#technofetishism

[leyyzi]

[auroroboros1]

i know about a dozen morons i could sell this too

[notmuchtoconceal]

disney movies on VHS function as obvious comfort blankets cause of the cascading tape fuzz.

the blinding clarity of the digital cleanness can hurt

do you want to see ~ or be lulled

[ferdifz]

[via RWW on Twitter.]

[icepotatofake]

i keep thinking of this story my friend told me.

He’s a project mantainer on a specific open-source project, which means he has rights to check in code and act on issues other people have raised.

some rando came barging in saying “YOU NEED A 64-BIT VERSION OF THIS”. 

now, look. the benefits of “64-bit” (in contrast to its predecessor, “32 bit”) are mostly around how much memory a program can consume, and there aren’t really any serious downsides these days except that some computers more than 5 years old won’t be able to run it.

regardless, it’s work to make the change, and it’s good to understand why you need to do something before you just go off and do it. if the problem is that, e.g., the application is crashing, just going to 64-bit might not solve it, because a bug somewhere else in the program could be causing the crash for any number of reasons. If the application isn’t running on a specific variant of Linux, it might have to do with the lack of another required program, and nothing to do with 64bit support. 

so my friend, reasonable guy that he is, says: “well, why do you want this? are you having trouble with memory consumption? are you running on an OS that doesn’t have 32-bit support?” 

and the rando posts an image meme that says “TROLL SPOTTED” and that’s it. that’s his entire contribution. 

to this rando, 64-bit support was worth the development effort simply because it was More Better. It didn’t matter that it was better in a specific situation with a specific set of circumstances. It didn’t matter that it also had some (in this case, fairly minor) limitations. It was just Better, so someone should Do It. Questioning this “more better” mindset is something that is so foreign to Rando that it immediately read as a troll!

I think about this a lot when I hear people asking for their favorite MMO to move to DirectX 12. There’s a bunch of press material that goes out saying “DirectX12 is Better Than Ever! Faster! Shinier! More Productive!”. So much of that fluff gets taken uncritically. Never mind the fact that DX12 is only on Windows10. Never mind that to use DX12 instead of DX9 would require a massive, massive overhaul. It’s better. It’s shinier. It’s an upgrade. If you’re against it, you’re a Lazy Dev who Hates True Gamers. 

That’s kind of what I mean when I talk about techno-fetishism. They aren’t researching risks and rewards, balances and tradeoffs. They are considering the technology as an isolated object of its own, something that slides neatly into place like (not coincidentally) a new graphics card or faster processor or going from an iPhone 5 to an iPhone 6. They are buying into the consumerist narrative of technology, plug and play, new is better than old, what could possibly go wrong.

It’s a very naive viewpoint that no one who works in this field would ever endorse. Over here, we laugh about the impossibility of a “one line fix”, because even changing one line of code has the ability to completely fuck you up in unexpected ways for a month. But consumers are Alienated From Our Labor. They just see this process as a black box where they Give Money, Get Shiny. 

[oilandbatteries]

Dave Grohl's Neve Fetish

I saw Sound City (finally! Thanks Vh1) and much of the time I wanted to yell at Dave Grohl: This box of knobs and wires did not make you great or talented or successful. You and your good luck did. It's a fucking mixing console. It's a tool. Not a magic ingredient to stardom.

[goodbadlibrarian]

Phone Tree

I am spending the day with the kids, at their house since there may be arsenic (or copper chromated arsenate to be exact) leaching from the kitchen ceiling. So between their running and screaming and my own sleep dep from worrying about the arsenic dripping into the cat's water and him turning even more violent, I've already forgotten how this sentence was supposed to end. Oh yeah, the following might make more sense under the preceding circumstances.

I have pretty much had it with the notion of phone upgrades.  A few service providers have introduced Frequent Upgrade plans, where you start out by getting a new phone and then when your sparkly new device is no longer the christmas morning delight it was when you first opened the box and threw away the instruction manual, you get another new one. 

Human evolution has finally reached its tipping point, hasn't it? I do not mean that in a good way.

We've developed opposable thumbs and wheels and coherent patterns of grunting and movable type, and now we walk around with more processing power than the Apollo mission, just so we can bitch about our shitty reception. So we blow our monthly food budget and get a New New Toy and then whine about the lag time on MortuaryVille or Kill The Things.

I'm done with phone upgrades. I want a phone downgrade.

My next phone will not be an iThing or a Galactus or any such device that tries to do the thinking for me. My next phone will be a tomato can - BPA-free, of course - with a piece of string. Maybe I'll get the optional elastic band to attach to it so I can play Angry Birds, but with real birds. Which would probably explain the Angry part.

My next phone will be a horse. It will still get the same shitty reception, but if I really want to talk to someone I can ride my phone over to their house. And if I don't want to talk to someone, I can still ride over to their house and my phone can crap all over their front steps.

My next phone will be a fat bag of catnip, so instead of using my phone to seek out pictures of cats doing adorable stupid shit, I will go grab a few more stray cats off the street and have them do adorable stupid shit while molesting my phone.

My next phone will be a giant brick that I will write upon with magic marker, for no other reason than someone needs to do this.

My next phone will really piss off the NSA, unless they can figure out how to eavesdrop on a garden blimp zucchini with a keypad made of glued-on googly eyes.

Fuck your iPhone 12s with neural implants or your bigscreen Samsungs or your Windows Phone that will bring as much delight to humankind as any other thing with Windows in its name. My next phone will be a piece of chalk.