trade show boilerplate, owl pics, pissroach and hunter drone.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: Possibly Useful

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Rather than going on about Twitter floating the idea of unleashing walls of text, or Facebook deliberately breaking its own app to make people anxious, or even the puddle in Newcastle, here are a few small things you might find useful or at the very least distracting from the drudgery of it all. As I'm currently doing that 'new year tidy up yer bookmarks thing' there could be several more of these collections to come …

Listen to music from the command line, sort of. Forget about your streaming players with their fancy interfaces and try cmd.to.

If you like watching postage stamp sized videos while getting other things done in your browser, the Sideplayer extension for Chrome is just what you've been waiting for.

Give yourself an atmospheric background with youarelistening.to, which mashes scanner streams from around the world together with ambienty music from Soundcloud and / or YouTube.

Maybe you're working on something that involves agonising over which would be the most appropriate font to use. Let professionals choose pleasing combinations of Google Web Fonts for you.

Make your own tunes with Soundtrap. It's the closest thing to a fully featured DAW in the cloud I've come across. Easy to tinker around with even if you're not familiar with this kind of thing.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Fifth Avenue Then And Now'

Totally Confused

Awkward adolescent tech, inventing Autotune, reincarnated microbus, design by tweet and 'beating' games.

Finally, here's a mix of my favourite cover versions from 2015. Contains One Direction.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: Off To A Good Start

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Two Oh One Six is here. The air is thick with commemoration smoke and the year only a few days old. The free calendar with last Saturday's Indo is so crammed with events that there's barely any space to write in any of your own. Anyway, back to the show.

Whilst the occupation of a Federal building in Oregon by armed militia members is obviously serious business and shouldn't in any way be sniggered at, referring to them as Vanilla ISIS is inspired.

Back on the Internet there's a rumour that Facebook may have been sometimes deliberately tormenting users of its Android app by breaking it to see how they'd react. This seems a bit underhand, but Fast Company have found a man to quote who thinks it's brave, so what do I know? Incidentally, how long has Fast Company not been bothering to put dates on stories for? That's sort of OK for company blogs if you want your posts to resurface occasionally (hello Intercom!) but not OK for news.